At least Charles Pierce is an oasis of sensible punditry. The violence this weekend in Nevada by Sanders supporters has me exasperated in the same way he is.
That being said, this whole mess was over four freaking delegates, and the Sanders people should know better than to conclude what has been a brilliant and important campaign by turning it into an extended temper tantrum.
I voted for Bernie Sanders. I even wrote about why I did here at this very shebeen. But if anybody thinks that, somehow, he is having the nomination “stolen” from him, they are idiots.
I understand what’s going on. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been a catastrophe: as Pierce puts it, she’s been trying to “grease the skids” for Clinton, a maneuver that was as unnecessary as it was divisive. Clinton has a solid lead, she’s 99.9% certain to get the nomination, and all Schultz has accomplished is to fuel a feeling that the electoral process is rigged. And now some Sanders supporters are rightfully outraged at the betrayal of the process, and becoming irrationally unhinged over a trivial number of nominees.
There are also people calling for Sanders to step out of the race. I don’t think he should; I want him pushing back every step of the way. But at the same time, he needs to slap down these idiots.
Also, if anyone needs to get out of this election, it’s Schultz. Don’t even talk about booting Bernie Sanders until Debbie Wasserman Schultz gets the heave-ho.
He’s not going to “slap down the idiots” because his very rhetoric is what has encouraged this. It is the province of white leftists to not know the rules, not organize, and then complain when they lose. They have no idea about the political organizing and political sophistication that have gone into real political movements in this country carried out by people of color.
Sanders made a tactical error when he fixated on “white working class voters” as the most important demographic, not realizing that if you don’t win over black women you don’t win the democratic nomination. But instead of looking at what they did wrong, the people supporting this ‘political revolution’ would rather complain about the rules being stack against them. And this is why they remain largely impotent politically.
Because, as we all know, everyone supporting said political revolution is white. Someone should have told my middle-eastern ass.
PZ: “a feeling that the electoral process is rigged”
Isn’t it to some extent? From the little I’ve read it seems like this process is designed to promote the party’s choice. While they are in their right to do so, it might suggest that they have problems with democracy within the party.
I’m not defending violent protests (maybe I am, but that’s beside the point), just asking if they have some legitimate ground for anger. I’m more and more sure that today’s society is thoroughly and utterly rigged. The way wealth is accumulated into a very small elite is not compatible with a just and fair society. And since it’s allowed to continue with so little real opposition can only mean that it’s so pervasive that most are unable to see it or at least powerless to do anything about it.
@2
Word
Interesting difference in voice. How about “Clinton needs to slap down Schultz”?
@3
Yeah, I mean, I’m loathe to say that any aspect of society isn’t “rigged”, seeing as how our society is founded upon a neat little cocktail of various forms of oppression and inequality that continue to this day. It seems impossible to even have an equitable, well, anything as long as various classes are categorically denied rights and fair treatment.
Oh, the Prime Minister of a European country isn’t chosen by a political party, without input by the opposition parties? It seems to be something that happens all over. You want a say in Party X, join and pay the dues in Party X.
@fredricksparks
Oh yes Sanders is so disorganized that he went from being a name that almost nobody in the country knew to filling up stadiums and crowds and coming close to taking down one of the most entrenched established politicians in the country. He was literally demeaned and rejected constantly by the mainstream media and still gathered a massive amount of energetic support among young voters. What mental gymnastics you perform.
Bringing in new blood is supposed to be a priority for democrats. Or at least I thought so.
Oh, and you do realize that Alaska and Hawaii aren’t that white, right?
Sanders did not get fixated on the white vote. He lost the african american vote because he went against Obama or rather Hillary played her card of being close to Obama very well. Obama for obvious reasons is very popular with the AA community: he is the first AA president, he is extremely smart, he is a very inspiring role-model, and a very eloquent speaker (even republicans were moved by his “amazing grace” speech). However, Obama was not a perfect president, he was not a progressive president and he was not even a leftwing candidate. He was center-right. So it is an unfortunate reality of politics that if you go against Obama, if you criticize Obama, you will lose a lot of the AA vote and it has nothing to do with Sanders getting “fixated on the white vote”.
And what makes this ironic is that Clinton is not going to be a good president for the AA community. Her support for Rahm Emanual is and was disgusting and a clear example of “politicking” and shows that she rather play game of politics rather than stand up for principles and racial equality.
But yeah, she played her card of being close to Obama very well. If you want to hold that against Sanders, or pretend that somehow that shows Sanders is running a “racist” campaign, then you are deluding yourself.
Also, I still hold that this weird influx of non-regulars that only show up in political threads to declare sanders supporters petulant white bernie bros are just trolling.
I’m not surprised about Sanders’ Nevada delegates being temperamental, as he tends to attract that kind of supporter. Remember the riot at the cancelled Trump rally in Chicago back in March? There were plenty of Sanders supporters being temperamental there too.
I WITNESS NEWS
I can understand this up to a point, because Trump. But violence is absolutely counter-productive here.
[Obama] He was center-right.
No, he’s a liberal. That Bernie Sanders said Obama should have been challenged in the 2012 primary hasn’t been forgotten by AA’s either. Nice try though trying to use Rahm Emmanuel as the issue that AA’s should care about.
@ Nerd #7:
I’m not saying it’s better elsewhere. And I’m not talking about outside influence but of the internal democracy. It seems like few Americans have any real choice when it comes to party, that leaves them with just the candidates. If that part of the system is rigged the whole system is too.
If liberal means “ineffectually going full warhawk (and fuck the innocents killed as collateral damage)” and “consistently watering down legislation in order to appease republicans that have zero interest in compromoise” then it might be time for me to stop identifying as one.
The DNC’s electoral process is rigged in the sense that they have relatively undemocratic superdelegates, something which I’m betting the anti-Trump Republicans wish they had right now, but Schutlz certainly hasn’t helped things either.
And if there are organizational issues with “leftist” voters (regardless of race), I’d say it’s our inability to get out the vote, especially in midterms, when many of the crazy congressmen first slither their way into office. These are cretins who refuse to affirm to a new Supreme Court justice, habitually vote to repeal the ACA, or include such wonders as Schultz.
@starfleetdude:
Do you mean AA should not care about a mayor trying to cover up reckless and public execution of an AA man on the streets? Really?
#5: My esteem for Clinton would climb much higher if she were the one to call for an ouster of Schultz’s establishment ass. But she’s benefiting right now, so she’s not likely to do that. Even though I think she’d be winning even without the shenanigans.
#10: Everyone I see commenting so far is familiar. No strange influx here.
@17
I’m not saying that they’re new, but that they seem to primarily comment on political threads, and repeat the same “Lololol bernie bros hillary kicked your entitled white butts” posts.
What specifically is rigged? I grew up in the 1950-1960’s, and this was before widespread primary elections that meant something. We saw liberal candidates on both sides of the aisle in Michigan (George Romney, Phillip Hart, et al.). The party tended to select who they thought was electable, and would encourage them to run, and provide the means to run a campaign.
That went away when the primaries became important. A lot of states had open primaries, where nobody knew which party you were voting for. It lead to some strange results, like George Wallace, Southern Bigot, winning the Michigan democratic primary in 1972. Link
Here in Illinois, we have to declare which party we are voting for, but don’t have to be registered members of the party. It does cut down on the cross-over votes, which resulted in aberrations like Wallace’s 1972 Michigan win.
We also see the strange results even today with the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the rethug side.
The rules for running are open and accessible to everybody. So are who can be delegates at the party conventions. I’ve signed many a petition to put people on the ballot. Those who complain don’t want to read the rules, and obey them.
I’m also using influx in a very relative sense. Like, I’ve noticed this trend over the last couple months. I’m not talking about this thread in particular. It’s just odd that there’s so many people showing up to insult bernie supporters and then go away until the next political thread.
It’s not really my argument, but, uh, yeah? I think the main thrust of iconoclasm is that you don’t like or want to obey the rules.
Nerd@7: Most systems I’m familiar have party insiders choose their leader. But on the flip side, it’s relatively easy to set up a new party and get some electoral success. Many such countries have some kind of way to limit strategic voting, e.g. runoffs, in order to better support having a lot of parties.
Any change in the USA will come about at the state level, and most states allow for referendums. Get a petition out with IRV or some other choice that gives small parties a chance. I don’t think proportional voting will go over here though. Still a winner takes all mentality.
Sanders is emblematic of his vilest supporters. I’ll never ever like or support someone who schmoozes up to the fascist, child-molesting Pope and dismisses Planned Parenthood as ‘The Establishment’.
You can’t turn elections into calvinball and not expect people to get pissed.
No matter how silly the rules, you have to follow them (or change them following the current rules) or people will just throw their hand up in disgust and say, “a pox on both your houses.”
If Hillary’s lead is so insurmountable, why the dirty pool by her minions? Why piss off (even more) the people you need to come out to vote in November rather than stay at home chillin’ with netflix?
Stacy DeathSatan @24: That’s either hillarious, or trumphant, but I’ll settle for pathetic.
CTR is getting nasty with their talking points.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/19/pope-francis-argentina-1970s
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/pope-francis-was-often-quiet-on-argentine-sex-abuse-cases-as-archbishop/2013/03/18/26e7eca4-8ff6-11e2-9cfd-36d6c9b5d7ad_story.html
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/hillary-clinton-planned-parenthood-ties-120794
What violence are you talking about? Please link to violence. There are hours and hours of videos from within the venue posted. (You can’t, there was no violence.)
Why are you, a confirmed Hillary Hater, even bothering to post nothing of substance; ie. Show us the rules that says non-democratic party members can vote in democratic caucauses….Until then, the Bernie folks who weren’t democratic party members trying to vote were WRONG.
vivec@14,
I suppose one piece of legislation you’re referring to is Obamacare. What people tend to forget about Obamacare is that Obama had to compromise just to keep all 60 Democratic Senators on board. Party discipline just isn’t a thing in the US, and so there’s no such thing as a filibuster-proof majority. A single-payer bill might have been preferable, but it never would have survived a cloture vote. So you either go down swinging in hopes of making political hay in the next election, or you take what you can get. Given what’s happened since, I think Obama made the right choice in that case.
@29
I’m more concerned with this:
http://heavy.com/news/2016/05/nevada-democratic-convention-what-happened-roberta-lange-delegates-election-fraud-videos-recount-denied/
But hey, Hillary can do no wrong. Anyone who points out wrongs she or her underlings committed are therefore liars and minions of Trump. They obviously can’t be upset at the wrongs done, because she can do no wrong.
The logic of Hillary supporters can give that of Sir Bedevere a run for its money.
I voted for Sanders in the IL primary, so shut the fuck up about those responding to your bullying as HC supporters. You seem to think YOU make the rules. You don’t. Sanders is losing in Oregon and CALIFORNIA according to recent poll data. It is all over but the shutting and temper tantrums from the likes of YOU. So, what are your options?
Sorry, Oregon polls, Cal 1, Cal 2
And instead of shutting, shouting.
Nerd @32: People should shut up because you voted for Sanders? Wow.
No, they shut up because other Sander’s supporters disapprove of their bullying methods….
Tell that to my friend, James. He has a full time job, but even with Obamacare he can’t afford health insurance. He just had to cancel a need out-patient procedure to remove an encapsulated cyst on his face that keeps getting infectied because he can’t afford the $8000 price tag the hospital quoted.
So please tell him, and what I can assume are the thousands of Americans with no or sucky health care despite the ACA, how Barry made the right choice.
Edit: Jim is self-employed…
@Vivec Exactly where I’ve been for quite a while. I am NOT liberal, I am a dissident. Sanders supporters are mistaken in denying that Clinton is a true liberal. WE are the ones who are not liberals, and that is the reason I voted for Sanders. Individualism is a cancer leading humanity to its destruction at the hands of the tyranny of capital, and I reject it in all its forms.
Yikes.
Akira MacKenzie,
As I said, a single-payer system probably would have been preferable, but it wasn’t going to pass. So if Obama had pushed for a perfect bill, your friend still wouldn’t have insurance, but nor would all the others who have benefited from Obamacare.
So I guess what it comes down to is picking your poison: compromise for the good, or go down in flames in holding out for the perfect. I don’t claim that the former is always the best strategy, but in this case your friend would be screwed regardless, while the hundreds of thousands who have benefited from Obamacare would be screwed if he hadn’t compromised.
@Ben
In what sense? In the grand scheme of things there has to be a balance between individual and group as the needs change.
I know, the comment had to do with philosophical individualism, but still. That has to be realized in some form and research into social cognition indicates that not only is the self and the other important, “the other” is will have aspects of being an elaborated version of the self. If there is any such thing as a perfect philosophy it has to take both into account in terms of how we think about things.
In fairness I’ll make myself a target too. I’m probably not voting for president at all. Neither party addresses my most important issues which roughly center around being willing to hold one’s own group accountable for wrong doing (I can get specific if anyone wants, but the torture issue was one), regardless of if that group is defined by party, or nationality and several other measures. I spend my time focusing on one-on-one interactions and if at some point there are more appeals to the people who are not voting I start yelling more often.
And what, Maroon, do you suggest Jim do about it? He can only just barely afford the anti-biotics to knock back the weeping infections that crop up every few weeks? I suppose that’s a better, more “realistic and pragmatic” option than… I don’t know… Actually removing the cyst. Given her and her husband’s track record, I don’t see why I should expect a new Clinton Administration to do jack shit about those who need help.
Face it, the Democratic Party doesn’t give two shits about the poor. It’s now the party of urban professionals, tech-sector hipsters, and Hollywood celebrities. It’s the party of people who love weath as much as the fucking Republlicans do, but call themselves “liberal” or “progressive” because they’re pro-choice, eat vegan, and drive a Tesla. People who are rich enough to wait for the “slow, incremental” change that Clinton, Obamma, and their triangulating captialist-lite sycophants vaguely promise, but never really deliver. After all, the lower class just doesn’t donate enough to the DNC to matter, eh?
What would Bernie Sanders do for your friend? Keep in mind that he voted for Obamacare, so he’s as much to blame for it as anyone. Could it be that he made a practical choice to support the best realistic option available?
It really doesn’t matter if Debbie gets the heave ho or not. I am sure she is vying for a cabinet position. Perhaps secretary of state. On a side note Debbie comes from a very liberal district her replacement would most likely vote the same as she would. Meet your new rep same as the old rep.
Practical? Realistic? I you mean sucking the rancid cock of capitalism because you’re too corrupt or much of a fucking coward to do the right thing.
I fucking sick to death of pragmatism and compromise.
I;m not a fan of DWS. I much preferred Dean’s 50 states strategy.
That being said, I haven’t actually seen any evidence of DWS greasing any skids. Could someone point to any evidence of this?
It may simply be because I haven’t been looking, so I would appreciate some sort of listing, or even a couple of anecdotes (no links necessary…enough info that I can actually Google it would be nice).
Ah, another post about politics, another bunch of comments from Nerd of Redhead which make me want to change my voter registration from Democratic to Republican, rather than to Independent as I’m planning as soon as I can find the time.
Meanwhile, there was recently an investigation (which seems to be getting absolutely no traction whatsoever) which found that the money Clinton was raising “for state contests” was funneled back to her campaign by her operatives within the state parties, so that only 1% of the money actually went to anyone other than Clinton herself. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign was attacking Sanders for not giving money to the state contests — looks like the Clinton campaign learned from the Kerry campaign in 2004 that hypocritically attacking the opposition by denying their strengths where your own side has nothing but weakness is a success with those too lazy to do any research. And Clinton supporters are dumb enough to fall for it. Amazing.
I cannot express how done I am with the Democratic Party. I think anyone who says “blue no matter who” must be a fool, just as uninformed and willing to vote against their own interests as the Republican rank and file. I always knew that Clinton could be vile during campaigns, but since the campaign apparently can’t even stay honest for a few months to avoid obvious criticism, I am astounded to find my opinion has fallen; I thought it had already hit a low. And her foreign policy proposals (for which you may read, without even the slightest loss of accuracy “proposed new wars”) are so insanely dangerous that we’re going to be lucky to escape World War III if she gets in — marvelous! I never, ever thought I’d say this, but I’m now actively hoping Trump wins, so maybe the Democrats will finally abandon the right-of-center corporatist war-hawk style of candidate and the top-down anti-democratic approach they seem to be addicted to.
Can Bernie supporters stop the whole “Super Delegates” complaining already.
It’s remarkably hypocritical and nonsensical.
1) The super delegate system has been around since well before this election. It wasn’t something the DNC invented to keep Bernie out.
2) The super delegates have NEVER voted against the popular vote.
3) Most of all, the super delegates are the ONLY REASON Bernie is giving to stay in the race. He has already admitted that he cannot win the pledged delegates. His consistent reason for staying in the race is that his hope is to have the super delegates overthrow the will of the people (Hillary will have millions more votes, and hundreds more pledged delegates at the convention) and vote for Sanders.
I am sympathetic to Sanders’s cause (heck, I prefer him over Hillary). But the hypocrisy of Sanders supporters complaining about super delegates when they have absolutely nothing to do with Hillary’s win (3 million more votes has everything to do with it) and Sanders keeps pleading for them to overturn the popular vote is unbearable.
@48 – It’s the heat of the primary, so tempers are usually frayed at this time, but annoying random internet posters pissing you off is rarely ever a good basis on which to make your political choice.
@#47, VP
Drat, I meant to reply to you specifically in my earlier comment, but I was so enraged that I didn’t do so.
DW-S is partially or fully responsible for:
1. The number and timing of the debates. Debates automatically help any candidate with low name recognition; since Clinton already has recognition, DW-S’s choice to have few debates and at times when people don’t want to watch — which was widely remarked upon — was definitely a move to help Clinton against any challengers.
2. The fine-tuning of the order of the state contests. She helped push the southern red states to the front. Clinton is very popular with Democrats who live in Republican states, which is hardly surprising because she is essentially a late 1970s Republican preserved in a time capsule. This also helped establish the “only white people support Sanders” narrative (which doesn’t hold up in any of the later contests); African-Americans in the south overwhelmingly voted for Clinton — but exit polls showed that an overwhelming majority of those who supported her, 75 to 80 percent depending on the state, only did so because they had never heard of Sanders before and had voted purely on name recognition.
3. The selection of superdelegates. Rather famously, Superdelegates are going for Clinton, even in states which Sanders won overwhelmingly like Washington. This is because, although it’s true that the rules as agreed upon require that such roles exist, the people to whom those roles were given are overwhelmingly anti-democratic people who are more loyal to the party power structure than to the voters the party theoretically represents. To push this even more into the realm of the disgusting, it turns out that many of these people are actually lobbyists for the banking, fossil fuel, and private prison industries, all of which Clinton has taken money from in the past, and none of which was disclosed.
DW-S was in charge of the election strategy followed in the 2010 and 2016 congressional elections, both of which saw massive Democratic losses. She hasn’t even been good at her job in the past. The fact that Obama has kept her in her position — he could get her removed — helps underscore the fact that Obama really isn’t interested in real reform or serving the voters.
(And in case you’re wondering about DW-S as a politician in general, well, this year she voted with Republicans to try and make sure that Elizabeth Warren’s consumer protection agency wouldn’t have any actual authority to protect consumers. This is par for the course; just as Clinton has been in favor of every war or military engagement which the U.S. has participated in during her career until it was too late to stop it, DW-S has consistently been a pro-bank, pro-1% politician.)
Why should Sanders supporters quit complaining about super delegates ? Or anyone really. The very notion of super delegates should offend the hell out of anyone who believes in one-man-one vote. Its function is to provide the party establishment a mechanism by which to subvert the democratic process if they deem in necessary. That they haven’t had to use it yet does not make it any less odious in principle.
@29
It seems many of those “not registered as democrats” got New Yorked (dropped from the rolls without their knowledge or consent)
https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10201688872540903&set=a.4782081047255.1073741838.1752572049&type=3&theater
@#52, Drawler:
Sanders supporters should quit complaining about superdelegates, according to Clinton apologists, because it’s old (and obvious) news that the superdelegate system is corrupt. Why, Sanders even knew about the existence of superdelegates when he declared candidacy! So obviously the system is okay and we should just accept it and move on, because having an attention span longer than five minutes is just boring. That’s also why we shouldn’t care about the lack of prosecutions for war crimes among the Bush administration, or Clinton’s vote for the invasion of Iraq (against the opinions of her constituency), or the way the ACA was watered down to try to attract Republicans but not tightened back up when the Republicans refused to vote for it, or the way the Obama administration refused to prosecute the banks as entities or the bankers as individuals, or the way both Obama and Clinton have argued that all encryption should be required by law to have back doors so the government can spy on us more effectively (and to hell with the experts who uniformly say that this would make encryption useless and cause a collapse of financial transactions), or the way that the drone bombing program turns out to cause more terrorists than it can possibly eliminate but both Obama and Clinton want it to keep going, or that just about every cause Clinton has ever publicly adopted has turned out to be a disaster in the long term (NAFTA, Iraq, Libya, TPP, etc.).
Having an attention span is boring. And hard. Democratic voters should ideally be like goldfish, and just believe whatever the party elites are saying right at this moment.
Besides, since Clinton is the presumptive nominee, pointing out that she and her organization are both as crooked as a dog’s hind leg might hurt her in the general election, and that would never do! (There’s a direct contradiction there to the common claim that she’s “the most-vetted candidate in history”, but pretend you don’t notice that.) Even though the Democratic Party in general has basically stopped caring about the average Democratic Voter in any meaningful way, let alone the average American, we are expected to care deeply about them, enough that we will assist them to cover up their bad behavior. Because Trump. He’s the reincarnation of Hitler, you know, the Boogeyman who’s waiting to eat you alive, the Dread Pirate Roberts who kills all prisoners, and shame on anyone who remembers that his actual actions have often put him to the left of Clinton in the past. We should totally believe his rhetoric, because politicians never temporarily lie to get their party’s nominations. (And the fact that absolutely everybody knows Clinton will move to the right after getting the nomination should be ignored.)
@Akira McKenzie
I’m sorry to hear about Jim. I am currently employed by a well-off company, but cannot afford health insurance for my family. When ACA went into effect I was employed by a hospital, and the increase in charges for in-hospital care made me almost drop it. Not being employed by a hospital means that, unless I know I’m going to have a catastrophic accident, it is cheaper to pay the penalty than pay for insurance and pay out of pocket for anything that happens. The last year I had insurance I paid 90% of what I would have if I hadn’t had insurance, plus the outrageous amount for my insurance premiums, meaning I “saved” a negative amount of money compared to not having insurance. I’m lucky to not be in Jim’s shoes, but there could be a day I am. And in that case, even having insurance I would be bankrupted.
@Nerd of Redhead
I can only affect my home state of Florida with any of these options. I literally have no voice in any other state. I think it’s horrible any state makes it so someone cannot vote in a primary if their affiliation is not Democrat or Republican. People are trying to change it in Florida, but it’s not happening so far. So I’m going to bitch about the issues of millions of people (possibly) who would have voted for Sanders in the primaries, but couldn’t because of their Independent or Green party affiliation (yes, I’ve heard some greens like him). The two party system will not change unless we vote for it. Unfortunately, we have to get the two-party system of politicians to go along with it. Yes, we can have referendums and the like, but there are still ways for the established system to avoid change. If we don’t complain, nobody will hear our voices.
@The Vicar
If Hillary wins the nomination I am completely torn as to who to vote for. I am honestly scared of what Hillary will push for militarily. I’ve never been one to say we need to stay in our borders and not get involved in international conflicts, but we really don’t need to be at the front of every single military intervention in the world. So few actually involve us directly that we should be letting the EU take a headlining spot. There is a chance that Trump will be softer in the international space, no matter what his rhetoric is on the campaign trail. He is well known for saying one thing and doing something completely different when it suits him. There is no reason to imagine the Oval office will make him act differently than his New York office does.
Oh well my huge coment is in moderation I guess. No idea what part of it was flagged, or if it was just that it was long.
@#55, methuseus:
Did your post have lots of links in it? It seems like this site’s filter, like many others, sees “lots of links” as probable spam. Which is actually true a lot of the time, so that’s good, but it can be annoying if you are actually making a legitimate post with a lot of backup references.
Well, that’s wrong.
She’s doing it now.
And, from my point of view, there is a difference between “actively hoping Trump wins” and hoping the right-of-center corporatist war-hawk candidate of the Democratic party loses (even if that means Trump wins).
But, aside from those two points, we’re in complete agreement.
@56 The Vicar
No, not any links, actually. No caps lock, either. I must have hit either a length filter or word filter. I don’t know that I used any offensive words, but I may have mistyped something or hit a word I didn’t realize could be filtered. It was more a collection of personal anecdotes aimed at different people, yourself included. In many ways I agreed with you, actually.
Look, people, I’m bummed that Sanders isn’t likely to get the nomination. I voted for him. If he pulls out a miracle nomination I’ll be pleased. But the fact remains that, at least at this point, Clinton has more delegates, not counting superdelegates, and has won more of the popular vote. The candidate who is nominated has to get elected in the US that is, not the one you wish existed.
As far as the superdelegates and the system being corrupt, may I point out that this is the primary: the Democratic party deciding within itself who it wants to represent it in the election. It is not an open election, it is a party function. Independents should not get a voice in that decision. Arguably, party officials who are more invested in the party should have a greater voice. Most parties elsewhere in the world don’t even hold a primary circus, just make their decisions internally in vape filled or overcaffeinated back rooms. It’s not supposed to be an open democratic (small d) process and never has been. Does that need to be changed? Maybe. I’d be pleased if the US managed to pull out of the 2 party morass or even abandon parties altogether, but that’s not likely to happen. Remember, the original intent was for individuals to run without factional support (i.e. parties) but that lasted maybe a single election. I doubt it can be changed now.
Though ousting Wassermann Schultz. That’s something I’d love to see be the issue that unifies the Bernie and Hillary factions of the Democratic party.
@#59, dianne:
There’s a problem with that: American voters not only vote based on identity politics and name recognition, both of which are extremely stupid ways to make a selection, but also hate to vote for someone who is already losing. (It’s why you keep seeing the word “momentum” referenced on both sides of the primary: a candidate who starts to win tends to keep winning, while a candidate who doesn’t win often enough will lose for good.) The Clinton camp got the superdelegates to promise to vote for her early on and then used that to inflate their delegate count to keep Clinton in the lead, which discouraged at least some of Sanders’ votes. Whether that would be enough to make Sanders win or not, it was a terribly dishonest tactic.
In that case, the Democratic Party deserves to lose, for two big reasons (in addition to the one I outlined above):
1. The superdelegate system permits a candidate to win the popular vote — although with the existence of caucuses, rather than ordinary votes, this is a bit of a tricky thing to calculate anyway — but lose the nomination anyway. That is the only possible purpose of the system. After all, if the superdelegates vote with the popular vote, then they are totally unnecessary; the only time they have any role at all is when they are against the voters. Which means that superdelegates only exist to make sure that sometimes a majority of the party do not like the candidate. That’s the only thing they do, nothing else. The mere existence of the system indicates that the party does not serve its own membership.
2. If Independents are not permitted to vote in primaries, it makes it vastly more likely that a candidate will be chosen who may be the choice of the party membership but cannot possibly win the general election. It’s funny that Sanders supporters are accused of being purists, but Clinton supporters believe that the party membership is a good indicator of the voting public at large, which is definitely not the case. Right now, there are more Independent voters than members of either party. (42% of registered voters, versus 31% Democratic and 25% Republican.) That means that the Party membership cannot possibly win the election without appealing to Independents. Attributing a majority of registered Democrats to either candidate appears to usually be an exercise in wishful thinking rather than evidence, but there is no question whatsoever that Independents hate Hillary Clinton, and often quite like Bernie Sanders. The debacle in Nevada — which the Clinton camp is desperately spinning as a spontaneous riot by Sanders supporters — along with the purging of registered Democrats in New York and a number of other irregularities, plus the financial scandal I mentioned above, are not helping Clinton with Independents one little bit. On the contrary, her numbers are apparently falling, and polls have been predicting a close race between her and Trump all along. Choosing Clinton to appease the Party and the Party only, in other words, is at best playing a game of Chicken with the voting public, and more likely throwing the election entirely. Considering that Clinton supporters always claim to be realists and that Sanders supporters are head-in-the-clouds idealists, this is doubly insulting. The realities of the vote mean that choosing Clinton is going to alienate a lot of voters out of the pool the Democrats absolutely must win over to win. Whether it’s enough to cost the election or not remains to be seen, but if Clinton supporters were truly as worried about Trump as they always claim to be, they wouldn’t play these games in the first place.
They do? Name recognition, sure, that’s why there’s the old saying about “say whatever you want about me, just don’t misspell my name”. Because the last thing a politician wants is to be the one whose name the voters stare at on the ballot and say, “who?” (Though that can be a winning technique: in the 1980s some LaRouchies took the Democratic primary in Illinois by having generic sounding names and being unknown while running against several highly recognized but controversial candidates.) But “identity politics”? How so? The vast majority of nominees, much less winners, of presidential elections have been white men, who are distinctly not the majority of US citizens or even voters. I think I may have missed your point. Sorry.
Really? Every news source I’ve seen showing delegate totals has not included superdelegates. It may be true–well, it certainly is true–that my news sources are atypical, but who is reporting superdelegate totals? It’s rather silly to do so since superdelegates can change their mind. Sanders is trying to make up his deficit by courting them, in fact. Or at least one of his campaign staff is. I never did figure out whether he had approved the strategy or not.
If I understand correctly (and I may not), superdelegates were basically a response to the McGovern nomination, which was a case where the dedicated activists got their candidate in but he had no real chance of winning the general. Ironically, he managed to scare the Republican candidate badly enough to make him (the R) do things that would get him thrown out of office, so I suppose McGovern got a sort of victory there: a mainstream candidate who didn’t scare Nixon might have resulted in a longer Nixon presidency. I can see an argument for dissolving the system, it is rather dubious democratically, but it’s the decision of the party, not the general public. If you want in on that decision, you have to be a Democrat.
If it is truly uncommitted independents who are being kept from voting, this may be true. However, open primaries also leave open the possibility of “independents” who would never, under any circumstances, vote Democratic coming in to the primary and voting for the candidate they consider weaker. In W Va, one poll showed that a substantial number of the people who voted Sanders stated that they would vote for Trump in the general, no matter who got the vote in the primary. If Sanders had been ahead and the same Trump voters had voted for Clinton in the primary, in order to prolong the uncertainty and weaken the party’s chance in the general, would you consider that a reasonable thing?
Or liars: scratch under the surface of self-righteous post-elections tantrums, and you’ll often find “Democracy sucks because MY guy didn’t win”
***
CTR? What is CTR? I doubt you’re talking about the Center for Turbulence Research
Obama won on much the same rules. Were they wrong then? If Sanders wins in 2024* using the same rules, would you continue to argue against them?
*Yes, I know how old Sanders will be in 2024. But in my little fantasy here, the Clinton funding increase to the NIH resulted in an extension of life expectancy to a median of 100 so there’s no reason for someone as young as Sanders to not run…Hey, Clinton I increased NIH funding. Clinton II might as well. If she were elected.
Come on! You know 2024’s democratic ticket will be Warren/Beyonce
@#57, Jeff W
In the words of Terry Pratchett: to make a hollow laughing. She hasn’t even scratched the surface yet. I’m willing to actually bet $20 against anyone who disagrees and can find a service which will let us make this bet anonymously over the Internet, that once she has the nomination, she will “evolve” against her currently official positions on at least three of the following:
• The Trans-Pacific Partnership (was absolutely in favor of it until the terms had to be revealed to the public, and then reversed and said she “does not like it in its current form” even though, as Secretary of State, she actually helped write it)
• The Keystone XL Pipeline (currently against it, was previously not only for it but astounded to discover that there were actually people opposed to it)
• Fracking (currently against it, which has been made easier by the oil slump which has made fracking economically unviable — nevertheless, the oil companies would sure love to get rid of the regulations which stand in their way, and Clinton holds a lot of what was formerly their money…)
• Alternative Energy (currently for it, but her plan is already much, much less ambitious than Sanders’ plan, which was itself not really as good as what I’m hearing we need if we’re going to take climate change seriously. But once again: Clinton holds a lot of what was formerly the fossil fuel industries’ money…)
• The Iran Deal (currently officially in favor of it, although she has already publicly badmouthed it because she wants to invade Iran among her other proposed ambitious wars)
• Black Lives Matter (currently officially for it, despite using static machines to drown out their protests and having a protestor removed by Security from one of her events)
• Universal Access to Higher Education (currently officially for it, despite mocking Sanders for trying to cut out the middleman by paying the colleges directly — after all, in neoliberaland where Clinton comes from, privatized middlemen in public transactions don’t add any inefficiencies or waste to the system)
• Universal Healthcare (currently officially for it, again despite mocking Sanders for trying to cut out the middleman by going to single payer, and despite the fact that the average American with private insurance is paying more in premiums than the necessary tax increase to expand Medicare to include everyone)
• Private Prisons (currently officially against them; has taken a lot of money from them, though)
I’d add an item for foreign policy, but I honestly can’t think of any plausible way Clinton could actually be worse than what she is officially saying she’ll do: she wants to increase unilateral support for Israel, start a bunch of wars against little countries which will be massacres that cause all kinds of hatred against the U.S., start a “hot” war with Russia over Syria and the Ukraine, and do… something, at a minimum increased saber-rattling, against China, and her State Department was the one which famously said “fuck the EU” over the Ukraine. Maybe she could try nuclear blackmail against somebody?
I’d also add an economic point, but she has said she doesn’t think the banks and Wall Street need more regulation (when even the pro-1% Forbes Magazine is uneasy about the derivatives market) and her entire official economic platform is based on trickle-down principles: boost the rich and maybe they’ll find it in their hearts to employ a few of the rest of us, at minimum wage, to lick their boots clean or something. (Not what she would want to do, but that’s okay — she’s in the 1% already, and her daughter not only will inherit that wealth but is married to an extremely wealthy hedge fund manager, so there’s nobody named Clinton who is poor to worry about.)
Well, yes, I admit I agree with your semantic quibble: I would absolutely dance with joy if, though some miracle, the selection of Hillary Clinton led to the election of the first Green Party president. I doubt very much that that’s going to happen, since most people share Nerd of Redhead’s idiotic opinion on third parties, which means a Clinton loss will almost certainly mean a Trump win.
(Incidentally: if, as is so often claimed, the Republican Party is going to collapse and/or fade away soon, and if, as is also often claimed, the American political system absolutely has to be a two-party one — which, as a person with a degree in mathematics who did some work on voting and elections, I find to be an asinine assertion — then what will happen in the case of the collapse? The Democrats are very obviously trying to position themselves to absorb the Republicans; the Clintons and Obama and Rahm Emanuel and all the rest of the very-much-right-of-center-if-only-the-Republicans-would-pay-attention-to-actions crew are the bait. By the time the Republicans collapse, if they do, the Democratic Party will be approximately as far right as the Republicans under Reagan. So… does it become a single-party system like in Communist countries, where the primaries will be the real election and You Will Vote For The Candidate For The Good Of The State? They already have that attitude. Or will there come some point where the idiots who refuse to vote Green finally realize they’re being had and jump ship? Or will there be a new party which is to the left of the current Democrats but to the right of the Greens? …Personally, I think the Democratic Party stands a good chance of splitting apart at the seams for good over things like the whole Clinton debacle before the Republican Party does, but that’s me.)
@#61, dianne:
Really? I’m seeing a huge number of women online who have said some variation on “I don’t really like Clinton, but I’m voting for her because she’s a woman”. And I’ve seen lots of “you should vote for Clinton because she would be the first woman president”, which is also identity politics. And then there was the original selection of Sarah Palin as VP strictly because of her gender in a cynical attempt to get women to vote Republican. And how many black people supported Clinton in the 2008 primaries again? (And how many white women went for Obama?) How many Jewish presidents have there been, or atheist ones? How many latinos and asians? Americans, particularly Baby Boomers and so-called Greatest Generation members, are suckers for demographic identities in politicians. Policy, not so much.
Either you are a liar or you live on a desert island and don’t even have any news sources. For months, every news source in the mainstream media was including them, from the first Primary until about three weeks ago, when a few of them started offering breakdowns of pledged and superdelegates as well.
I keep seeing Clinton supporters talking about how the McGovern candidacy was a huge failure. They never, under any circumstances, mention how the Democratic power base — the equivalent of the DNC led by our good buddy Wasserman-Schultz — actively tried to sabotage his campaign; Democratic Party orthodoxy is that left-leaning candidates can’t win. This despite the fact that ever since the party started moving explicitly to the right in the mid-1980s, it has been losing ground; the Democrats held one or both houses of Congress practically since the New Deal, and Reagan had to make deals with Democrats because they held Congress despite his apparent popularity. But since we started getting New Democrats like Clinton in control of the party, the Democrats have lost control of Congress over and over again. But we keep believing that Democrats have to be right-wingers, because the right-wing Democrats say so, basically. Another reason not to support the party.
I saw that poll. It’s the only one I’ve seen which makes that claim, and the numbers it gave weren’t particularly alarming. You are exaggerating the “threat”. Since Trump voters have overwhelmingly been turning out for Trump, that’s not a surprise.
I don’t think uncertainty weakens the party in the general, so it’s a moot point. Do you think the color of the paint on the walls makes eggs in the refrigerator go bad faster? (You already admitted that name recognition is good for a candidate, and a long primary keeps the candidates’ names in front of the public, so actually you have things exactly backwards: a long primary is what you want.)
Hillary Clinton has an unfavorable rating from 60% of the voting public. Trump is the only candidate has higher disapproval. But to counterbalance that, the people who view Clinton favorably mostly aren’t very enthusiastic, while nearly everyone who doesn’t hate Trump actually loves him. The Clinton camp is betting that more people will turn out to vote against Trump than will turn out to vote against Clinton. Since I’m still not actually happy about Trump winning, part of me is still hoping they’re right. But I live in a blue state, in a district which has been Democratic for decades, and everyone who doesn’t have a Hillary bumper sticker on their car is saying they’ll vote for anyone but Clinton.
If you find a way to take bets anonymously online, and Clinton wins the general election, I will bet you $20 that Clinton does not increase funding to the NIH, at least not beyond keeping up with inflation since — let’s say — 2008. There are very few Democrats who are as good at trotting out the Democratic “I’m betraying you again but I have to pretend I’m not happy to do it” frowny face as Hillary Clinton. She’s a master of it. I’d almost be willing to bet that her campaign is turning off Sanders voters on purpose, to try and make sure that the Democrats don’t get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, or don’t retake the House, and she can blame them for her own inaction, the way Obama always has. Nothing terrifies the current Democratic Party as much as the idea that they might have to actually take action on the ideals they claim to hold.
@dianne 61
Type “democratic primary” into Google. That is where a lot of millenials (as much as I hate that label) find this information. If people do not watch TV news sources, why would they specifically go to CNN.com and search for the current results? I tried that at CNN and MSNBC and got better results just by asking Google.
Also, my mother says I and everyone else should vote for Hillary because “it’s her turn”. When I suggested Sanders might be friendlier to people in her income bracket, she said, “Don’t you want a woman to be president?” I would love to have a woman be president. Just not this one. As I said (in my possibly lost comment) I am scared of what Hillary will do internationally. I wonder if Trump would be safer from that standpoint since he bails out on things that don’t work all the time. Many politicians will stick with wars because they started them, and now they have to finish them.
That’s only because ‘stolen’ does not map very well to a voting process. Manipulated, gamed, conned, and rigged are all much more suitable descriptors.
If so, it was quite a failure. Women elected Obama. If only men could vote, it would have been a near tie.
Also found while I was looking up the data for the above: Clinton got more of the popular votes in the 2008 primary than Obama. I expect you decried the unfairness of the primary system then as well. No?
@dianne:
Don’t bother. As The Vicar and lotharloo @#9 have demonstrated, most Bernie Sanders supporters really are a bunch of racists and/or mysogynists to different degrees.
I apologize, I misspoke badly. Bernie just attracts those kinds of people, but I’m sure most Bernie supporters aren’t that way. I had a moment of weakness.
Lacking a crystal ball, I can not tell you for certain. I can tell you that the international community is frightened of what Trump would do if elected. The Economist cites Trump’s election as a global threat on a par with a jihadist terrorist attack. Source. Der Spiegel is comparing him openly to Putin and Erdogan. Store keepers in Mexico do a brisk trade in Trump pinatas. In short, the international community, with the exception of perhaps Putin and Erdogan, don’t seem to agree with your assessment.
What’s your source on this one? Because while the numbers I’ve seen are high, for both Trump and Clinton, they aren’t that high. This article suggests the numbers are closer to 35-40% for Clinton and 50-55% for Trump. Could be out of date, I suppose.
Well, it looks like I’ll be staying home on election day. Don’t worry, I’m in a deep blue state, so my vote couldn’t matter less if I tried. Isn’t the electoral system fun?
Regardless, I’m a firm believer in voting for who I want to see in the white house, and neither Hillary nor Trump qualify. I must admit that I’m a bit of a single issue voter, but on the topic of LGBT rights, Hillary’s repeated support for DADT and DOMA at least gives me some priors to work with, and it doesn’t look pretty.
Re: the idea that handing the Democrats a loss here will display the need to embrace left-wing ideals.
I see this popping up, and I wonder how much this idea has been thought through. I posit that it is just as likely, honestly probably more likely, that a loss would result in less left-wing influence in the party, as those who control the party see conservative independent voters as the reason they lost, and attempt to court them more next time.
Perhaps I am being too cynical, but I kinda see this election as a lose-lose situation. We’re either going to get Clinton or Trump, and I honest don’t know who would be substantively worse (domestically, probably Trump; internationally, probably Clinton), plus either way I doubt the Democrats are going to get more progressive. And because of the way our system is set up, if a progressive third party would ever get traction it would largely just hand the reigns of power to the Republicans while progressives and centrists split the vote.
No she didn’t: thanks to a pre-primary clusterfuck, Obama wasn’t on the ballot in Michigan, which allowed Clinton to win 330.000 votes uncontested.
Once you take away that state where Clinton didn’t have to run against him, Obama held a paper-thin, but very real (which was slightly larger when estimate of caucus states that hadn’t released official popular vote totals were factored), lead.
Fer fuck’s sake BernieBros. I don’t know which is worse, your sense of entitlement or ignorance of process. This is the Democratic Party primary, morans, not the Democratic Socialist Party. Bernie Sanders is not now, has not been, and has promised never to become a member of the Democratic Party. Why for fuck’s sake should my Party lift a damned finger to help someone who doesn’t like nor trust us?
PS I’m to the left of Bernie Sanders.
Maybe stop trying to sway independents if you’re going to disregard their preference then? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Also, yet another person showing up to rant about the bernie bros here, as if there’s no non-white non-men on the sanders side.
lotharloo @ 16:
Sure they should care. But making it a reason to prefer Sanders over Clinton is wrong.
An excerpt from John Ralston’s article, it bears repeating:
https://www.ralstonreports.com/blog/sour-grapes-revolution-rocked-paris-hotel
Sure, it was all about Bernie supporters disregarding the rules, it had nothing to do with the Hillary supporter in charge playing calvinball with the convention.
#77
Has occurred to you then that you should probably favour the left-most candidate available to you on the Dem ticket? Oh but you discarded him on the grounds of not being a Democrat, good thing you smugly burnished your lefty cred while siding with the right-most candidate available outside of the Republican party.
Okay, but what are the preferences of independent voters? I mean, I know your preference, but you’ve already declared yourself a non-voter so the point is kind of moot. Most polls I’ve seen suggest that the “average” independent (whoever she may be) is likely to be more conservative than the average Democrat. Is this inaccurate or out of date? What are the data that indicate that independents would prefer Sanders (if that’s what your stating)?
@81:
That Sanders’ supporters were insulting the convention chair by yelling about “Roberta’s Rules of Order” says more about them than her.
Only from the perspective of the Bernie Bullies, who expected to get their way because they were loud and obnoxious….
When you take a voice vote, the louder response is supposed to get their way.
You are really grasping at straws to somehow justify your preconceived prejudices.
@Dianne, 69
The thing about it being a party function is that the overall system is designed such that new parties can’t effectively break in, and the big two effectively hold most states entirely by themselves, with a handful of swing states being contested by both of the parties. When the overall political system only realistically allows for two parties, and the parties themselves have any number of mechanisms to cut democracy off there, it’s a case of transparent corruption. The parties getting to have party functions however they see fit in this context is a lot like letting an unregulated monopoly (for all non-swing states) or an unregulated oligopoly run amok on the basis that they get to make their own business decisions and the market will sort it out. On top of it, the same two parties build the national rules, so most of the glaring problems there can also be put on their heads.
The whole first past the post system pretty strongly encourages a two party system, and that’s the first big flaw. The electoral college system then proceeds to effectively disenfranchise everyone who isn’t in a swing state, making their only meaningful democratic input the primaries. The existing parties are guilty of perpetuating this system, but at least they didn’t build it. The heavy use of gerrymandering, the continued failure to implement either mail in voting or election day as a national holiday without work, voter ID laws, and other such nonsense that plagues the general election can be put directly at the feet of the two parties, although there’s a definite trend for the Republican party to be disproportionately responsible for these. At the general election level, the Democratic party at least fights against some of the more obvious corruption, even if it is only the part that favors republicans.
At the primary level though, it gets worse. Superdelegates are a fairly blatant way for the party to throw an election whatever way they want, even if they historically haven’t done so (probably because advertising campaigns and similar tend to mean they don’t need to). Caucuses are an incredibly effective method to exclude people who can’t effectively sink hours of their time into voting on what is probably a week day, or who can’t travel, or who are just less involved. For the democrats in particular, the continued use of caucuses is more than a little hypocritical, given that this is the same party that generally tries to argue during the general election that voter suppression is bad and everyone should be able to vote.
So yeah, the system is corrupt. Clinton winning is at least partially due to systemic corruption (party influence, rules flouting, roll dropping), and had Sanders won it would also be at least partially due to systemic corruption (the wins in caucus states reflects the bias induced by the incredibly corrupt caucus system). Judging by popular vote Clinton would also have won without systemic corruption, ignoring the rather dramatically different system changes that could have any number of unpredictable effects. Once the general election starts, the Clinton-Trump choice is then going to be heavily influenced by yet more corruption, starting with how in it wouldn’t be a choice between a whopping two candidates if the overall system wasn’t designed so incredibly poorly for enabling democracy and so incredibly well for making sure those in power stay in power.
Knabb, tl;dr. But what I did read didn’t make sense. And you offer no solutions. Complaining doesn’t solve the problem
Why not, by referendum, set up IRV in the states. That would break the 2-party system you complain about. So, show us your petitions to actually solve the problem.
So it is all the Sander’s supporters, the Clinton people had absolutely nothing to do with it?
I’m an independent who registered Democrat to caucus for Sanders. My precinct in Iowa went handily to him, despite bullshit pulled by the guy running the show. There was video from it. Things got tense, but we did not insult him. We did not throw things. We did not ask him how much Clinton paid him.
I have long been frustrated with the running of the Democratic party, and I hate the 2-party system. However, there is too goddamned much at stake this year. So I will vote gladly for whoever can defeat the monster across the aisle.
Now people are harassing and threatening the head of the Nevada convention, and leaving misogynistic messages. These are people who support Bernie, and he won’t go beyond blanket condemnation of violence. I want specific, unconditional condemnation of these individuals. I might still support him if he said “I don’t want your help, threats and harassment are not what I stand for.” He has not said this. He has not shown the leadership I would expect of a president commanding the world’s largest military and one of it’s largest economies.
Many other Bernie supporters pretend that Bernie Bros don’t exist. They do. They are not all of his supporters, but they are undeniably there, fucking up an already problematic scene. My Facebook feed is filled with statements from other Bernie supporters who, while not like the Bernie Bros, seem to care more about trashing anyone who supports Hillary (or would vote for her in November) than they do about the fact that the other side has nominated a boldly mendacious, loudly misogynistic egomaniac who openly encourages violence. You’re making a stink that you aren’t allowed to manage the farm, while an enormous grass fire is enveloping the plains around you.
Sanders doubles down on the events in Nevada. Good grief.
Independent voices like the link in Lynna’s #80 seem to indicate that.
I have no problem believing that. Why?
If you are a misogynist, and a woman who could win the US Presidency is legitimately approaching the nomination of her party, you can and will do anything to derail that possibility. So you will trash Clinton at every juncture, without talking up Sanders, try to intimidate and harass her supporters, and by bullying and other means of intimidation/bullshit seek to kill her nomination. A couple of posters on this thread fit that profile.
Dang, sorry the blockquote in my #92 should read:
I should have previewed. *headdesk* Sorry.
What chair throwing?
One dude picked up a chair. Put it down. Then hugged it out.
https://twitter.com/Bernie4People/status/732619789424832512
It’s not like a celebrity endorser of Bernie followed Hillary supporters to their hotel room, aggressively shoved his way through the door, and physically assaulted a woman.
@94
It’s more than just the chair-throwing.
Death threats against state Democratic Party official draw rebuke (Las Vegas Sun)
– After the votes, Sanders supporters flooded the space in front of the stage where party officials sat, some of them hurling a host of epithets specifically at Lange and the party’s vice chairman, Chris Wicker.
Tensions flared again later in the day, when the results of the final delegate report were announced showing a 33-delegate lead in Clinton’s favor in the early evening. Some Sanders supporters countered that 64 of their delegates had been inappropriately disqualified, though the state party says only 58 were actually denied delegate or alternate status because they or their records could not be located or they were not registered Democrats by the May 1 deadline.
When the convention was brought to a close at 10 p.m. after representatives from the Paris hotel informed the state party that they could no longer provide the necessary security for the event, some Sanders supporters reportedly stormed the stage, yelled and threw chairs.
The following day, some Sanders supporters staged a protest outside of the state party’s offices where they wrote on the building, “you are scum” and “fire Roberta.”
Lange’s cellphone number and other personal contact information were subsequently leaked online, and state party officials say she has received thousands of death threats, threats of violence, and misogynistic insults since.
One of the text messages to Lange said, “Praying to god someone shoots you in the FACE and blows your democracy-stealing head off!”
“Our chairwoman had to be given a security detail throughout Saturday just to be able to move around the room and go to the bathroom safely,” the party said in a detailed statement online. “Our office was vandalized by protesters with hateful insults. This activity is beyond the pale.”
Yep, Starfleetdude, standard misogynist terrorism. Lynna’s posts shows the misogyny of some of the Sander’s bullies.
I see the Vicar is still stupid on the idea of strategic voting, that is not voting for the candidate you prefer based simply on their political positions, but for other reasons, like the good of the country and your fellow citizens.
Case in point. Canada. If the demographics are Conservative, 40%, Liberals 30%, and New Democratic 30%, then what is likely to happen is that the conservatives will be elected in a majority of the Ridings, and thus will form the government in Ottawa with a majority. Hence Stephen Harper.
You want to avoid the re-election of a Harper government, those who aren’t conservatives need to pool their votes, so that the conservatives do not end up with a majority of the ridings, and hence a majority in parliament. Strategic voting is required so that the plurality is won by either the Liberal or New Democratic candidates, or can later form a coalition government in Ottawa. And that is what happened. Harper and his idiocy is gone. Harper probably wouldn’t have been elected in the first place of IRV was in place.
Same is needed in the US, with respect to the rethug party. The elections of rethugs must be avoided at all costs, so this means one has to vote for the VIABLE alternative to the rethug. Usually, that means the democratic party candidate, as the nearest left party, the Greens, only got only 0.36% of the votes for President in 2012 meaning they are unviable. Further evidence of their unviability, is that in 2012, I don’t remember a single mailing from the greens. I did know they had a presidential candidate thanks to Pharyngula, but I wasn’t aware that a Green was running in the 10th district until I saw the ballot. Not any way to run a campaign you want to win.
So when I say give me a VIABLE, meaning electable alternative to Donald Trump. And there is only one such candidate; the democratic party candidate, probably Hillary Clinton.
You haven’t shown any other candidate is likely to win enough votes to beat Donald Trump. In other words, you have nothing, and know you have nothing. Nothing but bullshit from you.
Wishing for someone’s death is not the same as threatening someone with death.
I verbalized my desire to see Air Force one crash on takeoff after a local Dubya fundraiser. The secret service agent behind me wasn’t too pleased, but he didn’t treat me the same way he would have if I had made a “death threat.”
Granted it is still pretty rude, but much tamer than what Americans used to do to people that fucked with democracy: “run out of town on a rail” and “tarred and feathered” used to be literal not figurative punishments.
“Wishing for someone’s death is not the same as threatening someone with death.”
We’re not talking wishes, we’re talking about verbal and written threats that aren’t merely passive desires. We used to have duels too, but they’re no longer acceptable either.
This is Nevada we are talking about, even the city folk are barely holding onto sanity. Get out into the rural areas and all those nineteenth century tales of the “Wild West” start seeming totally believable.
I’m shocked that the only incident of actual violence was an out of towner Clinton celebrity endorser. I was expecting “gangs of New York” levels of chaos given the periscope feed of the caucus. The police storm troopers didn’t even riot.
Got any evidence of actual death threats. All the published ones that I’ve seen are of the “eat shit and die” or “I hope a house lands on you” type.
Fun fact, did you know that dueling to the death in Nevada was legal until 1911?
Bingo, PZ. And, yes, Sanders needs to slap down the idiots who have done nothing but harm.
At the same time, I’d like to see Clinton slap down her contingent of idiots who are equally culpable.
Perhaps such a common slap-down might impress the rest of America (less its paid-for idiot political analysts) that democrats might actually identify a ‘center’ somewhere near actual fucking democratic ideals spelled out by the fucking Constitution.
And I too want Bernie Sanders to continue doggedly to the bitter end, if nothing else than to remind Hillary and her oblivious adherents that a pretense to male competency and wherewithal for establishing women and a woman to POTUS is so far off the mark of achieving equality as to be ludicrous and a direct insult to the untapped competency of women.
Meanwhile, everybody is distracted by the boogeyman, by the asshole from hell that members of his own party considered pernicious beyond any possibility of representing them. But this is quite another level of idiocy. These are the very same idiots who: 1. decreed that Cruz (one of them) was the ‘most hated man on Capitol Hill’, 2. declared Drumpf (one of them) to be unrepresentative of the Republican Party ideals, and 3. reversed their position entirely to SUPPORT the asshole from hell…um, because of some librul problem (or, you know, whatever) that looms in the face of that horrible librul demo woman Hillary, who needs to be ejected…even if it means to adopt an asshole from hell.
But watch. Democrats will once again find a way to fuck it up. They’ve done it before, and will no doubt do it again. We can already see it in the incessant emailings for $$$ that scramble, obfuscate, distract or otherwise confuse the minds of their constituents.
I intend to vote according to keeping an asshole from hell out of it. But how many Clinton supporters really understand what a powerfully positive influence the Sanders campaign has been to energize the typically sluggish democratic demographic, and realize how bleak it would be now for Hillary’s chances if Sanders never showed up?
It would behoove Clinton and her supporters to think very carefully and hard on that…and embrace Sanders supporters NOW before this abominable situation blows up in ALL our faces.
One would think, right? You know, country before party and so on and sundry bullshit?
Otherwise we shall all be under the thrall of an asshole who thinks he’s smart…just because another brand of asshole amongst both Clinton and Sanders promoters figured its more important to highlight difference than commonality – and to their eternal shame, above all else, have not adopted the necessary dignity required for such a serious affair.
#85
Soooooooo when called upon to vote by yelling, in which the volume is used to determine the weight of opinion, it’s your position that the loudest are actually bullies? Amazing.
You’re aware that the volume vote was subsequently ignored, and hence procedural rules were broken right?
#88
So, never complain nor point out that a system is broken, unless you also propose a plan alongside the complaint? Wow, way to sweep away the vast majority of outcry on almost every social issue. Amazing again.
Even worse, if you do propose a plan you will be called a blue sky dreamer with no idea how things work “in the real world” and thus should be mocked and/or ignored.
Holms, you fire utterly off target, based on misapprehension, and declare you’ve hit something.
Amazing indeed…to a limit bullshit allows.
You ARE aware that this shit is POLITICKS, right?
Or are you so grotesquely ignorant in the implied idealist stance as to think that a system we all acknowledge is ‘broken’ cannot yet be steered by good people like you? Do you actually think that its beneficial to point out what everyone already knows? ‘Amazing’ indeed.
The Vicar @ #65
Superb list (although I’d place odds on maybe five or six of the list—there is no reason for Clinton not to “evolve” against her current position).
And re universal health care:
A just-released Gallup poll says “Americans support single-payer, “Medicare-for-all” health care system”—that is, a solid 58% majority, which includes 73% of Democrats and 41% (!) of Republicans (and people who “lean” towards those parties, respectively). In fact the headline that Gallup gives its own poll is a little misleading because the question is not about “supporting” single payer per se, it’s about replacing the ACA with single payer.
An somewhat greater percentage of Democrats/“leaners”—79%—favor keeping the ACA in place, while even more Republicans/“leaners”—82%—oppose that. I’d surmise, for Democrats, at least, given the specific questions and the overlapping large percentages, at least some of the responses about keeping or repealing the ACA assume going back to the status quo ante, not having single payer as an alternative. So one interpretation: nearly three-quarters of Democrats favor replacing the ACA with single payer while, at the same time, a somewhat greater number thinks the ACA is “better than nothing.”
@101
How about this?
*TRIGGER WARNING: THREATENING LANGUAGE*
Ooh, there’s also someone suggesting people send her dead animals. Like a cooked goose… get it, cause threats and carcasses are funny when you use a play on words.
But, you know what, why don’t you do what I’ve seen so many other Sanders supporters do, and take a page from the Gamergate playbook? She made those up. She’s playing the victim. Whatever news site I source is in the pocket of Clinton.
@101
How about this?
*TRIGGER WARNING: THREATENING LANGUAGE*
Ooh, there’s also someone suggesting people send her dead animals. Like a cooked goose… get it, cause threats and carcasses are funny when you use a play on words.
But, you know what, why don’t you do what I’ve seen so many other Sanders supporters do, and take a page from the Gamergate playbook? She made those up. She’s playing the victim. Whatever news site I source is in the pocket of Clinton.
@101
How about this?
*TRIGGER WARNING: THREATENING LANGUAGE*
Ooh, there’s also someone suggesting people send her dead animals. Like a cooked goose… get it, cause threats and carcasses are funny when you use a play on words.
But, you know what, why don’t you do what I’ve seen so many other Sanders supporters do, and take a page from the Gamergate playbook? She made those up. She’s playing the victim. Whatever news site I source is in the pocket of Clinton.
#105
Not a single word of your rant addressed what I said, and worse, it repeats the mistake I pointed to in Nerd of Redhead’s posts.
Oh and let’s bear in mind that the primary charge laid against Bernie supporters is that they are bullies, or at least were caught in an instance of bullying. And your first and only post addressing me is a torrent of insults.
@107
Still no death threats.
Lots of harassment and threats of further harassment, but their claimed worst voicemail said she should commit seppiku for her transgressions, which still isn’t a death threat.
Frankly, if the political system is hijacked to the point that rules are ignored and candidates are anointed, what recourse do people have beyond public shaming? The world’s largest peaceful protests couldn’t stop the Iraq war because politicians on both sides of the isle don’t care what the people think, but at least Dubya couldn’t make a public appearance without a crowd of people spitting insults at him.
@110
Holy Shit! So it’s alright to try to egg someone on to suicide now? Fuck you! From someone who suffered with suicidal thoughts as a teenager, fuck you.
Oh, and the death threats need to be super explicit to count? So someone could say “I hope you get driven off the road and die. PS I know you take the 5th street bridge every night” and it wouldn’t be explicit enough? Does one have to outright say “I, personally, intend to do you and your family bodily harm” for it to count?
Yes, W was insulted by the crowds. By all means, insult her on social media. But lay the fuck off the misogyny, and don’t try to drive people to suicide you cold shit. And what the fuck are you doing around FtB if you’re going to be an apologist for harassment?
And what recourse do people have? Try getting involved in the party in the 36 months between election years. Most Sanders supporters I know didn’t get involved in anything until last fall. Most Clinton supporters I know are involved year-round every damned year.
@#88, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
Well, for a start, IRV doesn’t actually solve any problems the 2-party system currently has. (Read it!)
Also, of course, it guarantees nothing whatsoever unless you require that every single voter rank all of the candidates, which means that most of the places which have already implemented IRV aren’t even getting the few benefits which IRV can promise (because they permit people to only list the candidates they like).
And then there’s the vote-counting problem: if there are more than 3 or 4 candidates and the preferences aren’t almost entirely uniform, counting IRV ballots is amazingly difficult to handle.
So implementing IRV would be a tremendous waste of effort and solve nothing. But hey, if you’re going to vote for Clinton you’re used to putting a lot of effort into supporting something which won’t help one bit, so I guess you’re at least consistent.
@#70, Kreator
Yeah, sure. I voted for Obama in 2008 and Jill Stein in 2012. I must really, really hate black people and women. (Eyeroll.)
I admit it: at one point I denied that there really were misogynist Sanders supporters in any large numbers, because I hadn’t actually seen any at that point. You can find it in the comments somewhere on this blog, IIRC. And then I went elsewhere, saw a bunch of them, and came back and admitted as much in the same thread.
By the same standard: I have repeatedly seen people say we should vote for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. These people exist — and at least in the places I frequent, they appear in larger numbers than misogynists. If I’m misogynist for pointing out that they exist, then frankly the label “misogynist” has become as meaningless as “anti-semite” in the mouths of AIPAC.
@#73, dianne
…At this point, I can’t say which one, because I long since closed all the browser tabs I had open at the time, but it was an article on Salon.com. Possibly I miswrote and it was qualified to be “among Independents”. (It’s irrelevant to the argument anyway: Hillary Clinton has the worst unfavorability numbers of any Democrat, and is only beaten out on the Republican side by Donald Trump, more or less consistently by the same amount, and the people who don’t hate Trump love him while the people who don’t hate Clinton vary widely in how much enthusiasm they have for her, which was the point.)
@#75, Matrim
They always do. If they win, according to the Democratic establishment, it’s because they have already moved so far to the right, so therefore moving rightward is a winning strategy and they should do it some more. If they lose, they lost because they didn’t move far enough to the right, so they should move further to the right next time. So voting for Democrats doesn’t help, either.
Well, there’s another possible reaction: the Democrats may finally go too far, people realize they’re as lousy as the Republicans, and a new party gets momentum to the Democrats’ left. Of course, what really seems to be happening is that the Democrats are alienating more and more people who simply stay home. Most non-voters are at least sympathetic to what the Democratic Party claims are its goals, but thanks to three decades of continuous betrayal by people like the Clintons, an ever-increasing number of people no longer believe the Democratic Party actually has those goals.
(I am one of them, but I still vote. Until the Ram-Hillary-Clinton-Down-The-Voters’-Throats movement began I was willing to vote Green for President and Democrats down-ticket. Now I’m thinking “tick the Green Party boxes where they exist and leave the rest blank”.)
Polls pretty consistently show that Americans like leftist policy — Americans by and large want low income inequality, taxes on the rich and corporations, environmental regulation, investment in infrastructure, single-payer healthcare, etc. But polls also show that Americans won’t vote for Democrats. This was not the case until the 1980s, when the Democrats started officially moving to the right. (“New Democrats” and all that — the Clintons and Harry Reid were held up as shining examples of how right-wing Democrats were The Future.) That’s why Sanders has all these supporters who “aren’t Democrats”. Of course they aren’t! People actually like Sanders.
The Party needs to demonstrate that it really stands for something, other than not being the Republicans. Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton is absolutely the wrong person to ask to take a leadership stance; her whole strategy is “triangulation”, which means taking any stance, at any time, which can give you a momentary advantage, and she is far too eager to chase corporate money. By definition, she doesn’t lead, she follows, and she only follows when someone is footing the bill for it. I suggest we will see even lower Democratic turnout in the future as the party squanders what little public trust they have left.
@#97, Nerd of Redhead:
That’s the stuff! Keep being insulting and obtuse! For a while I was actually feeling some sympathy for the Democratic Party for quite possibly losing to a joke like Donald Trump of all people.
More seriously: Hillary Clinton wants to start World War III by way of a shooting war with Russia. If that happens, we’re all dead. All other considerations are moot in the face of that.
She’s pro-choice? Nice, but dead people don’t need abortions. She has “evolved” to no longer refer to gay people as “unnatural” as she was doing in 2010? How nice! But if all the gay people will be dead, their feelings won’t matter. She wants to fix the Flint water supply? Charming, but that only matters if the people of Flint haven’t been wiped out by an ICBM.
You can go ahead and vote for her, hoping that Congress or her advisors will restrain her. History suggests that her advisors will be a bunch of people who will agree with her or be ignored — the Clintons love yes-men. And Obama set the precedent that a President can start a war — although it won’t be called that — against the explicit wishes of Congress. (Congress voted on Libya, and refused to permit hostilities. Obama, at the urging of Clinton apparently, went ahead and destroyed the government and all the infrastructure.) So that won’t work.
Me, I’m voting for a woman who isn’t a dangerously irresponsible warmonger with a history of bad choices: Jill Stein.
@#105, anchor
Wait, so your actual, explicit stance is: “this system is corrupt and broken, so stop complaining that it’s corrupt and broken because it makes people uncomfortable”? Seriously? I cannot change my voter registration away from Democratic fast enough to get away from people like you.
@#73, dianne
Well, I am not sure which source The Vicar had in mind but the polls on Real Clear Politics show Clinton with a 55.2% average unfavorable rating—it’s been above 50% for at least the past few months. (The striking thing about the polls is that the trend line keeps rising. Trump will do his best to drive her unfavorable rating up further as she will with his, which is now at an average 59.3%.)
Sanders, by contrast, has a 40.0% average unfavorable rating and he is the only one of the three whose average favorable rating (46.9%) is higher than his average unfavorable rating.
True, but consider that the Republicans really haven’t run against Sanders at all yet. I don’t think Trump even has an insulting nickname for him yet*. If Sanders got the nomination, how long do you think his relatively favorable rating would last once the Republicans started in on the red baiting, dredged up that gawdawful thing he wrote in the 1970s about sexual relations, went through his finances, called him a “career politician” (and thus not a protest vote, unlike Donald), etc?
I disagree with you, slightly: your tense is wrong. Trump has been doing everything he can to drive up her unfavorable rating. He and the other Republicans have been doing so since the beginning of the campaign. Again, this is in contrast to Sanders, who has not been campaigned against much yet. Are you old enough to remember the Dukakis-Bush campaign? Dukakis looked like he would win, early on. He was quite popular throughout the primaries and, IIRC, considerably ahead in the polls at the time of the nomination. Then Bush began his negative campaign and we ended up with a Bush presidency, not because anyone liked Bush but because they were convinced that Dukakis was…um, actually, I have no memory at all of why Dukakis was supposed to be a bad choice. The country was simply convinced, on the basis of nothing at all, that he would be a bad president. And that was back when the US had at least a pretense of independent media. I suspect it would go much the same for Sanders.
*Though I could easily have missed it. I don’t follow Donald’s late night crazy tweets closely.
dianne @ 115
Oh, yeah, I do—there was Dukakis looking foolish, riding around in a tank and some overly cerebral response he gave at a debate regarding some hypothetical involving the rape of his wife and the infamous Willie Horton ad. I don’t even want to think of all that.
I’ll concede that Trump has been trying to drive up Clinton’s negatives.
I will agree that Trump has not “started in” on Sanders yet and Sanders’ unfavorables could go up and his favorables take a dip but, frankly, I wouldn’t take it as a foregone conclusion. They’re both anti-neoliberal, anti-establishment candidates who are viewed as not taking money from corporate interests—so that eliminates a whole set of attacks that Trump could make (and has made or will make on Clinton) and, arguably, places them both “in sync” with the mood of the electorate.
Sanders’ positions are, in many respects, aligned with what large majorities of Americans want (including many Republicans) and (my own personal opinion) he seems reasonably direct and honest so it might be that (1) the more people see him and learn about his positions, the more they like him (the opposite seems true of Clinton), which could mean that (2) to the extent Trump’s attacks are baseless or based on character (or both), as were those on Dukakis, they might not stick or stick as much.
And the other thing is that, yeah, we can imagine that the full array of conservative forces (Trump, the GOP, Fox News, etc.) can turn absolutely nothing into something or black into white. So (from what I recall) John Kerry, who was a war hero, is turned into, well, whatever he was supposed to be. But Bernie Sanders does not take things lying down (witness his response—no matter what you think of it—to the DNC), he frames issues the way he wants to be framed, and he actually makes the argument—for things like single payer, things that people want. The GOP, which has been making false, vacuous arguments for a generation, isn’t used to that; it’s used to Democrats playing on their turf, on their terms.*
So I think Sanders starts off, poll-wise, in a better place than Trump or Clinton, and I think, position-wise and character-wise, he’s far less vulnerable than other typical establishment Democratic politicians (including Clinton). Unfortunately, I doubt we’ll get a chance to see if that is true or not.
*Just as one very small example: back, last May, on This Week George Stephanoupolus says to Bernie: “I can hear the Republican attack ad right now. He wants American to look more like Scandinavia.” Sanders’ response: “That’s right. That’s right. And what’s wrong with that?” [shrug] He doesn’t run away from his terms of the debate—he owns them.
@JeffW: I suppose it’s possible that it would happen that way. But I have doubts. I think it more likely that the Republicans would say, “Hey, that guy wants to raise your taxes and stifle business with government regulations!” I suppose they might go for “He wants to make us like Scandinavia where 60% of kids are born out of wedlock* and atheism is the most common religion. He’s coming for your bible!” That’d play well in the southern US. Then they can work the “they’re all too corrupt to bother with” angle by reminding people of Sanders’ statements about sex from the 1970s, pointing out that the NRA gave him a “C” one year, and looking into his financing. (There’ll be something there. There is no way he made enough money to campaign on without there being something at least questionable looking in his finances somewhere.)
By what mechanism do you think Sanders could keep control of the narrative? Sheer willpower in the face of Fox News? I don’t see where your claim that he “owns” the terms of debate comes from. Sanders did not clearly beat Clinton in the primary debates, at least in terms of the feedback I’ve seen from various news agencies reporting on the Democratic debates. You may, of course, differ in your assessment.
*I don’t know the right number and it doesn’t matter. The R’s wouldn’t bother to get it right anyway.
dianne @ #117
I agree—I’m not going to make the argument that what I said will happen—it’s definitely foreseeable that the Republicans could say exactly what you are saying they would and their blows would hit their target. I’m saying that Sanders’ substance (which aligns strongly with what people actually want) and “style” allows for not assuming that what worked for the GOP in the past will necessarily work to the extent it did with him.
I was referring to “debate” in a more general sense, not the particular debates that he and Clinton had. As just one example, the GOP likes to frame everything in terms of American exceptionalism—let’s talk about how “great” America is or isn’t but should be—and Clinton, in general, falls right in line (e.g., she says to Bernie, in the first debate, “We’re not Denmark—we’re the United States of America!,” as non-responsive a line as I’ve ever heard; she and the Democrats respond to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” with “America’s Already Great!”). Bernie won’t have any of that—he says, in essence, “So what? Let’s talk about the real facts on the ground.” That doesn’t mean he’ll win with that argument—it means he is doing something different than what Democrats have typically done and what Republicans are used to fighting against.
It seems to me like your argument applies to any Democratic candidate—in the face of Fox news, what Democratic candidate can survive the onslaught? Well, President Obama did and he was peddling neoliberal, establishment positions that the electorate largely hates. (There’s a reason why in the midterm elections Democratic voters don’t bother showing up.) We don’t know, frankly, how Sanders would do, with unabashedly liberal positions and ideals (he’s basically running on FDR’s “Four Freedoms”) because we haven’t seen that in close to 50 years—but we do know that, whatever he is doing, (1) again it’s different than what establishment Democrats have done in the recent past and that (2) he’s done far better than anyone who is relying on the conventional wisdom expected.
And, speaking of the South, there’s this regarding a new Atlanta Journal Constitution poll:
That’s in Georgia. (And. incidentally, Sanders polls better against Trump than Clinton does in the swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.)
Of course, once again, we don’t know how Sanders would do, once the GOP, Fox and all that, start attacking him in earnest, but people seem to find it “shocking” that he would do so well in Georgia. Applying the conventional wisdom has been wrong thus far—I would not assume that it would work any better moving forward. It might but I would not assume it would.
Yes, Sanders has polled better than Clinton in the past against all rethugs. A good chuck of this is likely due to misogyny. Some folks just can’t/won’t vote for a woman.
About this whole Sanders claim of Democratic Party rigging the process against him, finger on the scale, and such, well he is one big two-face. Helps to know a bit of history associated with him and the Democrats:
http://www.shakesville.com/2016/05/its-pretty-rich-for-bernie-sanders-to.html
@113
Richard Nixon was a raving antisemite who had Henry Kissinger in his cabinet. Saying you voted or like such and such person in a given oppressed minority does not prove you aren’t racist, sexist, homo/transphobic.
I don’t know if you are, but usually, the “I have black/queer/women friends” defense against those accusations is usually laughable.
Just would like to make a point, the Democrats aren’t trying to systematically make it more difficult for me to take a shit in a public bathroom. They also still understand the point behind diplomacy. Here in Nevada, one of the party platform planks is actively against Voter ID laws.
Are they perfect? No. Not by a long shot. Cannabis legalization is still off the table and the continued use of drone strikes and military intervention will still continue.
Are they as lousy as Republicans? FUCK NO.
I find this to be bombastic unserious noise a lot of people will lean on. If you think the Democrats and Republicans are stark and equal opposites, you aren’t paying attention. If you think they’re exactly as bad as each other, you really aren’t paying attention.
Probably a derail, but…I strongly suspect that cannabis legalization will be on the table and probably a done deal within the next decade. Colorado is making money off of it and that’s attracted people’s attention. A (Democrat sponsored) amendment to a defense spending bill allowing doctors at VAs to prescribe medical marijuana in states where it is legal has passed Congress and Obama is expected to sign it. The direction of the trend is obvious and it is being led by Democrats. They’ll make legalization part of their platform soon.
Yeah, I agree that Sanders is currently polling better now than Clinton is. But the point is that that is how he is polling when the Republicans are not campaigning against him. His numbers would drop if the Rs put any serious effort into campaigning against him.
Re his health insurance proposal: Yes, if people in the US are polled about the question of whether they favor universal health insurance in principle, they will generally say yes. But if asked if they support Obama’s expansion or other specific plans, they’ll say no. This is the voter cohort who elected the tea party two years ago to stop Obama from expanding their health care. I don’t think you can look at those poll results and assume that they mean that people will vote for Bernie for his health care plan. Especially since he couldn’t convince the majority of Democratic voters in the primary to support him. Clinton is significantly ahead in terms of popular votes. And, in general, Democrats tend to be more liberal than independents or Republicans.
Another semi-related point: Obama won on the votes of women and minorities. The votes of white men are becoming less relevant over time as whites become a demographic minority in the US and women vote more and more independently from men. The counter force to that is the voter suppression laws that the Republicans are proposing and passing in a number of states. If they succeed, then we’ll get more Trumps in the next several elections. If they fail, we’ll get someone like Sanders, but maybe this time someone who would actually court minority and women’s votes, instead of trying to scare them away from participation as Sanders’ supporters seem to be trying to do.
dianne @ 123
Right—but I guess I kind of feel like (1) if we assume that the Rs have not put serious effort into campaigning against either candidate, Sanders is in a much better position than Clinton. (Obviously, we can say that the Rs have campaigned against Clinton for the past 20 years but, somehow, her unfavorables have still managed to go up in the past six months.) (2) again, I think Sanders is less vulnerable (position-wise, favorable/unfavorable-wise, and “electorate mood” wise, if there is such a thing) than Clinton. He starts off in a better position and he ends up, arguably, in a less negative place.
That’s right. What I am saying is if people in the general—which is a very different population than that in the D primaries—are voting on the basis of health care policy, Bernie gets more people than Clinton. Essentially, that population hates the ACA a lot more (about 80% of Republicans want it to disappear) while liking single payer (including 41% of Republicans).
And, with an electorate in that mood, in an anti-neoliberal mood, it’s not easy for Clinton to defend a neoliberal health insurance plan. That’s what the poll I refer to in #106, in effect, says—Democrats are saying “we’d rather have single payer but the ACA is better than nothing.” That’s not a strong hand for Clinton to play because, even if it is better than nothing, Trump can accentuate how bad it is (to the extent it is—which you and I might disagree on, but that’s for another time).
Nate Silver (who has managed to be wrong about a lot this primary season) said yesterday “…we usually think of independent voters as being moderate. Sanders voters [who call themselves independents], however, are definitely to the left of Clinton, but a lot of them don’t like to call themselves Democrats”—and Sanders wins those voters by 31%.
And “…independents who lean toward the Democrats” The Nation said two days ago, “ are less likely to back GOP candidates than are weak Democrats.” That, to me, doesn’t mean at least those independents who lean Democratic are “moderate” if that means “in between” Ds and Rs.
But the independent voters who “lean Democratic” are actually a pretty small percentage (15%) of independent voters—what about independents, generally? Well, this current chart from Reuters shows that, of independent voters who are likely to vote in the general election, just over half (51%) would vote for Sanders and the percentage who would not vote (30%) is two-thirds more than those who would vote for Clinton (18%). That doesn’t mean, in fact, that nearly a third would actually not vote—it shows the relative real weakness Clinton has with independents.
Clinton has done better than Sanders in the Democratic primaries. (We argue about how much the board was tilted in favor of Clinton and against Sanders, in both completely legitimate ways and others, but that’s not relevant here.) But, in the general, either of them is up against a different opponent (and this year an especially different opponent) with a broader electorate (i.e., one that includes Rs and more independents). And that situation, it is not clear that Clinton will do better than Sanders did.
I’m not sure what the basis is for that but, accepting the premise for the sake of argument, whatever relative lack of participation is for women and minorities in a Sanders campaign, I can’t imagine it would be anything more than marginally worse than Clinton would against Donald Trump. (I’m not sure that addresses your point, though.)