Before you opine on a "Bernie loss" watch this

Interview with Chris Jansing, NBC News, 4-27-2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb77ARNQ51M

What I heard (and correct me if I am wrong).

Senator Sanders said that we must separate the "real world" from the "media world".  Great point.

He also said that he is committed to preventing a GOP nominee from being elected as President.  Also a great point. 

nohero said:

What I heard (and correct me if I am wrong).

Senator Sanders said that we must separate the "real world" from the "media world".  Great point.

He also said that he is committed to preventing a GOP nominee from being elected as President.  Also a great point. 

You heard correctly.

paulsurovell said:

Interview with Chris Jansing, NBC News, 4-27-2016

Bernie's insistence that current polling proves he's a stronger candidate in the general is just wrong, and people who know politics understand this very clearly.  Current polling for the general election is, for the most part, meaningless and misleading.

Paul, I'd guess that you know and understand this. 

mjh said:

paulsurovell said:

Interview with Chris Jansing, NBC News, 4-27-2016

Bernie's insistence that current polling proves he's a stronger candidate in the general is just wrong, and people who know politics understand this very clearly.  Current polling for the general election is, for the most part, meaningless and misleading.

Paul, I'd guess that you know and understand this. 

I wouldn't go that far.

mjh said:

paulsurovell said:

Interview with Chris Jansing, NBC News, 4-27-2016

Bernie's insistence that current polling proves he's a stronger candidate in the general is just wrong, and people who know politics understand this very clearly.  Current polling for the general election is, for the most part, meaningless and misleading.

Paul, I'd guess that you know and understand this. 

That's what the polling people, such as 538, say. 

the issue is not about polling, its about a man convinced that he is right, continuing to fight for what he believes and trying to convince the rest of us to support him.

nothing in his responses to the interviewer would cause me to believe that he is doing anything wrong, that he is out of bounds, that he is playing dirty political games, that he should do anything differently.

in fact that interview rebukes most of the nonsense that was written about his campaign regarding Hillary Clinton on the other Bernie threads.  

hoops said:

the issue is not about polling, its about a man convinced that he is right, continuing to fight for what he believes and trying to convince the rest of us to support him.

Its not?

Bernie's insistence that current polling proves he's a stronger candidate in the general is just wrong

To quote Bernie, his own words from the above clip

poll after poll, state poll, national poll

Bernie is the one who has now made the issue about polling. I guess we just need to forget he's losing on the primary voters.

Wasn't the Bernie campaign, when he started his campaign, the one decrying the super delegates as unfair, elitist, and undemocratic? Now that they're his only hope he expects and hopes the super delegates will shift towards him, disregarding the vote of primary voters.

Bernie's idea of democracy - have the party elite override the will of the primary voters. Hypocrite.

Bernie has already proven polls several months in advance of an actual election are rarely correct.  Basically they are a tool for a candidate to use to see where they need to campaign and on what issues.  Whether Bernie or Hillary would do better against Trump in November is pure nonsense at this point.  

BG9 said:

hoops said:

the issue is not about polling, its about a man convinced that he is right, continuing to fight for what he believes and trying to convince the rest of us to support him.

Its not?

Bernie's insistence that current polling proves he's a stronger candidate in the general is just wrong

I'm guessing you wrote this without thinking about the whole of my sentence.  Frankly I dont care about the polling, or what he says about it to support his case, or what Hillary says about it to support her case.  

There is exactly one intelligent answer to all of these questions about how anyone might perform in November: "I don't know." Weird how seldom anyone seems to say that.

BG9 said:

hoops said:

the issue is not about polling, its about a man convinced that he is right, continuing to fight for what he believes and trying to convince the rest of us to support him.

Its not?

Bernie's insistence that current polling proves he's a stronger candidate in the general is just wrong

To quote Bernie, his own words from the above clip

poll after poll, state poll, national poll

Bernie is the one who has now made the issue about polling. I guess we just need to forget he's losing on the primary voters.

Wasn't the Bernie campaign, when he started his campaign, the one decrying the super delegates as unfair, elitist, and undemocratic? Now that they're his only hope he expects and hopes the super delegates will shift towards him, disregarding the vote of primary voters.

Bernie's idea of democracy - have the party elite override the will of the primary voters. Hypocrite.

Here's one superdelegate with democratic principles:

http://www.citypages.com/news/us-rep-rick-nolan-joins-bernie-sanders-superdelegate-count-8193536

imonlysleeping said:

There is exactly one intelligent answer to all of these questions about how anyone might perform in November: "I don't know." Weird how seldom anyone seems to say that.

Exactly. Especially with Bill's past, present and future waiting in the wings.

paulsurovell said:

BG9 said:

hoops said:

the issue is not about polling, its about a man convinced that he is right, continuing to fight for what he believes and trying to convince the rest of us to support him.

Its not?

Bernie's insistence that current polling proves he's a stronger candidate in the general is just wrong

To quote Bernie, his own words from the above clip

poll after poll, state poll, national poll

Bernie is the one who has now made the issue about polling. I guess we just need to forget he's losing on the primary voters.

Wasn't the Bernie campaign, when he started his campaign, the one decrying the super delegates as unfair, elitist, and undemocratic? Now that they're his only hope he expects and hopes the super delegates will shift towards him, disregarding the vote of primary voters.

Bernie's idea of democracy - have the party elite override the will of the primary voters. Hypocrite.

There is nothing inconsistent with Bernie's call for superdelegates to support him and his view that superdelegates are undemocratic and unfair.  To the contrary.

Bernie has won slightly more than 45% of the pledged delegates thus far.  However, only 8% of superdelegates have announced support for Bernie, regardless of how their constituents voted.  Bernie's call for support from superdelegates is thus a call for fairness and for democratic representation in the nomination process.




Here's one superdelegate with democratic principles:

http://www.citypages.com/news/us-rep-rick-nolan-joins-bernie-sanders-superdelegate-count-8193536

45% is still less than 50%.  And if we were to be truly democratic, scrapping delegates entirely and going strictly by vote count, Sanders fares even worse.  Get even more democratic and scrap caucuses, and Sanders does worse still.

It's great to support your candidate - and I think Sanders has been a net positive influence in this race - but the simple fact is that more voters back Clinton than Sanders. If you've got a problem with this, blame the voters - but don't then try to claim some kind of democratic mandate.

There is the point to be made that a very significant number of Sanders supporters have not been able to vote for him because they failed to register as Democrats in time in states that have closed primaries or were otherwise prevented from showing their support in the voting booth.  Whether those numbers are comparable to the margins, I don't know, but they are not trivial.

I personally believe that if Clinton is the nominee, Sanders will support her very strongly and will exhort his followers to do so also.  I am less confident that many of them will do so, though, and that worries me.

@sac - I think there's two separate topics there: voting access, and Sanders support.

On voting access, I think it's pretty disgraceful overall. Up until this year, actually, I was not registered with a party, and I always found the idea of closed primaries very frustrating. I like the California Top Two Primary System, though it also can lend itself to gaming the system.

And beyond just the primaries, voting overall is a mess, what with malfunctioning voting machines, voters being dropped from the rolls. And even worse of course are explicit attempts to disenfranchise voters, such as voter ID laws, etc. 

I would like to see increasing voter registration and voter turnout as a real focus, and it's shocking and embarrassing how bad it is.

As for how this relates to support for Sanders, though, I don't see any good reason to believe that he would be getting more votes were voting more open. Some voter-suppressing measures - such as caucuses - benefit him, after all.  And if we are positing a different system, then we also have to posit that the candidates would have run their campaigns differently, and we really don't know how that would have translated to actual votes for each candidate (heck - maybe in a wide open primary landscape, some other candidate would have felt they could enter and run to the left of Sanders! - if we're positing alternate realities, who's to say might have happened?)

The fact is that a prerequisite for successful politics is organizing and getting your supporters to the polls. Sanders, for all of his ability to inspire, has not been as successful at organizing that inspiration into votes.  The current rules aren't new or surprising - he was well aware of them - and the simple fact is that he failed to organize accordingly. This isn't an incidental failure, but a pretty critical one. My hope is that some ambitious politicians out there are seeing Sanders success at inspiring people, and are working on doing the hard work of actual politicking so that we can have the votes to get a more liberal Congress and in 2024, carry on the Obama-Clinton streak and extend the GOP shut out of the White House.

PVW said:

paulsurovell said:

BG9 said:

hoops said:

the issue is not about polling, its about a man convinced that he is right, continuing to fight for what he believes and trying to convince the rest of us to support him.

Its not?

Bernie's insistence that current polling proves he's a stronger candidate in the general is just wrong

To quote Bernie, his own words from the above clip

poll after poll, state poll, national poll

Bernie is the one who has now made the issue about polling. I guess we just need to forget he's losing on the primary voters.

Wasn't the Bernie campaign, when he started his campaign, the one decrying the super delegates as unfair, elitist, and undemocratic? Now that they're his only hope he expects and hopes the super delegates will shift towards him, disregarding the vote of primary voters.

Bernie's idea of democracy - have the party elite override the will of the primary voters. Hypocrite.

There is nothing inconsistent with Bernie's call for superdelegates to support him and his view that superdelegates are undemocratic and unfair.  To the contrary.

Bernie has won slightly more than 45% of the pledged delegates thus far.  However, only 8% of superdelegates have announced support for Bernie, regardless of how their constituents voted.  Bernie's call for support from superdelegates is thus a call for fairness and for democratic representation in the nomination process.




Here's one superdelegate with democratic principles:

http://www.citypages.com/news/us-rep-rick-nolan-joins-bernie-sanders-superdelegate-count-8193536

45% is still less than 50%.  And if we were to be truly democratic, scrapping delegates entirely and going strictly by vote count, Sanders fares even worse.  Get even more democratic and scrap caucuses, and Sanders does worse still.

It's great to support your candidate - and I think Sanders has been a net positive influence in this race - but the simple fact is that more voters back Clinton than Sanders. If you've got a problem with this, blame the voters - but don't then try to claim some kind of democratic mandate.

Perhaps this was an oversight, but your statement that "more voters back Clinton than Sanders" should have been "more voters have backed Clinton than Sanders thus far."

With that in mind, here's an excellent article on the remaining primaries and caucuses in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Oregon, California -- and New Jersey -- as well as Puerto Rico and Guam.

On the issue of how democratic the Democratic Party nominating process is, I assume you agree that the superdelegate appointments are undemocratic and that Bernie is justified in seeking to win their support.

On the issue of caucuses, I think open primaries would be more democratic.

But that raises two additional issues that you overlooked -- exclusion of independents and the lack of same-day registration. To make the Democratic Party nominating process fully democratic, the party needs to make its primaries open and allow same-day registration, so independents and unregistered citizens are not excluded from the process.  And if these changes had been adopted in 2016, along with doing away with superdelegates and caucuses, there is much evidence to suggest that you would have said "more voters have backed Sanders than Clinton thus far."

paulsurovell said:

Interview with Chris Jansing, NBC News, 4-27-2016

Great interview, thanks!  

Oit of curiosity, what justifies giving an independent a say in the election of a candidate representing a party they do not belong to?  

ctrzaska said:

Oit of curiosity, what justifies giving an independent a say in the election of a candidate representing a party they do not belong to?  

Nothing - which is why you are better off in NJ remaining unaffiliated rather than registering as Independent. If you want to take the trouble, you can then vote in either primary by registering on election day and reverting to unaffiliated after wards.

ctrzaska said:

Oit of curiosity, what justifies giving an independent a say in the election of a candidate representing a party they do not belong to?  

The big picture which is that in a Democracy the person with the most votes wins and everyone gets to vote.  You should not have to choose a party in order to vote.  We should make it easier to vote, not harder.  Cutting off independents is just another format of voter supression.

nan said:

ctrzaska said:

Oit of curiosity, what justifies giving an independent a say in the election of a candidate representing a party they do not belong to?  

The big picture which is that in a Democracy the person with the most votes wins and everyone gets to vote.  You should not have to choose a party in order to vote.  We should make it easier to vote, not harder.  Cutting off independents is just another format of voter supression.

What is to stop somebody from running as an independent in November and receiving votes from voters regardless of party affiliation?

Sure.  Easy as pie. Once again, let's look at the big picture.  We only elect from two parties.  Let's make it easy to do that.

nan said:

Sure.  Easy as pie. Once again, let's look at the big picture.  We only elect from two parties.  Let's make it easy to do that.

We need a viable 3rd party.  It takes a huge amount of work.  Or people can complain about the two party system and hope for the fairy godmother to make it all better.

Either way there is tons of work.  Might as well start with what we have.

nan said:

Either way there is tons of work.  Might as well start with what we have.

And by that you mean "completely shut down and walk away if my first choice doesn't win."

If elections were fairer my first choice would have won.

The Tea Party represents an example of a movement that has organized to gain political power.  Sanders supporters need to be able to do the same thing.  Or maybe there will just be a gradual sea change as Millenials make their weight felt in politics.

nan said:

If elections were fairer my first choice would have won.

They are fair.  If you are  member of a party, you get to play in the party's sandbox.  Otherwise, you get to vote in November.

Now, if Bernie secured the majority of the pledged delegates and still didn't make it, then your fairness complaint would have more of a basis.

No one expected Bernie to do as well and come as far as he did but he hasn't been vetted like a front runner or viable candidate.  Hillary had been vetted and then some.  She has withstood a berage of "investigations" , released 30 years of taxes, has a record as a Senator, Secy of State and First Lady.  This is already baked into the polling.  Bernie has released one year of taxes , his congressional record is consistent but he has not authored a lot of legislation.  He has not been under the same lens as Hillary has as an independent senator from a small state.  We're he the nominee that would all change and so would the polling.