It’s impossible not to get a little excited about what Bernie Sanders just pulled off in Michigan. I am so schizophrenic about this race. I always root for Sanders to win every contest even though I’m not at all convinced he’s the right candidate for the job. What it reminds me of is one of those situations in sports where you know you need the team you don’t like to win so your team can make the playoffs, but you just can’t bring yourself to root for (in my case) the Boston Red Sox or the Dallas Cowboys.
This is why I can’t endorse a candidate.
It’s also why I’m trying my hat at just doing analysis with no advocacy.
The Sanders win in Michigan has changed the race. There can be no doubt about that. But before Sanders supporters get too excited, I have to douse them with some cold reality.
Sanders got crushed in Mississippi so badly tonight that he barely made the 15% minimum threshold to get some delegates there. And this was a two-person race. It was just a brutal drubbing. Clinton is also controlling almost all the superdelegates out of Michigan. It’s likely that she’ll emerge from tonight with the most delegates from both states, and also with a significant net gain in her delegate lead. Sanders cannot afford to have victories like this.
However, if he can translate his win in Michigan into wins in other upper Midwest states like Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin, he’s going to start eating into Clinton’s earned delegate lead.
It’s almost impossible for him to catch her in the overall delegate race, but this is mainly due to her dominance with superdelegates.
She shouldn’t be worried at all, really, but this is a setback for her. And it’s exposed a weakness that most people thought would be a strength. She’s not getting it done with the very same white working class Democratic voters who formed her base of support eight years ago.
Trump’s arguing that he can steal these voters in November and carry blue states. McCain thought the same thing, but he’s a different kind of politician than Trump.
In any case, my hat’s off to Sanders and his organizers. Very, very impressive work tonight. No one will be asking him to drop out now and he’s going full speed ahead with a head full of steam.
Similar wins:
1980, Kennedy down 20 to Carter in polling beats him in NY. Kenendy goes on to win PA, and then a series of states on June 6th.
It isn’t enough, but it fundamentally remade the race.
1984, Hart wins OH and IN in a complete upset. Hart then wins most of the rest of the primaries.
One thing: this upset is way earlier in the process.
Buyer’s remorse. A sense that people aren’t ready for the race to be over. It has happened in the past: Clinton in ’08, maybe Brown in ’92, Hart in ’84, Kennedy in ’80, Church and Brown in ’76, Reagan in 76.
The national polling from ABC and NBC (showing Sanders down 7 and 9) were not consistent with the polling from the midwest. One had to be wrong.
We found out which it was tonight.
81-18 percent sanders among millennials. 57-42 among white voters. 65-35 percent clinton among black voters. tie among younger african-americans.
Its interesting how very much this ties into the Obama legacy which HRC is the assumed heir of.
Actually it doesn’t. Not at the voter level. She has picked up a higher percentage of the AA vote than Obama in ’08 got through SC, but they aren’t turning out in the record numbers that voted after SC. She’s shedding the voters from other demographic groups that were with her in ’08. Take MA for example. Turnout was only down by 24 thousand. She beat Obama by almost 200 thousand votes and finished only 17 thousand ahead of Sanders. I can’t identity the shifts from these aggregate numbers and the lefty bloggers aren’t any help because I’m not seeing ’08 HRC supporters shift to Sanders and ’08 Obama supporters are splitting between HRC and Sanders. That’s not like any of the shifts in any state.
Heres where I’m coming from: under 30s of all races have shown they want Obama to do more, from Occupy to BLM youth were not satisfied with the Obama era. And now they give overwhelming margins to Bernie.
Working class whites never were a strong Obama support either, have had uneven economic gains even with Obamacare, and Sanders consistently wins them too.
So HRC has two of the most loyal pieces of the Obama coalition: educated whites and black voters but lost the youth block and many of her ’08 voters.
I think the shedding of her previous groups is because of the overlap. Of course I dont have a lot of numbers here so its more of a feeling than any hard idea.
Under age 30 is going for Sanders at a higher rate than seniors are going for HRC. However, the age split is 45. Below for Sanders and above for HRC. Income more so than education is another split (although income and education are correlated). But it’s Trump that is disproportionately favored among Republicans that have had less formal education. If I had to guess I’d say that HRC has higher support among voters with less education because older voters had less formal education.
Clinton got crushed in Michigan from the independent vote so badly tonight that she barely made 15%, minimum. And this was a two-person race. It was just a brutal drubbing. 🙂
Clinton carried just about 5 counties with Detroit as biggest prize – Wayne and Oakland County – with Sanders winning the rest including Grand Rapids (Kent-Ottawa County), Washtenaw, Ingham, Kalamazoo, and all rural areas. Quite amazing!
Perhaps the voters in Michigan remembered the DNC mess in 2008?
Are disaffected Dems going to fully come home to a conventional Dem candidate in the fall? How many are white working class, I wonder.
I would sum it up in this simple observation:
The fundamental principle of Bernie’s campaign is, essentially — Yes, we can; and Hillary’s is — No, we can’t. (Subtext: How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya, Bernie?)
She may wrap herself in the legacy of Obama, but Bernie captures the spirit that Obama voters actually responded to. And for all the unique status that Obama now enjoys, understandably and justifiably, among AAs, in 2008 he was NOT elected as president of Black America, but as president of the United States of America. And he never forgot that, though it seems some of the folks that voted for him did.
It’s becoming clear to me that we’re already in a very serious struggle — not merely a political campaign. Recently there have been definite signs that Wall Street, the banks, and the neocons, are preparing a push-back against the Warren/Sanders front. In relation to the campaign, the timing is very troubling.
I thought she drew blood at the Flint debate, but either she didn’t score the point that I thought she did, or people had already made up their minds, or people didn’t think it was a big deal. I was surprised.
I don’t think she can shrug this off, though. Yes, she widened her lead today, but as you say, a few more “wins” like this will weaken her. She needs to figure out why the polls were so wrong, why she didn’t score the knockout blow she thought, and how to win OH, PA, IL and the rest after tonight. I think she’ll be able to do that.
If Bernie can continue to beat her, he will have earned the nomination (even if he’s behind on the
superdelegates). I don’t expect him to continue to beat her, but she needs to up her game. And by doing so, she’ll be even stronger in the fall.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Her new position on trade did not fool anyone.
Commenters at the great orange satan were saying Hillary’s claim that Sanders voted against the auto bailout actually backfired with UAW members… FWIW.
Axelrod called it a cheap shot (after the MI polls closed of course). He has some familiarity with HRC cheap shots.
Nice to see that UAW members aren’t into getting fooled again.
Regardless of endorsements from the internationals, individual union members are showing more support for Bernie. This is true in both the public and private sectors.
That kind of cheap shot is, unfortunately, a Clinton (both of them) trademark. They still haven’t figured out that the electorate is getting better at recognizing cheap shots for what they are. And when they do, not only does the trick not work, it creates resentment. (“What do you take me for … ?”)
When something has always worked very well for decades and only occasionally doesn’t, why change it? It was cheap shots and dirty tricks that kept her in the ’08 primary.
Right. And contributed in large measure to her losing it.
I’m going to disagree on this point. Without the cheap shots/dirty tricks, Obama would have carried NH and she would have limped into SC while Obama would have energized the AA vote because he was no longer not electable. Had Clinton played it clean in NH and SC, she would have received a larger portion of the AA vote in SC (and perhaps more of the white vote as well), but she still would have lost on both the AA and white vote to Obama. (The white vote in SC ’08 split roughly 43-43-14 Obama-Edwards-Clinton.) With Edwards out and had she played it clean going-forward, the odds were that the Edwards support would have split 50/50 instead of a disproportionate percentage going to HRC. That wouldn’t have been enough even if she could have managed to recapture a portion of the AA vote that she lost in SC.
Youth turnout matched the olds turnout: 20% each.
Did the total reach 1M? I saw 800K at one point.
1.1m so far
1.1 million with 97% reporting. Big mistake all the pundits kept making was to use ’08 as their reference point for a DEM primary in MI. That one was a busted play — delegates weren’t supposed to count and Obama and Edwards didn’t campaign there and weren’t on the ballot.
The last DEM MI primary was in ’92. That’s before the youngest current eligible voters were born.
Oh, and Bernie had paid staff in MI before 6/30/15. HRC had temp help in several states as of that date, but ended those contracts in July.
Youth turnout was consistent with their proportion of the electorate. Not sure that’s happened since ’76.
That’s definitely a big factor in why the polls were so far off. Bernie brings in lots of new voters.
Nate had HRC at 99% to win.
All of the focus/attention on the delegate count since before Iowa by HRC operative/supporters, the MSM, and those claiming to be impartial smells a bit like generals fighting the last war. Meanwhile out in the trees there is some compelling data that few people are noticing and commenting on. The same pattern that emerged in IA has continued and is becoming more robust. If the Superdelegates dismiss it and push HRC over the nomination finish line, they will have nominated a seriously weak GE candidate.
Jumping the Shark.
I think I now know what it means.
Hmm — hadn’t thought of it like that. Of it’s apt, it’s in slow motion and there’s still fuel left in the tank.
could you explain, not understanding what you’re getting at
The name of the game was to set the table for the big wins for Sanders after March 15. This is the way to do it and HRC is about out of blowout states. It is the greatest upset in Dem primary history, is this a Sanders peak or a turning point? Time will tell.
Both of these candidates have very great strengths and also pretty large weaknesses, which is what makes this race problematic. Neither one is your average politician. In a perfect world you would be able to blend the best parts of the two, take off a few years, and get the ideal candidate- Who, I think, would end up looking pretty close to Elizabeth Warren… Ah well. Maybe next time.
The latest polls out of the states coming up this Tuesday show:
Florida: HRC +31
Illinois: HRC +42
North Carolina: HRC +10
Ohio: HRC +21
Will Michigan change this? Is the polling off again? I have no idea. But it still looks very bleak for Bernie.
According to RealClear Politics, in terms of delegates in Michigan it’s 65-57 for Bernie and in Mississippi it’s 29-4 HRC. Her lead actually expanded tonight.
Like MI, polling has been very light in IL and OH. There has been more polling in FL but doesn’t appear to be high quality. Don’t know about NC. The problem with light polling is that trends over time can’t be identified. A decent pollster should have picked up on some movement towards Sanders a week ago and a second poll three days ago should have detected that the momentum was speeding up. My guess is that they couldn’t build an adequate model for a DEM primary in MI because there hadn’t been an actual one since 1992, Will have to see if they do better on next week’s primaries.
It’s almost as if we have to apologize for the Michigan primary voters because they disobeyed the pollsters. Everyone scrambles for an explanation of the discrepancy between the polls and the outcome. Maybe because there has not been a primary in Michigan for ages the pollsters got confused, someone suggests. Or maybe instead just because the voters are sick and tired of the Hillary Clinton and the DNC schtick which is toxic to a lot of ordinary people (who still exist, like poor and lower class!). But that wouldn’t suit the pollsters because they would then have been incompetent. Clinton is said by the polls to be far ahead of Sanders in other northern states. But is the composition of the populations of Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. so very different from that of Michigan that the outcome should heavily favor Clinton? I can’t say, I’m not a pollster. As far as Mississippi is concerned, I’ll take a pass. Just because black people are in thrall to the Democratic Party and the Clintons. Let the pollsters explain that mystery. Too bad for the Mississippi Democrats, I’d say.
Bernie Sanders can better be seen as an Awakening than any kind of revolution, despite his own words. That’s the way I see it: a kind of long overdue realization of the social reality which is poisoning everyone, like the lead in the water of Flint and other US cities, and which the Clintons fully and actively support and advance. The whole world is in fact suffering from the same evil. See Europe, for example, the disastrous, extreme austerity policy. Too bad for all of us.
The problem is that there’s disproportionate interest in the front end primaries, which get polled heavily. We don’t need 20-30 Iowa polls a month to tell us how that race is going to turn out. But we need more than 0-1 polls in Michigan, Kansas, etc.
But do we really need the polls to tell us ‘where things are going”? Let the people go where they go and the pollsters can figure it out later. Of course that’t not their gravy train.
I’d say tired of the shtick – DNC stalwarts aside, many seem to be moving between Trump and Sanders. Clinton’s statement, replayed on the msm fairly often, that “the sooner we wrap this up and I become the nominee, the sooner I can devote my time to fighting Trump” was ill advised to say the least. I’m interested how completely she lost Flint, but imo the optics of the Foundation or Pritzker donation/ involvement in water distribution is just more of what ppl are upset at the billionaires about.
As far as the UAW not being fooled by the “Sanders voted against the auto industry” assertion, that’s something everyone in the region followed closely and won’t forget.
I thought Bernie’s Fox Town Hall was excellent, just excellent – with a nice cordial tone. hope he does more of those. I read the TPM comments after it was announced, and all thought he shouldn’t agree to do it. I found that wrong thinking about how to reach voters truly bizarre, like it’s a spectator sport, not ppl’s lives at stake here.
ok, I see she did carry Flint/ Genesee County
Yeah, Bernie did win Flint’s county. Heh. Mayor was visibly mad.
also too, that charity giving to help out Flint, that was Bloomberg’s strategy for silencing community groups when he wrested a 3rd term from NY city council. he’d have his philanthropic arm offer them something [don’t know if he ever ponied up though]
MSNBC did have an interesting explanation for why all the reporting was off in MI.
They say there was no contested DEM primary in MI since 1992 and it 2008 only Clinton was on the ballot. So there was no good models for likely voter screens and that screwed up everyone’s results.
Combine that with the fact that this was the actual first DEM primary since NAFTA
Gee — maybe “they” read my comments here to “figure it out.”
because news agencies and campaigns should take some random person on a blog as an authority on polling?
Didn’t think a snark tag thingy was necessary.
However, your comment sounded like you were impressed with what TV pundit said; so, seemed appropriate to point out that I’d supplied that information here and before a TV authority got around to it. Just some helpful fodder to reinforce you default position of hating on me.
I have no opinion of you. I don’t think you’ve ever replied to any of my comments in anything but antagonism so my missing your snark may have something to do with that.
Exactly, thanks. I will say, I’m not convinced either of them is the right candidate for the job.
With Hillary I’m scared we’d invade Iran, or that we’d be subject to one Clinton gaffe after another – nothing quite illegal because she’s too smart, but why can’t someone so smart figure out you can’t take the better part of a million dollars from Goldman Sachs right before a presidential election, and you can’t set up an MS Exchange server in your basement for your State Department email? Regardless of legality, this stuff is embarrassing.
But at least Hillary would have one party in Congress solidly behind her. Bernie might face a situation where neither party in Congress supports him, and then what?
So I dither. In 2008 I never doubted that Obama was the guy for the job. I gave everything I could to that campaign, and eight years later I’m still proud of that. I really wish I felt that confidence with either candidate this year.
I doubt this would happen on a national level but I lived in MN under Jesse. A weird dynamic emerged where since the executive wasn’t aligned with either party it became less vital to stop him and you got some actual compromises thanks to a reduction in the binary dynamic. Light rail exists in Minnesota because Jesse made it happen for example.
As for right person, how many times have I had to fight Obama on entitlements, on free trade, privacy on education, keystone etc. where he made noises about republican ideas? Even when he made the right choice it was exhausting. I know that kind of thing will happen much much less with Sanders and save energy for other fights.
You might disagree with all this, and thats fine, you’re right, neither is perfect. This is just an attempt to share why I think Bernie is the better (not perfect) choice regarding your concerns.
Funny, because I never wasted one second worrying about where Obama would end up on entitlements, free trade, or Keystone.
You spent eight years following the bouncing ball in a near-permanent sense of pointless discontent.
Were you worried about gay rights, too?
Look at what this guy did to the right simply by being the adult in the room while they flailed, panicked, looked every gift horse predictably in the mouth!
I told you over and over again that the free trade pact would never pass and that the Obama administration didn’t sincerely think it would pass. I told you that Erskine-Bowles would never pass and that they didn’t sincerely want it to pass. I didn’t even bother to worry about where he’d come down on Keystone. There was zero chance Kerry was approving that shit.
I wasn’t even the least bit exhausted by or worried about any of these things because I think just like Obama. He doesn’t fool me.
You might want to reconsider your last two graphs because as written there’s an obvious historical analogy and it’s terrifying.
??? graphs?
? Re: trade deal passage?
Historical — like a hundred and fifty years ago. “A show” that pleases “the man” and scares a certain demographic that is told, “don’t worry is all just in good fun” and we actors aren’t going to actually hurt you. Nothing will come of our little games.
What he did to the right? Loss of an unprecedented number of state electeds, loss of the house, loss of a super majority in the senate. Until Scalia went Dems had one lever of power, one that Roberts was in the process of pruning back. The right’s ability to hurt people is greater than any time except probably 2002-2006. Making them act insane doesnt count for much if they are still in the drivers seat of a particular institution.
Did Obama offer his proposals because he knew they’d be rejected, or because he hoped they wouldn’t be? Combination of both probably if you take his pre-presidential stances to heart at least at first.
TPP example. On the one hand we have evidence that Obama has lied about free trade skepticism, (campaign 08). We know he has been surrounded by advisors who support free trade (well elites of which obama is one generally do so hard to not have a few around). We know the admin twisted arms specifically for fast track authority. And once again its the GOP who is trying to deny him a win (though be wary of the lame duck session). This gives time to organize against it, and it helps that both Dems publically came out against it.
So against actual evidence we have what? Your 11th dimensional chess assertion. It absolutely could happen as you say but where does the weight of the evidence lay?
And thats leaving aside the possibility people like me who actually do try and correspond with office holders as well as people far far more vital than I who organize are as much a necessity to the Plan. Without that pressure or discontent how much harder would it be to scuttle such things or push for better?
Your problem is you don’t think like Obama. If you did, you wouldn’t be stuck on the two-dimensional chessboard of reality. 🙂
Some good things have happened under Obama, but some bad things have happened too, as you point out. Perhaps Obama slowed the country’s decades-long descent into chaos–I don’t know. The widespread control of state and local governments by Republicans and their driving their domains into the ground significantly offset the few gains we make at the top in the face of the crazy federal-level Republicans.
What was there to worry about on gay rights? He was lying through his teeth about his opposition to gay marriage. We have evidence he previously supported it.
The others, we have evidence of the opposite. He hasn’t approved Keystone — thanks to the activists who got arrested and did all they could to stop it — yet he’s approving offshore drilling like no tomorrow, including in the Arctic (which he campaigned against).
Now you can say extensions of leases were either cancelled or what have you, but that has a lot to do with oil prices in and of themselves.
Just do an honest assessment of the results for the coal industry, the numbers on imported energy, the power plant regulations, the agreement with China and the international climate agreement, and look at the price of gasoline. Look at the numbers for solar and wind energy produced and the momentum for them worldwide. Look at the budding American industry in those fields. And remember that all of the legislative pieces of this had to be done in the first two years.
Then if you want to complain about offshore drilling, go ahead.
Started wondering if there is an 11 dimensional chess side of Obama tacitly supporting HRC claiming the Obama legacy, especially after the Ukraine debacle and the email server problem.
So passing fast track for those toxic trade deals was a set up to sink her? Jeesus.
yeah, no.
Obama told her to flip-flop on TPP after they looked at the polls.
That’s dimensional chess, but you’d have to be a moron to think it requires more than three-dimensions.
I think Obama would be aware that her flopping would not be perceived as genuine by many, given Dem history on free trade agreements in general.
Do you still believe she will never try to pass an “improved” deal? Though, supposedly, these treaties are not subject to amendment among the parties. All or nothing.
mino — you and I are obviously handicapped because we don’t share a mind meld with Obama. Or aren’t narcissistic enough to believe we do. Of course we all laugh when GOP pols tell the world that god told them to run for President.
This invitation to picture a Machiavellian jiu jitsu operating system seems kinda un-serious, to put the BEST spin on it.
Spend years of picked negotiators giving corporations everything they could possibly dream of wrapped in a big bright bow. Get your fast track by noticeably exerting yourself. Just so you can arrange for your TPP, etc to get a big middle finger? Cray-cray time.
the whole foreign policy of the Obama team is oriented around the pivot to Asia. The TPP isn’t really seen so much as a tariff deal by them as a way to consolidate American influence in the Pacific.
If this were just NAFTA to them, they wouldn’t have gone through the exercise.
Unfortunately, the country looks at trade deals and says, “Not again!”
So, yeah, as soon as the GOP is ready to stop pouting, the thing will pass without much modification.
The Clinton Team will probably be more keen to pass it than Obama ever was. He knew it was unlikely to pass through Congress, but it was worth doing anyway for a couple of reasons.
First, walking away from it would have completely upset the apple cart with our allies, with the foreign policy elite, with Wall Street, and been a strategic gift to China, so this wasn’t really an option.
Second, doing the ground work allowed the US to act as the leader of this group that it hopes to be.
This subject is too complex for a comment, but we’re not blowing up the Bretton Woods construct without a revolution (probably with guillotines) and extending to the Pacific is a no-brainer.
Anything less would be a repudiation of the whole postwar system we’ve been evangelizing for seventy years.
Whoa! Even Booman admits Hillary is lying all the way to her back teeth about any objections to these trade deals. That is refreshing.
Hopefully, you’ll get more out of my comment than that.
I’m praying to be saved by our trading partners rejecting it. Cause it WILL be passed over here with bipartisan votes to keep squeezing the poors.
I guess what I would encourage you to do is to make an effort to understand why the Obama administration took the trade deal they inherited from Bush and turned it into what became the TPP, and how that fits into their overall foreign policy shift to Asia.
This won’t likely change how you feel about these kind of trade agreements as far as how you think they’ll impact blue collar workers in this country. But it will give you a fuller perspective to understand why this Kabuki Theater took place and what motivated the directors.
How about DEM Presidents stop completing the agendas of Bush administrations? If we wanted the latter, we’d just vote for whatever candidate the GOP offered.
This is such a superficial understanding of TPP and the Obama administration that it’s embarrassing coming from you.
It doesn’t rise above free trade=bad, which is not what I expect for your usually high standards of analytical thinking.
Well, Nancy just stuck her head in that buzz saw over at WaMo. Read her comments–they are quite knowledgeable and devastating.
You know, you can be opposed to the TPP for a variety of reasons.
But you can’t understand it if you don’t understand that it’s primarily about our allies in the Pacific and only secondarily about commerce.
If you read articles about the strategic reasoning for the pivot to Asia, you’ll begin to see how the TPP is a vehicle for crafting and strengthening alliances so that we maintain our influence there as China grows and throws its weight around.
This isn’t really what Obama inherited. Bush wasn’t pivoting to Asia, to say the least, unless you mean Central Asia and the Hindu Kush, or Iraq.
Unless you can put yourself in the mindset of the principals in this case, you won’t ever understand their motivations.
For the Obama administration, the very process of bringing all these groups together to work on a common enterprise is a demonstration of the kind of alliance they’re hoping to build. It’s like building a foundation for a house you don’t have the votes to complete on your watch. Worth doing, even if it won’t pass.
But, a precondition for this is that you can’t show the slightest doubt about the prospects for success or everyone stops taking it seriously and participating. You certainly can’t give up trying to get it passed, as that would betray that they whole thing was some kind of ruse.
But it’s not a ruse. It’s a strategic vision.
Debating TPP should be about that strategic vision, too, and not just a debate about whether TPP is just another NAFTA agreement that will cost us manufacturing jobs.
It may seem strange to those not born, raised, and living on the West Coast that Asia and Mexico aren’t foreign to us. That militarily we’ve been there for over a hundred years. That trade and immigration has been part of our consciousness like forever. How does one “pivot” to a place where we have long been?
We’re not deluded by all the crackpot realism of this “pivot to Asia.” We might actually know what is really up with this TPP. It’s not as if we haven’t had direct experience with what NAFTA did to both us and Mexico.
You’re really beginning to sound a lot like those of my youth that spouted the “domino theory” to rationalize the horrors of what this country did in SE Asia.
In this case, the horrors corporations have in store for us.
Do you know this guy? Canadian lawyer. Up to the 48th day in criticisms of the imbalances of it.
https:/www.facebook.com/michaelgeist
What a bizarre response.
Almost like I’m conversing with a dining room table or a machine that spits out one of twelve answers when you feed it a coin.
You have a tremendous blind spot on this issue and I’m not sure why because even when I disagree with you in other areas, you always seem to know what you’re talking about.
Not here.
How timely. Krugman has a column today on trade…
“Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman sagely observes, the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins — but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party, and with blocking power against anything but a minor move in that direction by the other.
So the elite case for ever-freer trade is largely a scam, which voters probably sense even if they don’t know exactly what form it’s taking.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/a-protectionist-moment/?_r=0
And, from the same Krugman column:
Do you see how cherry-picking works?
I see how haystacks are built to blurrr the differences. Sanders says no more, not repudiate existing. Unless you have a quote I have missed.
As far as I know, Sanders has not proposed ripping up the existing trade deals. His information page on trade emphasizes (i) his opposition to these deals when they were first negotiated and enacted, and (ii) the principles he will apply to the consideration of future trade deals. Much of his argumentation concerning past deals is put forward to motivate his present opposition to TPP.
http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-trade/
So Krugman’s point about how difficult it would be diplomatically to “rip up” the existing trade deals seems like a red herring.
(Dan Kervick)
Booman, would you consider a diary on the wider context of the TPP? In your spare time? 😉
no, actually I wasn’t thinking about TPP I was thinking about potential indictment of Hillary.
maybe my comment responded in the wrong place [?], I was wondering about down the line if she’s indicted – but I’m probably wrong, it’s Obama’s pragmatism at work here probably
“why can’t someone so smart figure out you can’t take the better part of a million dollars from Goldman Sachs right before a presidential election, and you can’t set up an MS Exchange server in your basement for your State Department email?”
I don’t know — could it be . . . hubris ?
How do you figure that?
At best, the proposition that “Hillary would have one party in Congress solidly behind her”, but Bernie “might” not needs some supporting evidence. Neither part of that seems self-evident.
On Sunday Fox 2 had Clinton up by 37%. On Monday they had her up by 27%. I wonder how they missed by so much.
Probably for the same reason that Gallup blew it in ’48.
Or for that matter, the Literary Digest poll of 1936.
https:/www.math.upenn.edu~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.html
Dead link. “can’t find the server at http://www.math.upenn.edu~deturck“
I had the actual page up and pasted in the URL. Yet when I tried it, it didn’t work either. So just google
“1936 election: Case Study I – Penn Math”
It should come up as the first item.
Thanks! That worked.
The link works, you just have to select the entire https address and paste it in a browser.
WGN reported yesterday that in Illinois (next Tuesday) Clinton 65%, Sanders 25%.
Anecdotal, I took my sister to early voting. she loves Bernie but voted for Hillary “to prevent Trump from winning”. Gaaaahhh! Ever feel like strangling your sister? Well, I knew she wouldn’t listen to her kid brother. My wife, very non-political, tells me she is going to vote for Hillary because she wants a woman President, she’s sick of stupid men. There’s two out of three, 65%. I can only hope that WGN polled only the nursing homes. Come on kids! It’s YOUR jobs being shipped to China! Put away the Xbox and vote for Bernie!
Guess you can stop referring to your sister as a saint — saints know always to vote their heart in primaries because the heart is more likely to be true than the head.
Some of us are sick of stupid men and women that lie while lining their own pockets. Not often that we get to choose between an honest and decent man and a dishonest and corrupt woman. Don’t understand why any voter would choose the latter. As MLK, Jr. said, evaluate people on the content of their character and not the color of their skin (and had he lived longer, would likely have added gender).
The Independents’ vote in Michigan was nearly a clean sweep for Bernie Sanders. In the primary 2/3 were party Democrats, the rest was the Independent vote. Must have skewed the polls, but not in the percentage they were off.
I’m a Hillary supporter who is fine with this. Congrats to Bernie and everyone who worked so hard for this win! Hillary is still ahead by more tonight than she was this morning, but I want Bernie’s message to remain a strong factor in this campaign and for the Dems to keep being pushed left. Also, I think keeping Hillary from becoming complacent is a positive thing. Everything is fine. Sleep well, my friends.
“She’s not getting it done with the very same white working class Democratic voters who formed her base of support eight years ago.”
Couldn’t this be more accurately described as “these voters prefer Sanders?”
Anyways, good on the Sanders campaign. Looks like this one’s going right up to the convention.
What I hear is Trump or Sanders. That doesn’t make sense politically, but it makes sense in terms of voter feelings of rage and betrayal. White working class dislike of Obama is always framed as racism, but a large part is a sense of having been conned by him in 2008. They voted for Change and got More Of The Same.
This is hurting the Democratic Brand. When I advocate for Bernie, I often get back “Democrats are all liars!”
Americans have a pretty good sense of rough justice. Perp walks would have made a big difference, imo. That really shocked us.
Yes, some high visibility high level jail terms ala Bernie Madoff would have helped immensely. I think people would have swallowed the trillion dollar bailouts of the institutions if the individuals had been punished instead of rewarded with multimillion dollar bonuses!
A huge failure of polling, as Nate Silver said last night. Predicting who is going to be a “likely voter” has been the weakness of polling this year. The media blackout has kept Sanders penned in until now. The fear of “socialism” among Southern Democrats also helped keep Sanders from a breakout ground game until now. Sanders’s proportion of the independent vote (70%) and the size of the independent turnout (28%) is one place that the polling models went awry. Sanders’s performance among younger African-Americans (49%) is another. A third might be the rumored backlash among UAW members to Clinton’s lying about Sanders’s record on the bailout of the auto industry. Clinton’s attack on Sanders was much like conventional attacks on Obama and the public option. For those most interested in the legislation (UAW and people who were previously excluded for pre-existing conditions), the attack provokes backlash on the attacker.
You can adjust polls for the first two, but you cannot predict the third. Clinton just might have shot herself in the foot by trying too hard to clear the field.
Sanders is slowly chipping away at the issue of electability of a “democratic socialist” and it is unfolding much like Obama’s chipping away at the issue of the electability of a black candidate as President and then the re-election of a black President.
If a democratic socialist is electable within the Democratic Party for the office of President, that hugely changes the Overton window. And that is why the corporate media are doing everything possible to prevent that event from happening. In some ways it is like the assumed illegitimacy of a conservative candidate for President among lots of Democrats in 1980. Didn’t the New Deal destroy the GOP on the basis of FDR providing real relief for the public?
Now the assumption is that the Cold War destroyed any possibility of a vigorous and popular left-wing politics in the US.
And yet we are facing the simultaneous failure of the ideology of conservatism, the GOP as a party, and the capability of capitalism to deliver globally to most people. And the capability of the US to delivery prosperity of anything other than more widespread war. At some point, reality slaps Americans in the face as it has already slapped down Karl Rove’s synthetic reality. Whose campaign is Rove consulting with? Whose is he advising? Whose is he supporting? Trump has out-Roved his ability to create his own reality. Trump’s infomercial last night was a stunning statement of the irrelevance of the Republican Party in its own primary–marketing all for itself, triumphant and devoid of any politics whatsoever except to put down Mitt Romney.
If there is a choice in November, it will be this. Will electoral politics in the US be a pure marketing exercise devoid of policy choices or will it involve informed choices of governmental direction and policy? And how much will the electorate drive the government as opposed to the government choosing its electorate and dictating their opinions?
Or will the public anger about not mattering be diverted again into a government in which they matter even less?
There are consequences beyond who wins in this election. Those are beginning to get lost in the lefty blogosphere.
Thanks for the intriguing commentary.
I keep reflecting on the fact that in 1932, as Europe was falling into fascism and general turmoil, the American people elected FDR. I needn’t belabor the political direction that he set.
In 2016, we again see turmoil in Europe, a strong resurgence of far-right political parties, and authoritarian governments in places (Hungary for sure, probably Poland, and of course Turkey (on the edge of Europe)).
Let’s hope that as in 1932, the American people choose a different direction from the one taken in Europe.
I’m not sure that the “we” who see turmoil in Europe is as large as the number that were concerned about Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s, even if Japan was not yet on the radar.
That’s a very good characterization.
I had NPR’s “coverage” on the radio last night while doing other stuff. I was first surprised, then astonished, then appalled and disgusted by how long they let him ramble and blather and bloviate and insult and pontificate and self-contradict-within-the-same-sentence and declare clear falsehoods as fact . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .
Most of what he said was transparently idiotic.
To the point that I went to NPR’s website while they were still mid-infomercial looking for a comment section to the “coverage” to complain and to ask “just how long do you intend to let this drivel run on?” I could find no such thing, though.
The absence of editorial/news-value judgment was truly breathtaking.
Talk about “free media”!
(Yes, I’m well aware of the degree to which “liberal” [HAHAHA!] NPR has been compromised — if not outright corrupted — by their corporate sponsorship model.)
I will just throw this out, courtesy of the Washington Post:
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2016/03/nice-work-gop-people-who-took-your-anti.html
I will note that some of the states yet to come, e.g., Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, AZ, others have closed primaries.
So strategically, Bernie needs Kasich to stay in the race, no?
This is such a stupid fucking strategy and I wish Democrats would stop engaging in it.
And what about those that generally vote for Republicans and of those on offer preferred Kasich, but decided HRC is the best one to beat Trump?
Turnout based on the number of votes was nearly equal in the MI DEM and GOP primaries. That is not evidence that HRC DEMs crossed over to vote for Kasich or any other GOP candidate. But blaming voters is what partisan DEMs always do when they lose.
I too have very mixed feelings about this. Most of the time, I think that a win for Bernie is a win for Trump. “I’m going to raise your taxes and change [i.e. take away] your health insurance” is a loser in the general. On the other hand, I admire Bernie’s integrity. And Hillary’s inability to put this away makes me very concerned that she is, well, just not “likable enough” (to quote a phrase). Though ultimately I think that most people vote their (perceived) interests rather than their assessment of personality.
You are hearing the message wrong. It’s “I’m going to raise the millionaire’s taxes and give you health insurance that you are now paying for out of your pocket.”
Bernie never said anything about taking away health insurance. That’s totally wrong. He has consistently championed public health insurance for all.
Incorrect. Sanders’ plan will raise taxes on middle income people. It’s a pittance, and you’ll be getting guaranteed paid family leave in exchange, but it’s true regardless.
Define “Middle Income” and what percentage of the population it applies to. Republicans always claim that Democrats want to raise4 “your” taxes.
Well it’s a payroll tax, so anyone paying payroll defines “middle income”.
I don’t know if the attack will be effective. But it would have the benefit of being true for once, even if it’s cynical.
I am hearing the message the way that most people will hear it. Bernie wants to replace employer-based health insurance, which is the kind of insurance that the majority of people have, with a different program. People are risk adverse. They are going to see that as taking something away.
You may argue that that’s the wrong interpretation, and you may be right, but being right isn’t going to convince people, any more than being right about Obamacare convinced people (and this is a much more radical change).
Most people think their insurance sucks. People with Bronze Obamacare policies think they are a complete rip off. Bernie talks about Medicare for everyone. Medicare is familiar, even though most people incorrectly think it covers everything at 100%.
Actually, 69% of people with private health insurance report that they are satisfied with the health care system:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/186527/americans-government-health-plans-satisfied.aspx
Satisfaction with medicare is even higher. But, this does not mean that someone who currently has employer health insurance is going to be willing to trade it for medicare.
People are risk adverse. In political terms, this generally means that the people who think they are going to lose something have more intensity than the people who think they are maybe going to gain something.
People will hear it the way the news media and negative ads portray it — as long as the marketing model of political conversation persists. There are alternatives but it requires Sanders to do something so dramatically different and yet comforting that is is difficult to admit that it is possible to change the process of political conversation in the US.
That is why I am pessimistic about the US ever dealing with its current serious problems through this election. The process is incapable of delivering good political policy and wise governance.
BOOMAN–I would love to see a post by you exploring the enormous voting disparities between various blocs (by age or race, say) of Democratic voters. What does this portend for the general election? We keep hearing that young voters will be reluctant to vote for CLinton, but what about the groups that have turned out strongly for Clinton? Would they be reluctant to support Sanders? IS there any historical precedent for the present situation? (I’m thinking 1972 with McGovern and Humphrey, although I know that the nature of the Democratic coalition then was a lot different from what it is now.)