When it comes to the electability argument, which do you think is bigger? The subset of the electorate that is normally in the Republican corner but is appalled enough by Trump to crossover and help Hillary Clinton win, or the subset of the electorate that is never going to vote for a guy who displays no religious faith and is clearly to the far left on economic issues?
Personally, I think Trump eliminates the argument that Sanders can’t get elected. I think he’d have a solid chance against Trump. But mostly in a “someone has to win” category, like when the Jacksonville Jaguars play the Tennessee Titans.
Therefore, I just don’t buy the talking point that Sanders has no chance.
On the other hand, I don’t think he’d get the same degree of crossover as Clinton from Republicans.
But, then, Sanders would do better than Clinton with young voters.
I’m asking you the question, but my answer is that both Clinton and Sanders can win, but Sanders is more likely to lose, and also more likely to win narrowly, if he wins.
Sanders will get crossover from Republicans; also, not sure if you’re talking about Sanders there, but he has talked about his faith, very serious for him and as he said, the motivation for his social justice stance. or do you mean Trump? I don’t see crossover from R Trump to Clinton except maybe in the pundit class or wall street.
“displays” is a key word here. I’m not evaluating his spirituality.
guess I don’t know what you’re getting at then. he answers questions about it when asked. of the 4, only Cruz talks about his beliefs
If you think it’s a problem that a lot of people simply don’t believe the president is sincere when he professes his religious beliefs, wait until they get to deal with a secular Jew.
I spent my whole life hanging out with secular Jews, so I personally would be thrilled to have one as my president, but I also know that it’s an enormous barrier to millions of voters of both parties for whom strong religious belief is extremely important, not only as a trust factor but as an example for their kids.
This is strictly an electability argument and shouldn’t be considered different in kind from questions about age, race, gender or regional strength or weakness.
Clinton is a Methodist who belongs to church groups, Cruz wears his religion like chainmail, and Trump is calling himself the defender of persecuted Christians. Sanders is an outlier among this group and among all recent presidential contenders.
By the way, Bill Bradley would have had a similar problem.
I’m speaking on the basis of conversations with people. Hillary’s Methodism is completely discounted by R voters. In fact I’ve never even heard anyone mention it. The president has been tagged as a Muslim; that is a completely different situation from Bernie’s. the people most upset that the president is a Muslim have a favorable view of Judaism. speaking of which I’ll be very interested in the NJ and NY primaries on that issue
Didn’t seem to hurt Romney, who was from a slightly more exotic religion than Judaism and was wooing a party that explicitly held the principle of WASP herrenvolk supremacy sacred.
Last time I checked he was doing better than HRC against Trump as was about the only politician who had a positive approval rating in the country. I think your opinion has to answer with both those polls.
For instance in PPP’s N. Carolina from March 22: “Clinton leads Trump 44/42, and Sanders has a 48/41 advantage over him. While 81-82% of Republicans would support Cruz or Kasich over Clinton, only 73% say they would vote for Trump.”
I think Sanders could pick up GOP crossover to a limited extent too because economically in wanting to hit the pause button on trade and spend more on infrastructure links the speeches at least. So for GOPers who are turned off by Trump but hate Clinton personally, they might prefer going for Sanders if for nothing else than he is unbashed about what he wants and stands up for it and that engenders some respect.
yes, re Sanders voters. Michigan, for example
Isn’t that due to registered Independents as well? Sanders certainly does better in states where Independents can vote in one or the other primary.
IL was an open primary, was Ohio?
Ohio was an open primary.
I don’t trust any head-to-head general election polls involving Sanders. He has yet to face the right wing attack machine in any real sense. Hell, he’s received kid glove treatment from the mainstream media, as no one still expects him to be the nominee. Hillary, meanwhile, has been facing concerted attacks since 1991.
Has anyone really dug through Sanders’ statements from his past 50 years? I bet he has said a ton of things that might be acceptable in leftist circles but would turn off general election swing voters completely. Hell, an ad campaign about his proposed tax increases on the middle class would dampen his numbers by quite a bit.
I still think Bernie could win against Trump, but it wouldn’t be anywhere close to the blowout current polls suggest.
An ad campaign on his tax increases on the middle class would destroy him. Particularly if framed as ‘another attack on the endangered middle class’.
People like to complain about why we get the political positions we get…..but the truth is, it’s where we are right now as a country.
.
Define “middle class”. This is bullshit from the Clinton camp.
Even if that is true, if it’s working on Democrats, we can assume it will work on anti-tax Conservatives.
And a lot of people in the middle.
So the Democrats are now the party of no tax increase? Even though the tax increase means no health insurance premiums and no more “sock every dollar you can get your hands on for your kids’ education”?
not sure if you saw the Vox calculator but it’s not pretty and no eliminating premiums and co-pays don’t make up the difference
It’s going to take a lot to convince regular people to increase taxes that much.
Or Bernie could just finance his programs with deficit spending. Like anyone with half of a brain would.
I’d in fact much prefer that.
Eliminating premiums alone makes up $6,000 a year.
not for everyone, especially not for those who get employer based insurance
Newsflash, it isn’t free any more.
Non-Postal Premium Rates for the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Plan 105 is the most popular plan. I can find a link for that if you insist. Employee pays $516.18 a month. Postal rates are better – union negotiation – $211.10 biweekly which is $457.38 a month.
I haven’t seen free health care since International harvester closed it’s doors.
that’s what I’m saying, it’s just that the increase in taxes for every day people is more than the savings in health care costs
That’s all I’ve been saying nothing more
I’d I’m saying the benefits outweigh the taxes. You originally stated there were $6000 in middle class tax increase. I’ve shown that’s mostly wiped out by health care savings and we haven’t even got to college savings.
I did question the definition of Middle Class. Is it the Romneyesque $150,000 a year?
people with employer based health care generally don’t pay $6000 per year, I’m not sure where you’re even getting that number as a reasonable amount per year that people pay
Can you multiply $500 by twelve? And as for COBRA! My Sister paid $1300 a month as a non-sick single woman ten years ago.
one person’s results isn’t what’s happening for everyone
just because she’s paying $500 per month most people aren’t especially those on employer based insurance which is where the majority of people get their insurance
The majority of people working for wages don’t get FREE health care,
They pay for it through lower take home wages because any money their employer is spending isn’t being taken home by the employee.
employee contribution through payroll deductions also cut into take home pay.
By federalising the costs, and cutting out the insurance/wall street profits, the total costs go down.
so YES Bernies ideas would definitely help them,
ESPECIALLY in red states
where the GOPers message is
to not get sick,
or if ya do
go deep in debt.
Ya know that health care savings account idea where you are supposed to maintain a bank account while working two jobs at minimum wage ……….only for being sick, not for eating, shelter, transportation, child care costs, child education costs, which the GOPers all want to privatise, read make the poor pay more of the costs for.
No, Obama and Bill Clinton both raised taxes on the wealthy (Obama’s increase was mostly used to reduce health insurance premiums, actually), and Hillary Clinton is proposing a fairly substantial increase on unearned income for the wealthy.
Today. While running against Sanders. She has a well known forked tongue.
Hillary hasn’t faced any concerted right wing attacks other than the Benghazi nonsense in a very long time. Seemed to me that they all lightened up after the Lewinski brouhaha because that elicited empathy for her from women.
Has anyone really dug through Sanders’ statements from his past 50 years?
If you have to ask that question, you don’t know how the Clinton machine rolls. That’s where all the mud slung at Obama in ’08 came from. They may have gotten a slow start in that election because before Iowa, Edwards and not Obama was viewed as her main competitor. With boatloads of money this time, any and all stones wrt Sanders have been turned over and any squiggling things underneath have been used. HRC’s team totally expected to have the nomination wrapped up in SC and hadn’t intended any need to continue heavy fundraising operations for the primary past December 2015.
They may have gone through his past statements, but I’ve only seen the 1980s clip where he praises the Castro regime. And I’m a pretty active blog reader.
And your statement about Hillary not facing concerted right wing attacks recently is almost laughable. Have you not heard of the email server scandal? The Clinton foundation’s supposed corruption? She’s getting it on a daily basis on Fox News.
Where do you think Univision got that old interview recording of Sanders? To throw that out there in a debate was really sleazy.
Wait a minute. Are we talking about attacks concocted out of nothing (ie Benghazi) or questionable actions/activities of a candidate. Why would you conflate the two? When either Clinton is exposed to have engaged in hinky activities, it’s correct that it gets exposed. But that always takes time because both of them lie, hide, obfuscate, etc. in an effort to make it go away. Why did HRC need/want a private server for her official communications as SOS? And it wasn’t some mistake — it was designed for a purpose(s). (As I was furious when it was discovered that Rove, etc. used the RNC server for e-mails and he resigned shortly after that was exposed, why the fuck would I give HRC a pass for doing something not only similar but more egregious a few years after Rove was caught.)
I would assume she wanted it becausr gkvernment IT services suck. Also like Obama she was inexplicably wedded to her blackberry which is a sinking ship of a company.
As if HRC would know anything about IT services. Sorry, not buying that excuse.
It was probably more along the lines of “why cant I check my email from my phone?” And then she gets the runaround for 6 months so she orders someone to do it because she is technologically hopeless.
Except it was done right before or as she entered the SOS office; so, she couldn’t have known what would have been available to her or how much it sucked. Seriously, would it have been improved four years later when Kerry replaced her and he doesn’t seem to have any complaints or problems with it. And in that there was no State IG during HRC’s tenure which coincidentally made it less likely that her private IT set-up would have been discovered.
Also used private email to conduct government business (I believe Powell said he had a gmail account) Occum’s razor tells me that IT services at state were hopelessly out of date.
The only difference between her and them she had access to a private server set up by some IT guys employed by the Clinton’s/Clinton foundation where Powell, Rice, etc used email accounts housed on third party servers (yahoo, google, etc).
On one hand it seems like questionable judgement that they all did it. On the other the fact that they all did it makes me question just how hopelessly out of date the email system at State was.
You’re misinformed. First — get the timeline correct. Powell was SOS 2001-2005 which was before Rove was busted. Second, Powell had a State Dept email address that he used, but mostly he used the State Dept secured communications network. His use of a third party, email provider for official use was limited and nobody is going to excuse that.
Rice didn’t use any email service.
What HRC did was most analogous to what Rove did. One difference being that the RNC and not Rove had custody of the server and therefore, he was dependent on RNC staff to delete the WH emails on it (which they did). Rove didn’t use the excuse that the WH equipment was inadequate to his needs; he (along with those that followed his direction) were avoiding federal records retention laws and subsequent FOIA requests. In their case, at least some of that would have revealed how much time they spent on campaign activities as compared with their official WH duties.
To dismiss HRC’s private server/email system as bad judgment suggests no intent which seems implausible to me. However, is “bad judgment” a quality we want in a POTUS?
I wonder whether the Bradley/Chelsea Manning incident sort of gave pause (or reason) to keeping information off the government servers. I’m not sure of the timeline, but it seems pretty clear that the systems were not particularly invulnerable in any event. Marie3, this is not an excuse. I’m not sure anything could convince you. But, if you would, please address this issue when you can without bias.
Sure I’ll address that w/o bias but ask that you read it w/o bias.
In real time, I welcomed the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Evidence that people in our government were fully informed that what they said in public about the Vietnam War were lies. Really smart outsiders had by then pieced most of it together, but absent those documents there was no proof that they had lied and they could simply hide behind a claim that they made an error, misjudged the situation, etc. Young men in my generation died for a lie as did large numbers of people in SE Asia.
(A side note: “However, Kissinger convinced the president that not opposing the publication set a negative precedent for future secrets.”)
Lies that when people got close to the truth and protested the war, they had their heads bashed in and the fuckwad liars won in the court of public opinion. And the lying didn’t stop where the Pentagon Papers ended in 1967, but continued on into 1968 and after in the Nixon administration and to the killing of anti-war protestors and bystanders in 1970 at Kent State and Jackson Stage. (Note: the PPs weren’t published until 1971 and maybe they were instrumental in getting us out of there.) I don’t take kindly to liars and killers.
So, I’m not really into all this secret FP stuff that the USG engages in. And those years taught me to become as well informed as possible about MIC actions (proposed, after the fact, or ongoing) and piece together from that with confidence that I and others were getting the big picture accurate enough because that’s what the rare gift of the Pentagon Papers taught us. Has come in real handy in the years since then. First time was two years later with the overthrow of Allende in Chile — that one had USG fingerprints all over it, but confirmation took three decades and we still don’t have any of the documentary evidence. That’s not acceptable and makes a mockery of a democratic government.
Thus, in general I applaud those that capture and release secret USG stuff (mostly merely embarrassing for the officials being exposed) for public consumption. (Read that sentence carefully because it’s precise.) Whistleblowers are rare because the cost to themselves is high and the cost to those that are exposed ranges from zero to close to zero. They are also more important today than they were when I was young because the fourth estate has lapsed back into being a voice for the elites in business, government, and religion.
Did HRC claim that she needed that home server because the USG systems were too vulnerable to someone like Manning? That would be no. Also ludicrous because her set-up predated Manning’s access to and release of USG communications. As a government official and if she had any such thoughts, it was her duty to make the case to her boss and get USG IT personnel to fix it.
I’m a huge stickler for the standard that an employee’s work product remains in the custody of the employer and no editing/excising after the fact when things didn’t turn out the way one expected (often hoped for long-shots). It’s also safeguard for employees from any accusation of industrial or government espionage. Computers have made it easier than ever for employees to do some work at home or off-site, but that should never be done without the knowledge and approval of a higher up and should be defined and limited.
Was the existence of HRC’s server known outside her tight circle? No.* Did she turn over her files to the State Dept when she left? No again. A hacker discovered her private email address in March 2013. In the summer of 2014 State Dept lawyers discovered that she had used that address for State Dept communications. And only in December 2014 did she turn over files from her server. It’s known that close to 40% of what had once been there had been erased.
What she did would be grounds for immediate termination in both the private and public sectors. Independent of the content. I must stress again that she did this AFTER Rove had been busted for similar behavior; so, the three predecessor defense is inoperative in her case and nothing but a pro-HRC talking point.
*One final note. The State Dept IG position was vacant throughout HRC’s tenure there. Someone in that seat would have been in the best position to discover and server, but it can’t be known if such a person would have done so. However, as questions were raised during that time period, odds are fairly good that it wouldn’t have remained so well hidden and for so long:
I always read without bias here and then decide whether to agree or disagree. Anyhow, I appreciate your thoughtful and historical reply. So basically, though, your complaint is that she had a private server, but not anything about the “secrets” (if any) on that server. You’re concerned about process and not content. Is that correct?
Is the Federal Records Retention Act merely process in your mind? Sorry, that wouldn’t require legislation. The process is the implementation of that regulation. If departments of the USG thought it was fine for all employees to decide on their own how to protect and preserve their work products and turn in whatever they choose to have archived SOP wouldn’t have been needed.
Just because I’m an advocate for transparent and open government and therefore, I’m not jumping up and down about any top secret USG communications that may have been on HRC’s unsecured server, that doesn’t mean that the content on her communications is irrelevant. It absolutely was and all of it was supposed to be stored and available upon request. The public should never have to trust that an individual USG official won’t destroy/delete documents after the fact. As in Rove’s case we will never know what was in the deleted files and that’s not acceptable.
Well, thanks again. I don’t know the timing of the applicable law regarding emails, etc. I’d have to guess that this is violated many, many times by elected officials, the military (Patreus) and others. It isn’t good, I agree. But not unusual. Would you agree with that? Nonetheless, I’m really not quite as upset about this as you, obviously. I wish it weren’t there, but it surely isn’t a deal-breaker for me. Not at this stage, anyhow. Just so you know, I’ll vote Dem whichever one is chosen. And I will support enthusiastically. I wish everyone here could say the same, but “if wishes were horses…”
So, you’re going with lots of people must have done that so it’s okay? The problem with that is that there’s no evidence that anyone other than Rove and Clinton routed their work emails through a private server and in Rove’s case it wasn’t a server in his custody. Petraeus used a USG email address which is why they were easy to find when the FBI investigated the matter of a person receiving threatening emails that linked to Petraeus. (His case is not germane to the HRC email issue. Plus he was booted out of government, took a plea deal, and isn’t a candidate for POTUS; so, why would you even cite this in defense of HRC?)
Good grief — no wonder people continue to vote for politicians that are given a pass on their official failings.
People have failings, official and otherwise, all the time and are usually forgiven them. But, thanks for the discourse. I learned something.
forgiven, in religious contexts, depending on the mistake, yes. elected president – it’s not about forgiveness of sins, it’s about fitness for office
#4 is hogwash. #3 is not in compliance for those that have security clearance — they are trained to be able to identify classified communications and safeguard it. #2 is so what? (Like someone that had a few drinks and drove home without getting stopped by a cop or getting in an accident.) #1 would only have relevance if Rove or some other administration official not been busted for this prior to her setting up her own system.
Personally, I think “the whole classified information was sent/received on an unsecured system” is mostly inflated GOP attacks even though technically/legally it shouldn’t have been done. You will note that I didn’t touch on that aspect at all in my original comment. If I actually ever used “anti-Hillary talking points” I surely would have, wouldn’t I? (Perhaps you can direct me to where I can pick up such talking points that I might consider using in the future. Probably wouldn’t because then I would be bound to cite the source which is what I do when I’m not using my own noggin and words.)
He praised certain elements of Castro’s regime, like health care, education.
As any self-respecting socialist would.
He’s raising taxes on income over $250,000 p.a.
Cue violins.
I have no idea how anyone could think Sanders is more electable than Hillary. The polls now are meaningless, since Bernie is an unknown quantity to most people who don’t avidly follow politics. The negative ads on a self-described socialist could be absolutely accurate and still brutal. I’m sure they’d point out that he’s not even a Democrat.
Of course he could beat Trump, but he’d be substantially weaker than Hillary.
This a thousand times. It’s simply not fair to compare an unvetted Sanders to a fully vetted (over the past 25 years) Clinton.
The right has a limited ability to define Hilary at this point. Virtually everyone knows who she is. The same cannot be said of Bernie. His numbers will surely come down if he were to be the nominee.
She’s only partially vetted. And there’s a lot of stuff out there that isn’t widely known, but would become well known in a general election campaign.
The Republicans I know absolutely go apoplectic at the mention of the name Clinton, be it Hillary or Bill. I think they won’t vote for President if Hillary is their best choice.
Her unfavorables are vey high and not likely to change.
She may be only “partly vetted,” but she’s the most-vetted person of my lifetime.
“The Republicans I know absolutely go apoplectic at the mention of the name Clinton, be it Hillary or Bill.” Or Obama.
What do you mean by “vetted?” Every candidate that survives the first few primaries gets scrutinized for anything and everything. Identifiable quid pro quo, substance abuse, “love child,” dead boy or girl, etc. What can be a killer in one election can be no big deal in another. (Gary Hart ’88 vs. Clinton ’92.)
After ’92, a lot more “vetting” has been taking place. There was no there there with Gore, Kerry, and Obama, but that didn’t stop their opponents from making such claims.
We’re supposed to believe that all the people who have researched and campaigned against the Clintons, from both parties, have somehow either missed or withheld information that could be used against Hillary?
Uh, yes? Sanders has specifically held off on attacking her e-mail server issue and treats her Kissinger tongue-bathing and Wall Street transcripts with kids’ gloves. And there’s absolutely nothing going on about the Clinton Foundation.
The Republican Party hasn’t really been able to take advantage of Clinton’s dirt, a lot because it revolves around issues that are new to this cycle. We haven’t actually had a major GOP contender say that the Iraq War and TPP was a fuck-up until Trump came along. Trump (or Cruz) may have too many disadvantages himself to take advantage of it. To speak nothing of the GOP, using a complicit MSM of course, engaging in breathtaking hypocrisy and directly criticizing her Wall Street ties.
Don’t kid yourself into thinking that because no one has dropped any major bombshells on her yet doesn’t mean that they won’t ever. Sanders has little incentive to really unleash the hounds against Clinton and the GOP hasn’t ran a George Wallace-style candidate who can at least keep on the veneer of populism (however false) since Buchanan.
I find the foundation to be the most troubling issue of all, and there are many to choose from.
Benghazi: only dead-ender GOP operatives care about this. The movie about it bombed, as did the House hearings last year.
Email server: Snoozefest of a scandal, will be old news after the Feds clear her in May.
Clinton Foundation: it’s been 15 years and no one has found anything. Whitewater 2.0.
The GOP will do their best to sling mud to distract the media from Trump’s awfulness, but the attacks will have as much traction as Palin’s complaints in 08 that Obama was too much of a celebrity.
Sanders has little incentive? He’s losing. Does he not want to win badly enough to “unleash the hounds”? If there was something really bad, sharing it be the ethical and honest thing to do. Why would Bernie not do that? Maybe because there’s nothing there?
There are several ways to put out the talking point of ‘this person would be a bad X because of W, Y, and Z’. Bernie promulgates the talking point that Hillary Clinton is too ideologically cozy with mass murderers like Kissinger fairly gently — I’m sure that a survivor of the Honduras coup would be much nastier than he is. Myself, I’d say that Hillary Clinton furiously masturbates like a brain-damaged bonobo atop of a pile of tear-soaked blood money every time she thinks about getting a Wall Street or MiC-donation/”speaking fees” courtesy of her Libya or Honduras bullshit. But I’m not running for President.
Because there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party simply not willing to confront the facts of neoliberalism, clientelism, warhawkery, and climate change. They flip their shit if you press them too hard, no matter how true the criticism is. See the hysteria over West calling Obama’s drone warfare program “international George Zimmerman” or something like that. Even if pushing leftist buttons to juice turnout would make it easier for him to win the nomination, he feels (incorrectly in my opinion, but c’est la vie) that it’d lead to a Pyrrhic victory.
Bernie has made it pretty clear that he’d rather lose the nomination and have a Democrat win the Presidency than him win the nomination and lose the Presidency. That should’ve been obvious when he declined to go after her e-mails.
By the way, before you or anyone dismisses my comment for tone, keep in mind that I’m talking about a woman who no-shit guffawed and cracked a George W. Bush-esque about arranging the death of a dictator.
So. Who are you to tell me that my tone is too gross for HRC?
he’s campaigning on the issues not on attacks against his opponent. if you’re worried that issues won’t get aired, rest assured, Fox, et al. are on the case
Yeah, except for all the polls the last six months, nothing says Sanders is more electable than Clinton.
Gee, wonder what Dems might throw up there against Trump, too?
Those are democrats voting.
I don’t know why this basic logic escapes so many people.
Sanders is getting walloped in the primaries by self-described Democratic partisans. Like 20% or higher-whopped if you believe the exit polls.
If Sanders was being propped up by strongly committed Democrats, you’d have a decent point about the polls showing a composition/division error, but that applies much more to HRC right now.
“Bernie is an unknown quantity to most people who don’t avidly follow politics.”
Maybe two months ago. Try another one.
Bernie Sanders has been close and sometimes a bit higher in national polls than Clinton since about mid-February.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-24/democrats-evenly-split-over-clinton-sanders-in
-bloomberg-poll-im63yb0w
I think Hillary much more likely to get crossovers of neocons and wealthy, older elites trying to kill Trumpism dead.
Bernie, not so much. But he might well profit if Trump is denied the nomination, as trade and economics are issues they both campaign on.
Weirdly, I’ve heard personal anecdotes of Republicans saying they’d prefer Sanders to Trump. I think it’s the character thing.
Wonder if he is inoculated a bit by being a long-time independent???
He’s not a grifter and he’s clearly saying what he thinks. And for people who really do care about family values, he has a strong family.
Sanders does really well with independents. As far as Republicans, from my circle I’d say he’d do okay with Republican blue collars who haven’t invested in hate. Clinton would do well with Kasich voters who don’t hate women.
I don’t think Trump gets too much from the Democrats except maybe some Reagan Democrats. Unless there’s a big scandal.
yes, I’ve heard it too. see my comment below
it’s character and it’s that they both appeal to the same group of voters – Trump by offering fear and hatred, Sanders by verbalizing the problems and offering a way forward.
Sanders has been seriously courting Trump voters.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/12/27/bernie-sanders-wants-trump-voters/
I don’t think it’s a far-fetched idea for a good many of them, because I see some people now saying Bernie is their first choice but if the nominee is Hillary they’ll vote for Trump.
I’m not making this up.
It’s very misguided, but I understand it. They’re so sick of the status quo, in some cases probably desperate.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/13/bernie-sanders-supporters-consider-donald-trump-no-hi
llary-clinton
I’m also hearing that.
The Democratic partisans are part of the problem just like the Republican partisans. They put party above country. I feel that borders on treason. There are not enough “strongly committed” Democrats anymore to put a candidate in office.(Because the party has turned their back on the people for corporations)They need Independent, Libertarian & Republican voters to seal the deal.Bernie is the candidate that can draw votes from all of those groups. The “Establishment” refuses to see it at their own peril. But I’m really beginning to believe that the “Establishment” would sincerely prefer to LOSE with Hillary than to WIN with Bernie. That would cut off their access to the gravy train & we can’t have that can we?
It’s a good question, and an important one. Personally, I agree with everything you said in the post.
There is also the issue that Bernie has never been subject to GOP Attack Machine ads, whereas HIllary has been savaged by the right wing for over 2 decades. This is another reason why her cushion for victory should be larger. (Which not only further reduces the risk of President Trump, but will also have downstream ballot implications.)
The Republicans never ran against him in New Hampshire?
The GOP never ran against Bernie in New Hampshire. They did in Vermont, which he represents. Bernie was the Mayor of Burlington, one of the biggest cities in the State. Then he held a House seat for over a decade before a Senate slot opened up.
His path to beloved status with the State’s voters, fairly untested by the State’s tiny media market and increasingly weak Republican party, doesn’t give us many experiences which are useful to project onto the ultra-partisan, media-saturated Presidential campaign to come.
Whoops.
I remember a couple of years ago when you predicted big margins for Hillary because her polling was so strong coming off her SOS gig. Now you’re predicting the possibility of big margins for Hillary because Trump is so bad.
Personally I can’t see it, not for someone with such high negatives, who has been viscerally disliked by so many Republicans for so long. I do think she could win the self-interested financial elite arm of the Republican Party, but that won’t help her in Indiana and she’ll win New York regardless.
This general election campaign is going to be slow, grinding and unbelievably ugly. I think Hillary can win a clear victory in the end, but I just can’t see her taking historic margins.
Of course, you’re better than I am at this, so I hope you’re right. 🙂
A good point. Where are those cross-over voters concentrated–bi-coastal blue states. Won’t help her in the least in the rust belt.
rust belt is what I’m writing about;
I think you may be overlooking the magnitude of Clinton’s personal unfavorability ratings. She has a hard base of voters who have stated in any number of ways that they will “never ever” vote for her under any circumstances, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the hard core of GOP voters who approved of Dick Cheney no matter what he did. Sanders doesn’t have that; he has the “socialist” tag to contend with, but otoh Mitt Romney had the “Mormon” tag in 2012, and it did absolutely no harm to him in the reddest of evangelical states like Oklahoma, where, when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, a Mormon was in some ways worse than an atheist because of the “heretical” twist on the life and teachings of Jesus presented in that faith.
A lot of people simply do not like Hillary Clinton, and there’s probably a fairly solid number of them who will either vote against her for the GOP outright, or more likely turn to a 3rd party candidate or abstain altogether. The independent vote is a tossup, but imo Sanders’s anti-establishment message likely will carry more influence than Clinton’s offering as the safer and saner choice. GE voters are horribly susceptible to visceral appeals, and she’s not good at making a positive case for herself along those lines, and in fact is arguably unusually vulnerable to attacks.
If Bush got close enough to steal the 2000 election from Gore on the basis of which candidate seemed like more fun to have a beer (or 13) with, how much more does that perception hurt Hillary Clinton?
If it’s Clinton v. Trump, we have a campaign between a known quantity (Clinton) versus an unknown quantity (Trump). Yes, Clinton has high negatives, but Trump’s are much higher.
With Sanders v. Trump, both candidates are unknown quantities. I think that creates a lot of problems for us with independent voters, as they ultimately have no “safe, experienced” candidate to defer to when trying to make up their mind in November.
Like it or not, Sanders would be painted as a very old Ben & Jerry’s socialist extremist who wants to jack up your taxes and doesn’t have the toughness to take on terrorists. Would these attacks work? Don’t know, but it’s not as cut and dry and Bernie supporters believe.
Much higher? Recent polls I’ve seen have shown her only ahead of Trump by the mid-single digits. And that Huffington Post poll aggregate of her favorability rating doesn’t look like that trend of increasing unfavorability will end anytime soon.
The basic question I have for people saying that Hillary Clinton is a known quality is: why do her unfavorability numbers keep going up? And not only that, why does the slope look linear rather than logarithmic?
Bernie Sanders has been in public office continually since 1981. He was the mayor of Burlington from 1981 to 1989 for four terms. He served in the House of Representatives from 1990 to 2006. Since then he has been senator from VT. He is the most popular senator in America, that is, more popular in his state than any other senator is in their state.
Donald Trump has never held any public office.
I think Sanders gets more of the moderate, white, patriarchal male GOP vote due to a) gender bias, and b) insane clinton hatred.
I don’t agree.
Sanders’ appeal is ‘Bottom rail on top’.
If you’re white, moderate, male or patriarchal, you’re already the top rail.
The political nation, short of a revolution — a real revolution, like in Godfather II — ain’t goin’ there.
I meant that demographic in terms of why Sanders might get more of the GOP vote than Clinton.
Bullshit, quite frankly.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-millennial-women-20160203-story.html
I meant that he gets that portion of the GOP vote. It was in response to the question about why Sanders might gain more crossover votes than clinton.
Interestingly, I’ve met several people who say their order of preference is 1) Sanders, 2) Trump, and 3) Nobody. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about, but some of them will vote.
Clinton will lose a substantial number of young (and not so young) voters who really, really don’t like her. It’s kind of amazing not how many people don’t like her, but how strongly the people who don’t like her don’t like her.
Bottom line, Sanders taps into the mood of the electorate right now. Hillary has to persuade people that she actually believes anything that’s not just about her winning. It’s a rough sea.
“Bottom line, Sanders taps into the mood of the electorate right now.”
As we can see on the GOP side, a candidate who taps into the “mood of the electorate” is not necessarily the most electable candidate.
Trump represents a shake-up on the level of Bernie’s promises.
With Hillary almost everyone feels in their gut that significant change will not come.
Authenticity is what voters crave. Hillary is a public daily example of a moral wind vane.
With Donald what you see is what you get. (Shudder)
I think the Repub crossover to Democratic nominee because of Trump would be nil. The GOP would vote for anyone including Trump to keep Hillary out of the White House. To believe otherwise is discounting a decade of attacks and gazzilion dollars made with those attacks. Same for evangelicals. They were told that the Clintons were the worst people in the world for years. I personally was told in a church that if Bill sent that nice Cuban child back to his father in Cuba, it would be the beginning of a dictatorship in the US. After Vince Faoster and sexual aids being used as Christmas tree ornamants nonsense; there is no way any of those people are going to vote for Hillary.
So forget any GOP cross over scenerios. The base and main stream Republican will not vote for Hillary. The Donor class may do so, as she is one of their own, but their numbers are so small that it won’t matter.
In reverse, the hardcore Democratic base will not vote for Trump in any numbers. Won’t happen. Represents the worst we have heard from Fox News/Hate radio for 20+ yrs.
The only real people in play are the disaffected drawn by Trump and Sanders. The sometime voter, new voter, or “independents” who switch party to party or vote personality. And what draws them is a dissatisfaction with the current economic structures in the US. That is what is bringing out the crowds. Older, less educated whites for Trump as he is playing the demagogue to their feeling of exposure to the winds of economic change. With Sanders, the younger as they see the storms ahead and want structures in place so they can survive and thrive. He is addressing those fears with a sincerity that Trump or Hillary can’t match. That and the past / future MidEast War thing.
(Certainly appealed to my young, college attending daughter. She and her friends voted in the Dem Primary for the first time for Sanders.)
All the other things in the campaigns are icing on the cake. Its the economic message that is bringing their support.
If Trump is not the nominee, then Cruz/Ryan/whomever will keep the base but lose the others as they won’t repeat his message. If Hillary is the nominee, she will keep the base but will have a very hard time attracting Sanders’ others. To say they will fall in line is incorrect and she would have no chance with the Republican/Trump voters. Only if she concedes her economic team to Sanders can Hillary hope to attract the Sanders economic voters. I wonder if she has the courage to do that?
The real question is which campaign will those economic voters go to if their #1 choice isn’t on the ticket? My guess. More of a chance of Sander’s voters going to Trump than Trump supporters going to Hillary. That could be enough to swing the election.
R
agree, except I think a % of the hardcore R base and a % of evangelicals would go to Sanders. they’ll never crossover to Hillary for the reasons you give. evangelicals are having problems with Trump
Haven’t heard that. The areas I’m in range from established main line Protestant churches in small Southern City , to hard scrabble doublewide churches in Appalachia. No evangelicals in those areas have mentioned Sanders, just anti-Clinton. Trump is a constant subject because of the things he said “last night”. The response is usually, “Yeah he’s nuts but on somethings he’s right.”
Example-
Have a 9yr old GE front loading washer. Top of the line when made. Went down. Got a guy to look at it. Parts bad and would have to be ordered. Looked at the mod/ser# sticker and got the info. Along the bottom. “Made in P R China” People’s Republic of China. Its a Commie washer. The repair man looked and me and said, “Maybe Trump has a point”.
I keep saying this as I’m not hanging out in office parks, Trump is a real danger and many people, who see their lives effected by trade deals and easy corporate money will vote for him.
R
They’re all gonna be commie parts now;
So roughly, 2014 turnout if the insurrectionists are not present. A pure base election.
If Sanders and Trump are not on the ticket, then yeah. Except won’t have Obama on the Dem. side and you have to wonder how motivated will Hillary get the party? She doesn’t have the supporter’s enthusiasm that was present in 2008.
R
Well, her voters aren’t showing up in the primaries, at any rate, in numbers better than 2012.
I’m going to repost something I put up in a thread on March 24th because I think it bears consideration here.
Post link: http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2016/3/23/113712/199/110#110
Text thereof:
As I commented to priscianus jr earlier today:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/3/26/195620/718#169
Do I know if this poll is valid? Nope. If valid, is it a blip or a trend? Damned if I know. Can I prognosticate accurately how this would affect the general, if valid? Nope; I ain’t Booman. Should it be dismissed out of hand? Unwise, I think.
Sanders’ ratings are slipping because after nearly a year of studiously ignoring him, the MSM media is finally starting to talk about him. And of course, what they have to say is negative, and to the typical American voter, it’s very negative.
We are doomed to feudalism….
well educated
wealthy
those with high-status occupations
white
elderly
strong party identifiers
those with a high sense of political efficacy and high interest in campaigns
those who read about campaigns in newspapers
those who live outside of the South and Border states
They are?
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/bernie-sanders-favorable-rating
From what I’ve seen, it looks like a (positive) favorability gap of about 5% opened up in September and it has hovered around 8% since the start of this year. As people form an opinion on him, he gains as many haters as supporters, keeping the width of the gap constant.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has her favorability rating going linearly more and more negative. It was leveling off after a quadratic jump after she declared in April, but it spiked again to a linear slope after 2016 started.
Boo, your phrasing is so strange. I don’t actually understand what you’re setting up.
Sanders can pick up R voters who are looking for something other than more anger and hate; enough people are hurting that they are looking for something more. Sanders articulates the problems of a large % of the R voters; in his favor he is previously unknown, not associated with the previously villainized dems. [in fact he’s not even a dem, if one wants to use that in the General]
faith is an issue for some rw Rs, but Bernie’s faith is acceptable. He’s talked about it and clearly walks the walk. Trump is not, as one can hear on talk radio. whatever he professes his life is not that of a religious person (often discussed). I’ve only heard them pose it as Trump vs. Hillary, and they won’t vote for Hillary, but Sanders, being unknown is an option.
One of the things I hadn’t thought through fully until now is the difficulty Sanders would have in the general election with his health care proposal.
In the public response to the negotiation and passage of the Affordable Care Act, we have witnessed the most vicious demagoguing of a legislative effort since the Civil Rights Act. Majorities of Americans still disapprove of the Act, despite the fact that those same people who tell pollsters they disapprove of the ACA often give strong approvals of all the major elements of the ACA, except for the individual mandate.
For the Democratic primary electorates, Sanders’ single payer proposal goes down as easily as Trump’s genocidal racism and bullying sexism does with the Republican primary electorates. I could see single payer being demagogued successfully and easily in the general; in fact, I think it’s likely.
Many here would say, “Oh, no, people will be happier to pay higher taxes so they can escape dealing with private health care insurance companies! They’ll save money; we can help Bernie explain that!”
Think about what happened, and has continued to happen, in the ACA’s debate and implementation. You tell me if you think the Presidential campaign will support a rational, fact-based discussion of a much more profound government invasion into regulation of the health care system. I don’t.
I had thought of this as a governance problem, but I hadn’t thought of it as an electoral problem very deeply until now. I’m still going to vote for Sanders, but I think health care might even outrank foreign policy as a campaign issue where Sanders would lose support relative to the Republican nominee. On both issues, you could argue rationally that Sanders’ ideas are much better than the status quo, and I would heartily agree, but the ACA experience shows us that rational arguments are often not what is most persuasive to voters.
yes. I would like this to bring about another discussion of health care, starting with what actually is in the ACA, what the Rs propose and Sanders’ proposal, HRC and what needs fixing and strategies to move forward. too many stuck on ACA is terrible, but can’t explain what they think is wrong with it
Colorado has a single payer ballot initiative up to bat this fall. I seriously doubt it will win, but I am supporting it. It’s called Colorado Care. http://coloradocareyes.co/
A lot of the anger towards the ACA is related to the mandatory requirement. Furthermore, for many people it simply isn’t affordable. In addition, in many states there is no subsidy.
every state has subsidies, the only thing that got state by state is the Medicaid expansion – which if someone would have qualified for Medicaid under the ACA they won’t get subsidies because there was never any mechanism in the law for that situation (mainly no one conceived that the states would turn away additional money from the federal government)
Yes, which means that the poorest people STILL have no health insurance, but they do have a tax for having no health insurance, basically a tax on living in the South.
they’re exempt from the mandate and the pay for in the bill didn’t come from poor people’s taxes
How many know this?
I would think anyone who has to file taxes
Actually… The residents of every state pay taxes to fund Obamacare, whether they like it or not. Residents of the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are paying about $50 billion in Obamacare taxes each year, and about $20 billion of that is for Medicaid expansion. Instead of flowing back into their states, this money is going straight to Washington DC, never to be seen again.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/red-states-spent-2-billion-2015-screw-poor
in the sense that all tax money is fungible sure, I was addressing the tax penalty and the new taxes set up for the subsidies
Can you cite a source for this: ” . . . they’re exempt from the mandate . . . “?
I think that the statement upthread that the poorest get hit by the double whammy of no insurance + tax penalty is also wrong.
“The poorest” qualify for Medicaid (the version existing prior to ACA). I do think the qualifying rules/factors vary among states, but as far as I know, all states did have Medicaid before ACA.
It’s the people in the doughnut hole — too “rich” (hahaha!) to qualify for original Medicaid but under the qualifying income for ACA subsidies — who are screwed by that double whammy in the states where wingnut state governments refused the Medicaid expansion. (As I think someone already noted, because this was unanticipated, the law made no provision for the consequences of wingnut lunacy for those folks.)
the only states that fit into the hole are those that refuse to use the Medicaid expansion.
Someone from the administration, probably HHS said that they wouldn’t be subject to the mandate
here’s an actual source
http://obamacarefacts.com/obamacare-mandate-exemption-penalty/
re:
2. your recollection is not exactly what I meant by “cite source”: re:
Our subsidy was ten fucking dollars. There are a lot of people stuck in between.
Yes, this is something that I have been worried about for awhile. I think that Sanders’ health care proposal will be successfully framed by a republican candidate in terms of what it takes away (the current employer-based insurance that most people have). If ACA was unpopular, this is going to be way more unpopular.
Sad, but true.
I agree Sanders is more likely to lose– unfortunately. But….. That also depends on the extent to which the party gets behind him.
This.
It would be to the benefit of the Democratic Party candidates to get behind him if he wins. If the apparatchiks want to nip the “socialist cancer” in the bud they might sacrifice 2016.
The socialist cancer isn’t going to go away as long as the re-proletarianization of the American worker (especially the youth) continues apace. Bernie Sanders is socialism with a mug of hot chocolate and crooning on the fireside chats. If he goes down and things don’t significantly improve (which they won’t if HRC is President), then they’ll be getting a much more angry and radical leftist next go-round. It happened with Trump and it will happen again.
People got salty at me the other day for saying that beloved liberal icons like Krugman and Klein and Stewart would in about 8-12 years be viewed as the liberal equivalent of cuckservatives: weaklings, shills, and traitors. Well, people, that’s what happens when you create two Lost Generations in a row and have plans to extend this impoverishment to Generation Z as well. The affulent centrist wing needs to grow some thick skin, because the generation of workers who will be my junior are going to be even more pissy and radical if things don’t change.
I totally agree. In the long run, this is the most important issue of all. Ignore it at your peril, Democratic establishment.
From Generation Jones forward. We the people have finally had enough. The Democratic elites better get out of their bubble & look around. The pitchforks are visible.
While I greatly prefer Sanders, I don’t trust any of the polls this early and before the GOP has attacked Sanders. I’m also petrified about any chance of the GOP winning, so I have to agree with Booman on all points.
I don’t think it’s at all clear at this point how Sanders might actually do if he were the nominee, in large part because he’s not well known to many. On the one hand, there’s the barrage of negative ads by the Koch/Rove wing and Trump himself that would attempt to define him as way outside the bounds of the mainstream, a McGovern on steroids; on the other hand, Sanders the actual man, talking about his faith, about the unfairness of a rigged system, and most importantly through the genuine passion and utter sincerity he projects, could be the antidote to the negative onslaught that renders it wholly ineffective.
Bottom line for Republicans: I think the bluster about not supporting Trump if he’s the nominee will disappear. In the end, virtually all establishment figures will be on board after the convention, regardless of what they’ve previously said to the contrary, and most regular voters will follow along, especially if Hillary’s the opponent. I don’t see a big split among party regulars happening, with a third party and so on–to do so would mean that they actually stand for something other than power, but they don’t.
Bottom line for Democrats: if Sanders builds enough momentum to somehow cause Clinton to crash and burn (and as I’ve said here before, she’s certainly helping him towards that goal), then, as it was with Obama in 2008, the achievement of beating the ordained one would itself confer on him everything he needs to move on and win the election. But he would be smart right about now to formulate some deeper and better thought out foreign policy positions and carefully lay out with precision how he would propose to rein in Wall Street, make college affordable, articulate precisely why it’s good economics if the minimum wage is actually a living wage, etc. This would signal, now, that he believes he can do it. Although its impact was lost due to bad timing, one thing Clinton did right was to release detailed position papers when she first announced her candidacy.
Are several liberal economists who are looking for those, I can tell you.
yes, and fp, should do asap
Your last point gets precisely to what I’ve heard from some people who like Sanders’ positions but find him far too vague on how he’d actually accomplish any of his domestic program. They think it’s all very lovely but there’s no chance in hell any of it would get through Congress. Whether or not that’s a fair perception, it exists and needs to be dealt with.
What does the average/ordinary person that didn’t personally benefit from the ACA loathe about it? The sheer complexity of it. 1,800 plus pages. They don’t give a crap about “position papers,” which they also rightly know don’t mean much of anything.
Non-School of Chicago economists think there is value in doing something DIFFERENT after a decade of lost growth.
Marie, mino, you’re missing the point: the concerns I’m hearing don’t address the philosophy, the “position paper”; they concern the pragmatic means of getting anything past a Congress where the House continues to be held by the obstructionist Republicans. Fair or not, that perception is out there and needs to be addressed.
Monetary policy is not set in the Congress. There are Fed actions and regulatory changes that can significantly change behavior, too.
Things like free college for all, however, do have to get through Congress. So would moving to single payer. And so on. The people I’m talking with have watched how Obama has been stymied by the Republicans over and over again and are applying those observations to their expectations for any future Democratic president.
Frankly, banks have been allowed to set the table for themselves. Even to the point of getting the Fed to hike interest rates in the face of under-target inflation. Does anyone expect a neoliberal administration to allow upward wage pressure to build without using the Fed to crush it?
Frankly, any non-neoliberal economic administration with its appointments and viewpoint would be a change for the better all by itself, imo.
Considering the lethargic legislative branch, I think if Sanders somehow wins it will be hard for Republicans to do the same to him that they did to Obama. In fact, that could bring about a lot of problems in 2018. Then again, how the media behaves plays big.
Let’s just assume that Republicans will continue to act like Republicans. That way it’s incumbent on DEMs not to have some pie-in-sky notion that we can elect a magical DEM POTUS that can seduce Republicans into behaving responsibly. IOW not be as naive or arrogant as Obama publicly suggested that he was. Construct the plan for ousting the obstructionists — and if by some chance they suddenly choose to act like public servants than we’re ahead of the game.
Wouldn’t that be the same question for HRC?
The road path to accomplishments as POTUS isn’t some intractable mystery that DEMs have constructed in their minds. It’s fairly straightforward. First secure the nomination. Select a first rate VP. Build on that success in the remaining primary nominations for the House and Senate. A strong win in November. (53% of the popular vote would be strong enough.) Choose first rate people for cabinet and high level administrative posts. Lay out the agenda in straightforward and easy enough language for the public to understand. Then push it, but allow for enough flexibility depending on circumstances that requires putting something different at the top of the agenda. Let Congress balk, stymie, etc. but keep the public fully informed of where they roadblock exists and why it’s unacceptable. Take back Congress in the ’18 midterms (with much, much better DEMs). IOW, don’t screw up the first two years as WJC and BHO did.
THIS! Nothing that’s put forward by a Democratic President will get through this Congress. They view ALL Democrats as illegitimate. Bernie will push hard for what he believes is right & what the people want from the Presidential bully pulpit. Hillary has already said she will proudly continue BHO’s appeasement politics.
I wasn’t saying that I think Sanders has been too vague, as many Clintonistas and centrist Dems say dismissively about him, and I also don’t buy the “no chance in hell of getting things through Congress” argument either. There’s no chance in hell of getting anything through Congress anyway without first changing the discourse. In a lifetime of advocacy he has boiled his arguments into an essence, which I think is the reason he’s made an impact.
I meant to say that beginning to bring more specifics into his positions could help him win over some of those who otherwise dismiss him–he’s leaving primary votes on the table by not doing this now. So taking the example of the minimum wage, there are details to the argument that need to be more fully explained in order for the logic to reach a greater number of people. It is bad economics for people to work full-time jobs but not be able to get by. He’s reached a great number of people with the bullet-point version of that argument, which for many is intuitively understandable. But there are far more people right now who would be receptive to that and other positions of his if he begins to flesh them out more fully.
In that spirit, I think Sanders should moderate his health care position. My reasoning is that his position on Single Payer is not as popular as many of his other positions. Also, it is frightening to anybody working in the health care sector, and will be disruptive to the system and many people’s livelihoods, whether it is a good idea or not.
So I feel Sanders should alter his health care position in this way:
1. Early in the 1st term:
-Focus on closing the Medicaid gap within the ACA to get everybody covered
-focus on negotiating with Pharma for lower prices
2. Throughout the 1st term:
-Educate the public on Why Single Payer is best
-work with Insurance providers, hospitals, doctors and nurses to set up what a smooth transition to singe-payer would look like
-work to elect more and better Dems – the kind that will pass Single Payer
3. Re-election campaign:
-Run on Single Payer after laying the groundwork
4. 2nd Term:
-Pass SIngle Payer – be awesome President
If he wins I see his second term as Liz Warren.
Warren isn’t his only possible successor. Sanders first real time decision will be more consequential than for possibly any other nominee in either party. She/he would have to be a full partner with Sanders in the general election and during his term and ready to take over on day one of the next administration.
Curious, what do you think of Labor Sec Perez?
For what? VP? No.
The ideal scenario would be a 45-55 year old woman with charisma and in office as a Gov or Senator and politically in tune with Sanders. Four years to raise her public profile and kick butt in the court of public opinion and DC. She doesn’t seem to exist. (Although it’s possible that she’s lurking in Gillibrand.)
If it were me (an arrogant comment because I do trust that Sanders will make the optimal choice), I’d be looking at Schatz (he does have charisma), Heinrich (don’t know if he has any charisma). I’ve also struggled with the question of what’s wrong with Martin O’Malley (other than his Baltimore screw-up). Objectively he ticks off all the right boxes, but he’s missing je ne sais quoi. There’s an emptiness about him that makes him look small. I’m open to the idea that it could be filled with an partnership with Sanders.
I agree that Sanders would have to use his term to lay down some huge markers on health care. The ACA may have made a transition to single payer even more difficult than it would have been before for two reasons.
First it ignored the supply side of the equation (with the exception of Sanders’ insistence on more federal monies for primary care facilities). We’ve now lost seven years in beefing up that component. To date, nobody has been able to explain to me that with single payer, how the current top, medium and low end medical facility resources will be distributed. IOW which LA residents can opt for Cedars and who has to go to County.
Second, it mucked up the funding model for Medicaid that was purposely designed as a federal and state partnership. Why? For the simple reason that health care costs varied widely by the local cost of living. (For medical costs, possibly far more true back in the mid-’60s than today as the price of US health care has defied rational economic models.)
Funny you mention that. I had a stent put in at Cedars in 2014. Last year my insurance at work went for the lower HMO plan and I got kicked out of the Cedar’s group. This year I am going to contribute extra out of pocket to back into an HMO plan that allows me to go to Cedars.
When dealing with this switch, I was well aware that by supporting Single Payer I am helping to bring about a future where NOBODY may get care as good as they give at Cedars, but WE ALL will have necessary care. I have no problem losing my “privilege” in this area or any other, to help alleviate suffering in this world, but many people believe looking out for no. 1 is the American way.
I think convincing people to go all in on the Golden Rule is part of the consciousness raising that must be part of this political revolution.
I’m with you, but we’re probably a minority in single digits. This is a huge problem with having allowed the US healthcare infrastructure to devolve through insurance and privatization and employer subsidies. With the ACA, the remaining public hospitals are having to compete against private hospitals for Medicaid covered births. How crazy is that? And in my experience those with the least almost always seek the most expensive option possible.
Cost effective and good enough health care doesn’t exist in the quantity that’s needed. All those other countries with quality UHC didn’t get there by first building hospital Taj Majals and making PHarma, medical device manufacturers, and specialty physicians enormously wealthy. (The average GP in the US is under-compensated and we have too many specialists who for some reason defy the law of supply and demand.)
Single payer is just one way to fund that but it isn’t the only way. I think progressives myopic focus on single payer has done a lot more harm than good in that that focus has taken up a lot of oxygen that could have been used to improve what we have.
I also think single payer as the path to universal care became a non-starter way back when Truman failed to get a national health care plan and employers became payers for a large chunk of our population.
Sure if we were designing a system from scratch single payer would be the way to go but we aren’t so we have to work with what we have.
There are ways to build on the ACA to get us to a German or Dutch style system, both of which have employer based coverage as a large component. Here is what I think both candidates should be proposing
Do all of that and you are very close to what both the Germans and Dutch have.
. . . any of his domestic program . . .”
I keep seeing this raised as problematic re: Sanders, but not Clinton.
I don’t get that.
Absent a drastic reversal in both houses of Congress (i.e., majorities large enough to prevail over filibusters and defections by traitorous ConservaDems), I see little likelihood either of them gets much through Congress.
Maybe a hard-enough thumping would prompt some wingnuts to be less “all obstruction, all the time”, but I won’t be holding my breath, either for that outcome or for the thumping that could make it conceivable.
Which brings it back to whose (between the 2 Dems) policy proposals better match what I think needs to happen? (Corollary: and which in my judgment holds those proposals most sincerely and will work hardest to accomplish as much of them as possible?)
Policies, proposals, “position papers”, etc.: they’re all aspirational and roughly equally unlikely to go anywhere, unless this proves to be a Dem tsunami of a “wave election” — not likely, imo, though tha’d be nice. So how wonkily fleshed-out with specifics they are seems of little importance to me (and doesn’t seem at all a useful “discriminant function” on which to base a decision to support one over the other).
probably because a lot of her policies are adjustments of agencies and rule making
another good chunk is budgetary which has a somewhat better chance of getting passed even with this Congress (as President Obama has shown) obviously not everything
she’ll have the same trouble as Sanders with the remaining parts
her to do much while constrained to Executive prerogative alone (i.e., not requiring Congressional action) that Obama hasn’t already done (which the wingnuts already rabidly slaver over as unconstitutional overreach). Obviously, she could probably find a few more niche initiatives here or there, but the notion she could accomplish much that Bernie couldn’t just doesn’t seem very convincing to me (absent that wave election, anyway). And what Bernie proposes to try to accomplish comes far closer to what’s (drastically) needed, imo.
I think you came close to getting it with this:
But didn’t stop and think that through. There has been a barrage of negative messages hurled at Sanders by the HRC campaign, the DEM Party, and MSM. (They’ve also worked hard to keep him from being more well known.) This have been extremely effective with partisan DEMs that regularly vote. It has been less effective in turning out the more casual DEM partisan voters. Hence, factoring out the increased primary participation rate that was driven by the presence of Obama in the ’08 race and the counter increased participation rate for Clinton, she’s only turning out the regular, strictly DEM Party voters. That suggests to me that the negative attacks on Sanders aren’t hitting their mark among a large segment of Democratic voters and their response is to sit out the primaries. Most will show up in November and vote for the DEM nominee.
Would expect it to function similarly in the GE. Attacks on Sanders will turn out the GOP base but will be less effective with the more casual GOP voters leading to a high level of indifference and thus, non-voting.
Trump and/or Cruz as the GOP nominee should be sufficient not to reduce the DEM regular voters if Sanders were the nominee. However, I do tend to underestimate how much “hurt fee-fees” guide strictly partisan DEM and GOP voters. And most definitely not looking forward to an all hate and fear general election between Clinton and Trump or Cruz.
I think it’s rather telling that states that went heavily for Clinton have had significantly lower primary turnout than in 2008 but states that went for Sanders had turnout close to or even exceeding 2008.
This election is a nothing-burger compared to 2004 and 2008. The number of Sanders Democrats who said that they’d never vote for Clinton is like, what, 20%? And the number of Obama and Clinton Democrats who said that they’d never vote for the other was like, what, 40%?
Internet drama, especially the ideological kind,
/what’s going on in real life.Nope — not a nothing-burger this time.
2004 was over so quickly that most of the DEM primary voters didn’t even know it had started. 2008 got “hot” because race was elevated as a criteria (by the Clintons) and more younger people became engaged with “hope and change.”
Turnout has been good (at or near ’08 levels) everywhere that Sanders has been competitive. (Except IA where it was only about three-fourths the ’08 turnout.) In ID, they released the raw votes for the caucuses and turnout was up by 15% and in AK the estimate was up by 10% and the WA estimate was down by 10%.
The only state that I’ve been able to piece together the BHO and HRC shifts from ’08 to ’16 was SC. The white vote collapsed from 223 thousand in ’08 to 143 thousand and the AA vote dropped from 307 thousand to 228 thousand. The decline in the AA vote is understandable as BHO was a phenomenon for AAs (many of whom might have had memories of ’88). One can guess as to why the white vote declined (note: Obama led among SC white voters as well as AAs), but have no idea if any or all such guesses are valid.
What was key for me in IA is that most of Sanders voters were first time caucus attendees. Less than half of those that attended the ’08 caucuses (most of whom showed up for BHO, Edwards, and HRC) were engaged this time around.
Barring some catastrophe (attack, indictment, health issue, etc.) — I can only see suburban Republican women moving over to Clinton and pulling their husbands with them. This is important along the Main Line of Philly, for instance. She will carry the cities and if she gets the suburbs, she will be unbeatable. My guess is that if Sanders isn’t the nominee and Clinton doesn’t choose a surrogate for Sanders as VP, then young people will stay home, disgusted, and it’ll be a very low turnout election. Clinton also has the advantage that older folks actually like her and they vote in big numbers.
Sanders’ religion is untested waters. There are large swaths of the country where is Jewish heritage will play against him terribly. And his professed lack of observance will make it even worse. I think that the combination of non-religious observance and “socialism” is going to smack of religionless communism for two many people. It’s just too easy an argument to make if you want to gin up fear. Think Fidel or USSR. Also, his age is a factor for many.
Against Trump I think either of them could win, but not because of cross-over voters. I can count on one hand the people I know who actually cross over from one party to another. Most R’s or D’s will just abstain if the choice party choice is unpalatable. The independents who, I think are probably quite young, will go for sanity over bombast because there will be other issues besides economic (those too) like environment, choice, equality, incarceration, and so on.
“There are large swaths of the country where is Jewish heritage will play against him terribly. And his professed lack of observance will make it even worse. I think that the combination of non-religious observance and “socialism” is going to smack of religionless communism for two many people. It’s just too easy an argument to make if you want to gin up fear. Think Fidel or USSR.”
Yes, the very states that won’t go for any Democrat.
I think that Clinton is more likely to win, and Sanders more likely to lose, for all the reasons that people usually barf up. I’m not an original thinker on this subject.
Were Sanders the nominee, one issue that I think would come up in the general election in a major way is his age (which, to my knowledge, has not been a major issue in the primaries). Reagan was (arguably?) in the grips of dementia when he left office at 77. Sanders is now 74. He seems healthy enough, but given that recent presidents have looked decades older upon leaving office than they did when sworn in, I think it would be fairly easy to raise doubts about how he would hold up and whether electing him would be “worth” the risk that he couldn’t finish out his term.
Hillary isn’t much younger than Sanders. And has had health issues that could be non-issues or major.
I continue to think that Clinton’s moderation is more likely to draw more cross-over voters than Sanders’ more left wing policy prescriptions. I’m pretty sure that any republican candidate will hammer Sanders as wanting to “raise your taxes and take away your health insurance” and this won’t be an entirely unjustified attack.
However, I could be wrong. I agree with the people here who note that Sanders is more in tune with the zeitgeist of the times. I’m just not sure that many people vote on the zeitgeist.
Also, since several posters are bringing up anecdotes, I did have an interesting conversation with an old friend of mine, who is an informed but not very politically involved professional (doctor) who usually votes Republican. He said that if it was Clinton vs. Trump, he would “hold his nose” and vote for Clinton, but that there was no way he would vote for Sanders. I’m sure there are a number of typically republican members of the professional/managerial/small business classes who feel the same way, though I do not know how they compare in size to other (perhaps more blue collar) groups who might favor Sanders but not Clinton.
I’m sure there are a number of typically republican members of the professional/managerial/small business classes who feel the same way, though I do not know how they compare in size to other (perhaps more blue collar) groups …
Tiny. The limits of that potential crossover (GOP to DEM) vote was most likely seen in ’08. Having Palin one heartbeat away from the Oval Office isn’t a whole lot scarier than Trump or Cruz (all of whom trawl in the same pond). They went back to their GOP home in ’12 and even with a reduction in younger voter turnout that year, it wasn’t enough to elect Mitt.
The better question is what will regular, “moderate” DEM voters do if Sanders is the nominee. Crossover to Trump or Cruz, not vote, or vote for Sanders. They are well over half the DEM Party base.
I doubt that it is tiny. Voting for Trump at the top of the ticket is a whole lot different from voting for Palin as VP.
But in any case…we are speculating. It would be nice to see some data, of one sort or the other.
Of course it’s tiny. Based on income, they are at most 10% of the population. They skew older and whiter and wealthier. In 2012 in the age 45-64 they favored Romney 51% to 47% and age 65 and over favored Romney 56% to 44%. White favored Romney 59% to 39%. By Party ID — GOP 93% to 7%, IND 50% to 45% and DEM 8% to 92%. Income >$100,000 Romney 54% to 44%.
Compare that to the ’08 voter breakdown (McCain/Palin to Obama/Biden).
Age 45 to 64: 49% to 50% and 65 and older: 53% to 45%
White: 55% to 43%
Party ID: GOP 93% to 9%, IND 44% to 52% and DEM 10% to 89%.
>100,000: 49% to 49%
While it doesn’t compute for you that Palin as VP for a 72 year old man that was known to have been treated for melanoma would be as scary to potential GOP to DEM crossover voter with Trump as the nominee, it doesn’t mean that it’s not true.
I appreciate you coming up with some numbers (though I do not fully understand the argument you are making with them). I googled “demographics of the US electorate” and got the following estimates for 2016:
College-educated whites 37.4%
Non-college educated whites 32.8%
African-American 13.3%
Latinos 10.9%
Asians/Other 5.6%
Romney’s fraction of these voters:
College-educated whites 55.7%
Non-college educated whites 61.7%
African-American 5.7%
Latinos 26.7%
Asians/Other 30.7%
Even a small shift in party preference among the first group would be significant, as they are the largest portion of the electorate. Even if the shift was only in the wealthier portion of this group, it could still be significant. 10% of the population is not tiny…not unless you are going to claim that African American and Latino voters are also insignificant.
People don’t shift willy-nilly from GOP to DEM or vice versa from election to election. That’s why they are labeled as the base of each party. Most people even follow the party ID of their parents and grandparents except in those rare period of political realignment. Even then, it often takes several presidential election cycles and another generation for two before it’s complete. For example, AAs (when/where they were allowed to vote) stuck with the GOP through 1928 and only slowly moved to the DEM which wasn’t completed until 1968. In 2000, the Muslim population (an extremely small demo) went for GWB because historically, the DEM Party was more rabidly pro-Israel than the GOP. That shifted relatively quickly after that and now they feel more comfortable with Sanders than HRC (for good reasons).
Yes, I’m aware that party affiliations are often very stable, but not always. One of the slow shifts we are in the middle of is the movement of northern Republicans to the democratic party, as the republicans become more Southern and more crazy. We see this a lot in the Philadelphia suburbs, for example, which was historically a Republican bedrock. The presence of Trump on the ticket will accelerate this shift, and I think that more people will make the jump if the dem candidate is Clinton than if its Sanders–it’s just less far of a jump. Also, there are people in the middle with weak party affiliations who vote. It’s not just the base.
When was the last time PA went red in a presidential general election?
The electoral map looks ugly and daunting for any GOP presidential nominee in ’16, but the popular vote (percentage wise) isn’t likely to change that much from ’08. (If it were, we would have seen some Congressional shifts from GOP to DEM in the ’10 through ’14 elections. And new Senators like Cotton, Ernst, and Tillis are every bit as nutso as Trump.) Turnout is going to be a large question because some large faction of the GOP isn’t going to be very displeased with the choice and the same may be true for the DEMs.
IMO they will vote for Sanders.
Wish I could share your confidence.
I can see the debate.
Trump: He wants to raise your taxes.
Sanders (pointing to Trump): I want to raise his taxes.
Hillary is only moderate when compared to the possible Republican opposition.
I agree that Trump eliminates the argument that Sanders can’t win, because Trump is comically toxic.
And I agree that Sanders probably doesn’t get the same level of crossover once he’s been through a serious general election onslaught. That’s why I’ve been telling people to stop reading GE polls. Sanders hasn’t been defined one way or another for the middle voters who’ll decide this election yet. His favorables would drop in that scenario (how much they’d drop is anybody’s guess).
I think Sanders would obviously do better with young people, but I think he’d also do worse with old people who aren’t big on the whole “socialism” thing. I don’t think people in the middle, especially suburbanites, would be big on the whole “revolution” thing either.
Not sure Sanders-vs-Trump would be bad enough to warrant the Jags-vs-Titans comparison. Maybe more like Postseason Bengals-vs-Everyday Browns?
…adding:
By “crossover” — I don’t think it’s really crossover in the sense of actual Republicans of the David Brooks variety coming over. Rather it’s the middle 20% of the electorate that’s independent, leans one way or the other usually but is theoretically conceivably-had for both parties.
It’s certainly imaginable to me that Hillary could pull a lot of them and win by about 10 vs Trump.
can be defined many ways, and I’d be in a lot of them.
“Socialism”? More, please.
“Revolution”? Bring it on.
Yes, I’m merely anecdotal. “But I’m not the only one.”
Given that you’re posting on a liberal blog, I don’t think there’s any way to define you as being in the middle.
I’d also refer to the first sentence of your sig even if you could be defined as such.
many ways, and I’d be in a lot of them.’
Sorry, but that’s just a fact. What you think about it is irrelevant.
And referring to the first line of my sig was obviously the point of “Yes, I’m merely anecdotal” before quoting John Lennon.
That said, I can’t imagine anything safer than the claim that, for the two positions I stated, “I’m not the only one.”
Today:
I’ll take President Obama at his word on this one and it’s another reason why I am not shy about criticizing him which gets me into trouble with many posters here that can’t tolerate any criticism of him.
I hear that Wasserman Schultz may have a problem with Tim Canova.
Just sent him a few more bucks yesterday. Sent a few more to Bernie, although I think I might as well have lit a match to my money, judging by the Bernie hate here.
Take heart — it’s just a mini-invasion of folks in need of new people to fight against (might be lonely at the orange crush after Kos hung out the not welcome sign for Bernie supporters) and demoralize. Don’t let them win here.
Precisely.
Thank you.
AG
Yes, that certainly explains why half the Rec List is pro-Bernie diaries.
Sanders has no chance because of that economic calculator that Vox created.
My middle class self would pay nearly $6,000 more in taxes under Bernie’s plan.
I bristled at the thought, but I actually agree with where he wants to put the money.
But, that squishy middle? Those ‘ independent’ voters?
Man…the GOP would run ads advertising that calculator 24/7…..
He’d be crushed.
I honestly hope that thing’s way off. Jesus Christ.
Vox did a Q&A with guy who did that calculator and there are a lot if assumptions built into it that make Sanders’ plan look worse than it is. But it is a fact, if you want denmark you have to pay taxes like denmark.
The problem is that I’d be much more receptive to that if the Denmarkification happened before I reached adulthood and started barreling toward middle age, so that the burdens of such a society grew with me and I could make life changes accordingly.
Dude, serious question here: why are you even on the left if that’s how you really feel? I mean, assuming that you are.
I don’t see how the two issues are inextricably linked. I’ve been reasonably pleased with Obama, I’m sure I’d be reasonably pleased with Clinton or Sanders. They all stand on the right side of social and economic issues as I see them. That said, there’s a limit to what I, personally, can financially afford in the name of change, as there is for anyone else. The Vox calculator suggests that Bernie’s plans would be very expensive and Clinton’s would be comparatively much cheaper, just as Obama himself was “cheap”.
I’m at a point in life where I’m trying as best I can to reduce debts, not add to them, and I think that is a point that would resonate in the general election, which is what I was trying to state above, especially if the people who feel the most squeezed by any new taxes do not feel like they would be the primary beneficiaries of any new social programs. It would be great to provide free college tuition, for example, but you have to think about how such a program should be modeled to lighten the impact on those who 1) would be paying for that program via taxes; and 2) are also burdened by hundreds of thousands of dollars or more of their own student loan and mortgage debt at the same time that they are being asked to absorb those taxes (and, obviously, will not be going back to college). I think the sale can be made if pitched right, but it’s not an automatic sell and you better believe the Republicans would attack with heavy artillery.
Anyway, I’m on the left because I believe in the left’s ideals, but I’m also entitled to grumble if someone’s policies are going to cost me an arm and a leg at a time when I don’t need that.
He REALLY needs to talk to Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. I see too much wish list and too little integration between the items.
My understanding is that the Vox calculator is off. An example given me is increased medical costs without deducting savings because today’s costs would be gone.
the Vox calculator only looks at the tax changes not anything else so no it’s not off
Then it’s an incomplete picture and misleading. If people don’t realize that, it’s off but not in the sense you took my comment. Bad wording on my part.
it goes both ways and its a PR problem so it’s a problem rather we’d like it to be or not
I know my MIL, a lifelong Republican has said that she would vote for Trump over Clinton and she has also stated that she would vote for Sanders over Trump. I also know that this is completely meaningless, because she is going to spend the 8 months gorging on Fox News.
I would love to see someone with Sanders policies and outlook win, but I don’t think our country is there yet, and I know the right wing media would have a field day with a Sanders campaign.
We need a young charismatic progressive ala Justin Trudeau. Obama was almost that person, although unfortunately more moderate and willing to pre-compromise than many of us hoped.
Obama was that person. And then he arrived in what Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky call “the corporate prison” of the White House and discovered in short order just how little action is possible in a progressive direction (even without wall-to-wall congressional opposition).
Presidents like George W. Bush create the illusion of executive power because their agendae coincide with the banks and the military-industrial complex. But the idea that a progressive President could move the needle just as freely the other direction is a naive fallacy — as we learned under Obama. (As BooMan frequently points out, what he was able to accomplish in this context is remarkable, even if the sum total of the Obama years was, from a progressive/liberal standpoint, profoundly disappointing).
The same thing would happen to a President Sanders, but even more so.
Obama was never that person.
what you write about why agenda coinciding, yes
Much was made of the many small donors to Obama’s 2008 campaign. It wasn’t until after the election that we realized how beholden he was to large donations, especially from the financial sector. His horrid appointments showed us that in short order.
Hadn’t seen that, but it captures one of his most maddening failings — of Negotiating 101 — (more so earlier in his terms . . . he did at least seem to gradually, eventually catch on) quite neatly.
You think they won’t have a field day with Hillary?
They’ll try, but they don’t know what, if anything, they can use that will stick. Their problem is that the stickiest stuff in ’16 isn’t anything they disagree with.
The Republicans I know would never, never, never, never, never, never vote for any socialist, ever. You can’t discuss politics without them talking about the need to save America from creeping socialism. It’s an obsession.
The endless propaganda against Hillary has been more effective than I would have expected, but I do know several Republican women who would be “Hillary-curious” if Trump is the nominee, but pretty much only then. Possibly once Cruz’ forced birth policies got some discussion they’d go Hillary-curious on him. They love Kasich.
In a straight-forward marketing-based advertising campaign, the one who commands the most money can overwhelm the opposition with negative advertising with a good ad strategy.
In a straight-forward GOTV campaign, the one who commands the most volunteers in the field and over the most geography can motivate a wide variety of people to vote for their candidate on election day.
In a straight-forward social media campaign, credibility of friends can cause messages and invitations to vote to have more impact; this however is inversely proportional to age.
That, unfortunately is the only kind of campaign that we have. It’s great disadvantage is turning the candidate into a product with a consistent value proposition that causes one-way communication from the candidate to the prospective voters. The absence of feedback is compensated for with focus groups in which the presuppositions of pollsters and consultants are given a statistical sampling test. What we get as candidates is the result of this supposedly scientific method of running a campaign.
A second disadvantage is that it costs increasingly larger amounts of money and creates a consulting class who have a vested interest in profiteering from elections. And the Koch brothers have upped the ante in tossing money into state and local elections.
Bernie is electable only if he can invent another method of getting votes, one that brings a clear policy mandate with his successful election. The other candidates don’t want a clear policy mandate because it sacrifices their “flexibility”. And policy mandates come only with winning Congress; it is a party victory with the momentum to race legislation into office in the first year. And the mandate to make that legislation what the voters actually wanted.
The Democrats are hobbled by having set sights low for the past elections and having been blindsided by what the Tea Party was actually doing.
I’m not sure that the market segmentation that pollsters are doing actually helps with analyzing elections at a national level. Take the millennial generation segment for example. The age cohort is dramatically different from one geography and from one ethnic group to another. And too often for segments other than those based on ethnicity, one often has to at a subvocal “white” to understand what the pollster is imagining. Such as white millennials, white working class males, white evangelicals, and white seniors.
Sanders’s biggest issue with minorities is his framing of his policies as “for everybody”. Minorities have never seen that work out in practices once federal policies trickle down to states, counties, and municipalities. If he can close that gap in time to alter the current trend line with some large states, he is electable as the nominee. If he can hold and expand the white voters he picked up and expand the geography (and by doing that the Congressional outcome), he certainly could be elected against any of the Republicans. That is such an unorthodox path to victory and so unlike any Democratic candidate post-Reagan that it will have to happen to create believers. It requires improbabilities like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump losing New York, like an anti-Trump business class backing a democratic socialist Democrat, like some of those massive caucus victories turning into equally massive general election victories. It would require a “revolution” equivalent to the “Reagan revolution”. It really is something cannot be handicapped by bookies or Nate Silver.
The real question is whether we are in politics as usual or not. Politics a usual…Clinton. Not politics as usual…Trump, Cruz, or Sanders. For all the circus antics, it seems to be settling down to politics as usual.
But like I said, revolutions can’t be handicapped.
What frustrates me about this whole thing is that Clinton is so close to being a doctrinaire Republican candidate (in terms of so many core issues — Israel; warfare; banks; corporate donors etc.) but has been systematically turned into an Emmanuel Goldstein hate figure over the decades to a degree that millions of people just have this irrational bilious reaction that’s completely overscaled.
I’m not saying she’s a great candidate or that I’m a big fan or anything like that. I’m just saying, the “negatives” are completely disproportionate.
Thanks to the right wing bent of the propaganda pushed daily as talking points by the corporate owned MSM,
The former traditional positions of the Republican party from a couple decades ago, are being represented in Hillary Clinton.
The former main stream positions of any FDR style democratic party elective representative is now-a-days called a socialist (democratic), even from their own mouths.
And the positions held by the two front runners?
A cross of 50’s style McCarthy-ism and the John Birch Society.
Liberal MSM, my tuchus.
Well, depends on how you define liberal.
If you define liberal as ‘socially liberal, economically centrist/conservative’ (like the Democratic liberal elite seems to do these days) then the MSM is very liberal indeed.
I define liberal as non-corporate owned or directed.
Not the way the DLC-GOP would
In a way it’s disproportionate, and in another way it’s not but a lot of Democrats are disproportionately ignoring it.
When the Clintons came into power, they did it by stealing a lot of the Republicans’ thunder. That’s what “Republican Lite” means. The right hated them for that, even while the Clintons retained most of their their Democratic appeal as well.
They developed an attack machine, producing a never-ending barrage of anti-Clinton stories. Most of this was bullshit, but the Lewinsky scandal was real and sent Republicans into paroxysms of disgust that have never ceased.
The things that Sanders supporters typically don’t like about Hillary are quite different, and they are things the republican establishment are fine with.
But with the rise of populism, there is now a considerable overlap between working-class Dems and Republicans when it ocmes to Hillary, because of the fact that she is a really, really establishment figure.
Here’s the paradox: The years of Republican hatred has really helped her with Democrats, especially older Democratic women, because it has inoculated them against the massive, very valid criticisms coming from the left. They just don’t want to hear any criticism of Hillary.
Whenever you close your mind to truth, you are bound to make bad decisions.
On that subject, you will find this interesting:
http://www.mahablog.com/2016/03/29/the-clinton-sanders-divide-and-moral-foundation-theory/
Thank you! Very interesting theory. My loyalty is to my country not a political party. I have never understood how a person could be more loyal to a political party than their country. This theory does help explain that thought process.
Yes, Trump could be beaten by either Sanders or Clinton, it seems clear at this point. Are you all willing to bet that Trump is going to be the nominee? I’m not; the repub. elites may very well scuttle the S.S. Trump at the convention. If we are instead running against Kasich, or RMoney , I think we’d better put aside our fantasies of free college, healthcare, ponies, and rainbows for everyone, and run a well-vetted candidate who can kick Repub. asses with realistic (if centrist) policy proposals that appeal to a broad swath of the electorate, not just those who live in Left Blogistan.
Then again, how will Republicans feel if the guy they voted for doesn’t get the nomination? That strikes me as a very unpopular move among the base.
I’m down in FLA visiting my very sick mom and every day I pass another roadside stand selling t-shirts. Those folks will be mighty upset if the GOP gets high-handed with their boy.
All of these things that people have mentioned are at this point undetermined. I can see circumstances where any numbers of things could happen.
Er, selling Trump t-shirts. And doing lots of business.
Something I hadn’t thought of — I just looked it up and the repub convention is the week BEFORE the dem. convention. So we will actually know whether Trump is the nominee when we meet to decide out nominee. That’s a horse of a different color.
I’d be interested with this question if it could get narrowed down somewhat by state, or region, or swing state.
You haven’t been talking to republicans. You have NO idea of the depth of hate they have for her. It even exceeds mine! Republicans will NEVER vote for her, but they might stay home.
It’s not merely a question of their opinion of HRC, but also who they voted for in ’08 and ’12. If it was for McCain or Mitt, it doesn’t change the equation. (Why even bother listening to someone that voted for Palin?)
I frankly don’t see any point in this particular discussion at all. It’s completely speculative and driven by commenters’ likes, dislikes, and prejudices.
The Democrats are not going to choose their nominee on the basis of nationwide opinion polls asking people what they think about head-to-head matchups with particular GOP candidates. The nominee will instead be chosen on the basis of state-by-state actual primaries and caucuses.
The Republican situation is only slightly more complicated by having three remaining candidates, but really, if you think the GOP is likely to select the 3rd place guy, with perhaps 10% of the delegates, on account of some opinion poll, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Yep!
You see that bias over and over in the comments.
.
I’m not so sure on the repub side. If trump doesn’t get at least 50% of the delegates so that he can win in the first one or two,rounds of voting, all bets are off. The rules committee could very well make changes that allow a dark horse candidate. Weirder things have happened, although not for a long time. But we live in wierd times.
“a guy who displays no religious faith.”
The important word there is “displays”.
I’m old enough to remember when presidents and presidential candidates did not make it a point to DISPLAY their religious faith.
Even Reagan didn’t do it.
You also need to take into account the fact that Sanders is a Jew. When Sanders and I were growing up in Brooklyn, you didn’t display your religion, least of all to non-Jews. And we lived in a Jewish neighborhood.
You understand why, I’m sure. It’s because every one of us knew that we had our rights through separation of church and state. So in the civic arena, you’re neutral.
You want to know a Jewish politician who displayed his faith at every possible moment? Joe Lieberman. Because by that time, that’s what the RW Christians expected.
“I don’t think he’d get the same degree of crossover as Clinton from Republicans. But, then, Sanders would do better than Clinton with young voters.”
I think Sanders is already getting a big crossover from Republicans.
This is just one anecdote. I have a friend here in TX who voted for him in the primary. Changed his registration just to do that. He told me it was the first time in his life he’d ever voted for a Democrat. He’s under 45 and having a very hard time finding steady work.
But I think he represents something that’s probably happening a lot.
“both Clinton and Sanders can win, but Sanders is more likely to lose, and also more likely to win narrowly, if he wins.”
But what do you base that on? All the polls I’ve seen for months now are showing the opposite. It’s been very consistent.
The most recent ones do show Clinton beating Trump and Cruz, but not Kasich, and Bernie beating Kasich but not by much.
The “Clinton is more electable!” camp is basing their assertion on at least two out of three assertions:
A.) Current polling won’t reflect future results. I actually tend to agree with this — but only if current polling doesn’t match demographics. Is there a demographic mismatch with Clinton’s numbers?
B.) Clinton’s numbers will bounce back after the primary. This is really weak. 2008 Obama and 2004 Kerry did not get a post-primary election bounce. Why should Clinton?
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1618/favorability-people-news.aspx
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/obama-favorable-rating
C.) Clinton can’t get much worse but Bernie, once the GOP unleashes its broadside, will drop below Clinton’s floor. Without getting too much into what the GOP will do to Bernie, let’s attack the much more empirically shaky part of this sub-argument. Long story short, the idea that Clinton has somehow hit some kind of floor is unsupported by polling. Her unfavorabilities keep going up at a linear rate ever since 2016. What makes the people advancing this argument think that they won’t continue to go up?
Clinton is also in a historically unusual position. Generally, the favorability/unfavorability number for candidates (Bush, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Obama, Romney) is stable throughout the primaries. Then the candidates see their unfavorables go up after the primary. Sometimes it’s accompanied by an increase in favorables, other times it isn’t.
Hillary Clinton is in the unique position of having her unfavorables spike noticeably DURING the mature phases (i.e., after September) primary. Why is something that didn’t happen to any of the previous candidates happening to her? And regardless of why this is happening, what makes them think that Clinton’s floor has been reached and won’t go any lower?
Correction: Obama did not get a post-primary favorability GAP bounce. His favorables went up but so did his unfavorables. His rating was pretty stable from the start of 2008 until he won the Presidential election.
Don’t net favorable ratings improve after a politician goes away? HRC has also benefited from an empathy for her factor.
When she publicly retreated from a co-president role with Bill and took up more standard First Lady duties (in her case, mainly globetrotting that was easily ignored by the public), her numbers improved. The Lewinsky affair in the final analysis pulled in the empathy factor. Thus, it was like “after all the crap she had put up with from the GOP, media, and Bill, she deserved to be a Senator.” Once there, most of the public forgot about her and assumed that she was doing a good job. Then she run for POTUS and a large portion of the public is reminded of why they once had an unfavorable opinion of her. She loses the nomination to Obama — so sad and she worked so hard to get it and isn’t it nice that our nice new President is honoring her with a very important job. Some noted that she wasn’t good at it and most paid no attention. Then she fell and hurt her head (empathy again) that was followed up with a period of being out of the public eye. Then — like all pols today — she had a book to sell. How nice. Ordinary people didn’t get that this was a prelude to another run for the WH.
When “she’s baack” became a reality, it was like, “Oh yeah, now I remember.” She really did need to wrap up the primary in SC and then spend the next five months doing another low-key “listening tour” and keep Bill and Chelsea out of the picture including through the DNC convention. Fat chance in keeping Bill out of the spotlight. Thus, her net favorable rating isn’t going to improve unless people begin see her more favorably because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate which so far hasn’t happened.
Lots of interesting points…
The problem is elections are fluid and the media can (and will…) distort the playing field during the contest in ways that can be hard to predict (Dean scream… etc) so no one really knows who the “most electable” candidate is until after the election has happened…
Honestly, due to the anachronistic nature of our presidential elections, the question is really which candidate can best carry the swing states while still holding on to the blue states. I actually have no idea- but the issue I see with Hillary is that independents, in large majorities, view her as dishonest. That’s a huge negative and something that is extremely difficult to overcome. Her best strategy to winning is to make sure the Republican’s negatives stay higher than hers. Certainly with Trump, its a doable strategy. But there is a chance the R nominee won’t be him and then she gets into increasingly greater trouble depending on who it is. Also, a negative campaign probably doesn’t produce any kind of mandate for positive change and also might adversely affect the Senate and house races.
Also, I really don’t get how people think that since she has been in the spotlight for so long her negatives can’t get worse- there is just no evidence that this is a real phenomena. A poltician’s favorability can always get worse- well, at least until literally everyone dislikes them (Republican goal?)
Bernie, on the other hand, is viewed as honest by independents. Sad to say, but that’s a remarkable achievement for a politician these days and I believe that it might insulate him a bit from the inevitable Republican general election slime. I actually think that more people will vote for an honest democratic socialist than a dishonest capitalist these days despite how negatively “socialism” has polled in the past.
Not only is there no evidence for the hypothesis that being in the spotlight for so long means that her negatives can’t get worse, her numbers ARE getting worse.
Seriously, I can’t believe that HRC partisans keep forwarding this talking point. Including Krugman. It’s just insane. At least Chambers’ denial had a thick, creamy layer of rationalization on them. HRC supporters flat-out deny that her numbers can continue to get worse even if you show them the trendlines.
lol reality-based community.
I actually think that more people will vote for an honest democratic socialist than a dishonest capitalist these days despite how negatively “socialism” has polled in the past.
That’s because socialism is abstract and has been pounded into the heads of Americans that it’s bad, evil, etc. Sanders is a face and even those that totally disagree with his political positions, concede that he’s honest (well, with the exception of some rabid HRC supporters that have accused him of being racist, sexist, and a liar about his record). What he proposes sounds better to young people that what they’ve lived with and to older people that experienced and/or respected the New Deal for what it was, socialism, we know it works and is not in the least bit radical and it preferable to what has been done to government over the past four decades.
While we’re on the subject of socialism, which can also be referred to as the common good or the public benefit, let me just say something about “free stuff.” Back in the 1960s I got my B.A. virtually for free at Brooklyn College (as did Bernie and many thousands of others in the City University system). And that had nothing to do with the 60s, This had been going since it was set up decades earlier. In other words, countless New Yorkers got their college educations virtually for free. Most of us lived at home. These colleges were not glamorous, but they were very good. To us this was NORMAL.
Around the country state colleges and universities for the most part used to be very inexpensive, especially for state residents.
The idea was not “free stuff,” it was a public investment to benefit the state by having more educated citizens. And it worked extremely well.
“free stuff,”
translation, not enuf money going into the pockets of wall street elites from said operation;
whether from;
education,
medical care,
military budgets,
veterans care,
pensions,
etc.
the anti-“free stuff” folks just want their 10-15% cuts off the top and ensure most people sink deeper into debt, which means years of more free money to the anti-“free stuff” folks and their political cronies in debt servicing.
Absolutely right, and the technical term for that (in socio-economic history) is “enclosure of the commons”. Private interests taking over public property for private benefit. It’s been going on for centuries.
Imagine a real estate developer (like Trump) getting title to New York’s public parks to “develop” them into private resorts and gated communities. What prevents that? Only the laws and the vigilance in defending them.
That’s too blatant even for today. But how about granting “concessions” in pubic parks because the city could use the money. Well that is happening, and it’s happening in a big way public schools, prisons, you name it. And actively considered a “good thing” by neoliberalism. It’s the essence of Reaganism and Thatcherism. Run everything as a business.
What’s forgotten in all this is that society runs better if it provides public amenities whether profitable or not. It’s true that passenger service on American railroads just isn’t profitable. But we need it. The government took them over and created AMTRAK to save passenger service. Ever since, the Republicans have been complaining that Amtrak is not profitable and has to cut, cut, cut costs, and they are not going to subsidize it if it can’t support itself. SIt’s patheric.
Even worse with the post office. Public libraries. The predators want to close them because they’re employing so many people, competing with private shippers, and sitting on billions of dollars in valuable real estate.
Privatizing traditional knowledge (intellectual property) through patents is another huge area, especially for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries.
http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/500-year-revolution-rich-against-poor
“Enclosure of the commons”. Google it.
Don’t have to, lived it for the last 35 years, ever since Reagan began destroying the “commons” for the uber-greedy uber-rich.
in the past?
Seems like one of those propositions that one is tempted to intuit just must be true . . . but is it?
My take is very similar to yours, Martin. As an elected official in a blue county in a purple state I spend a fair amount of time working with older moderate Republicans. My sense is that quite a few would cross over to support Hillary vs. Trump but anyone who has ever called themselves any kind of socialist would be a bridge too far for them.
The answer to the question is a quite easy one, Hillary Clinton is a better candidate than Bernie Sanders.
Leave the future to the young, not-yet baby-eaters.)
Leave the future to the young, not-yet baby-eaters.)
My take it that Sanders in the general campaign would continue doing what he’s done in the primaries, namely, just do a lot better than “the serious people” expect. And Hillary would continue doing what she’s done in the primaries, i.e. worse than those same serious people expect.
Look, the whole above discussion about why Sanders would not do well is based on various things that are indeed real. I’m not dismissing them. Many people WOULD react in various negative ways. But in every presidential election ever held in America, millions and millions of people voted against the candidate who won. They had their reasons, and those reasons were well known before the vote.
I will say this though. The arguments based on common negatives, like religion, age, socialism, name recognition, have to reckon with the fact that our current president was in an analogous position in 2008. A black man, too young, no name recognition, in fact a really weird African name, Muslim father. And he ran against the same candidate, a person that even then had huge name recognition and a huge political machine behind her.
Pretty sure your analysis is wrong Booman. Yes, you might get a few more crossovers from the Republicans if Hilary is the nominee, but not that many. You’re failing to take into account the literally visceral hatred of HRC by some many in the GOP, something they’ve very carefully stoked for 23+ years.
Republicans will crawl over broken glass naked while enduring the intense heat of a 10,000 suns to vote against HRC in the GE. They hate her that much.