New @CNN poll: Post-debate, voters move to Clinton via @jennagiesta https://t.co/2p9KDg8bHB
— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) December 23, 2015
Wait, I thought no one watched the debate. https://t.co/HzJlOVmaEu
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) December 23, 2015
Or is it just an “unskewed polls” issue? From the CNN article:
… Overall, Clinton tops Sanders among registered voters who are Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents 50% to 34%. That’s a slightly tighter margin than in late-November, when Clinton led 58% to 30% over Sanders.
But those overall results mask a shift back toward Clinton following the Democratic debate on Saturday night. In interviews conducted before the debate, Sanders ran closer to Clinton, with 37% support to Clinton’s 45%. Among those interviewed after the debate, Clinton’s lead grew to 60% vs. Sanders’ 27%.
The Sanders campaign focuses heavily on economic issues, and the new poll suggests he has boosted his standing on that issue. Yet Sanders continues to trail Clinton as the candidate better able to handle economic issues, 47% say they think Clinton is best able to handle it, 39% Sanders.
The former secretary of state has even larger leads on foreign policy matters and ISIS, however, topping Sanders 72% to 15% on foreign policy, 63% to 18% on ISIS. Clinton also holds a 21-point advantage over Sanders on handling gun policy, 51% prefer Clinton vs. 30% Sanders…
The gender gap that has persisted throughout the race for the Democratic nomination continues as the year comes to a close, with women favoring Clinton 56% to 23% and men about evenly divided, 46% Sanders to 44% Clinton. The gap is actually even larger when it comes to favorable views of the candidates: 82% of Democratic women hold a favorable view of Clinton, but that drops to 71% among men. And on Sanders, 84% of men hold a positive impression vs. just 64% of Democratic women.
Despite those gaps, Democratic men are actually more likely than Democratic women to say the party has a better chance to win in 2016 with Clinton than without her (64% of men say the best chance is with Clinton, 55% of women say the same). Overall, about 6 in 10 Democratic voters say the Democratic Party has a better chance of winning the presidency with Clinton as their nominee than with someone else (59% say the party has its best chance with Clinton, 38% someone else).
Democrats are more apt to see Clinton as holding several key attributes than they are Sanders. Nearly nine in 10 see Clinton as having the right experience to be president (89%), three-quarters call her someone they would be proud to have as president (76%), and 7 in 10 as someone who shares their values (72%). Smaller majorities say the same about Sanders, with the smallest gap coming on shared values (62% experience, 63% proud, 67% values)…
Your thoughts?
Baud
I’m sticking with me.
burnspbesq
I’m voting for the Democratic nominee, whoever it is. Presidential elections are, first and foremost, about the Supreme Court.
JCJ
@Baud:
It is Baud! or bust for me.
Gimlet
I was leaning toward Baud until I heard about his handling of Benghazi and his penchant for conducting official business on his unsecured personal email serer.
debbie
@Gimlet:
And he posts in Rusky!!!
Baud
@Gimlet:
If those are the only skeletons that have made it to light, I’m sitting pretty.
Baud
@debbie: Google Translate will be my Secretary of State.
RaflW
Sanders does not, to me, come across with the same credibility on Nat Sec (compared to Clinton. Compared to any republican? Then he’s a f*king Rhodes Scholar). Yes he voted the right way on Iraq, but then again so did Lincoln Chafee. He stuck his neck out, but from the relatively safe space of the Senate.
I worry that Clinton will be too hawkish. I really do. But I’m not loving the Bern on Nat Sec, though I probably need to get a bit more familiar than one debate that I watched with Twitter absorbing a bit too much of my attention (which still puts me ahead of a disturbing # of voters, in terms of being ‘informed’)
eta: All that said, I’m voting, and I’m voting for the Dem nominee.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Virginia votes March 1. I’m not sure who I will be voting for then (I’ve sent some money to MOM and BS). I don’t want HRC to win by default, but nothing I’ve seen thus far indicates to me that anyone other than her is going to be the Democratic nominee.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Marc
Sith Lord Sexypants is the candidate to vote for in 2016!
ArchTeryx
There’s a lot of theories being bandied about, such as Sanders not clicking with the all-important AA democratic primary demographic, being too monomanically focused on income inequality, too used to dealing with the wealthy white demographic that dominates Burlington and U of Vermont, and so on.
Some of each of those is true, I think, but ultimately my spitball is that Hillary is just much, much better known on the ground, by every one from Democratic precinct captains to regular primary voters, and most quite like her. She and Obama were so neck and neck because he drew a lot of NON-primary demographics into voting, and new voters and old voters nearly canceled one another out.
Bernie has, quite unfortunately, attracted a lot of the Purity Pony voters (which are, indeed, mostly white and well-off) and they are making a lot of obnoxious noise, but few of them are regular primary voters anyway. They’re looking for the New Hotness and Bernie’s who they latched on to, but I doubt they’ll decide anything. The regular primary voters will.
And for me? I’m white and male and anything but well-off, and I’m a Bernie supporter. But then, I’m also not a purity pony: I will crawl over broken glass to vote for whoever wins the D primary, because my life literally depends on it. Kill the ACA and kill Medicaid expansion, and I die in slow, screaming agony. That tends to clarify one’s thoughts wonderfully.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Baud: I’m not voting for you unless you have more skeletons.
Elie
I want our candidate to be prepared for the incredible challenge ahead. It is going to be tough, and it is better for us to accept and be prepared for that. I imagine (at least so far) that Hillary is stronger, but shit, it Bernie does what he needs to do then I am inking my checks and will work for him. I want a strong candidate for the Democrats who has the mental energy and the physical strength for what is ahead — not just during the election but for at least 4 years and hopefully 8 years after. It will be grueling and the fate of our country is dependent on the outcome. I will take it to the wall for whoever of our Democrats wins the nomination.
Felonius Monk
@Baud: I’m voting for Baud because I want Baudcare.
jl
I’m going full speed ahead with whoever the Dems nominate, and I expect the Dem loser to do so as well, with enthusiasm, and be overjoyed about the general election.
.
I’m more aligned with Sanders on issues, but the differences between Sanders and HRC are tiny compared to the gulf between even the bestest and sanest GOP candidate (Kasich) who is not very best and not very sane, and has no chance to get the nomination anyway since he doesn’t act like a vicious loon on a bad speed trip often enough (though he does act that way more than enough for me to conclude he would be a complete disaster).
Both HRC and Sanders have big weaknesses, IMHO, but I hope a good primary campaign improves them both.
Gimlet
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA:
Any candidate Trey Gowdy endorses is good enough for me. Baud in ’16
Ruckus
@ArchTeryx:
That tends to clarify one’s thoughts wonderfully.
It does, doesn’t it.
cmorenc
If you post this info over on DKos, you’ll get royal treatment from the Queen of De Nial. Who will threaten to draw and quarter you for being a defender of the corrupt status quo, but only after they show you a poll showing definitively that Bernie would wipe the floor against any of the GOP nominees, while Hillary would lose against any of them except Jim Gilmore.
ThresherK
Is this really savvyites having real-world opinions on Sanders, or just the Village’s penchant for loving second-running Democrats during primary season above all else, because it lets then lean on the tired idea that Democrats Can’t Win?
jl
@Felonius Monk: Baudcare is plenty hookers and blow, IIRC. And plenty of booze.
Ruckus
@cmorenc:
Did they get that poll from the RNC?
Baud
Baudcare covers pets.
Take that, Scandinavian socialists.
Felonius Monk
@jl: I hope so. That’s why it’s Baud all the way to the W House.
Gimlet
@ThresherK:
http://time.com/4157904/bernie-sanders-fundraising-donations-record/
Time – December 21, 2015
Bernie Sanders has broken the fundraising record for most contributions at this point in a presidential campaign, surpassing 2.3 million donations.
According to a Dec. 20 post on Sanders’ campaign website, the previous record-holder was Barack Obama, who had logged 2,209,636 donations by Dec. 31, 2011 during his reelection bid. Many of these contributions are from small donors: according to the Sanders website, the average donation that came in during the third Democratic debate on Saturday was less than $25.
Baud
@Felonius Monk: That is where the hookers and blow and booze will be stored. For safekeeping.
jl
@cmorenc: Which is wildly overinterpreting polls for the general election at this point in the election cycle. As far as I am concerned, polls on general election matchups show that the both Democrats have, on average a slight advantage over whichever loon the GOP coughs up for November 2016, which is a hopeful sign. The Dems don’t face an uphill batter whoever wins (though at this point HRC has to be the favorite). So, that is about all they mean.
jl
@Baud:
” That is where the hookers and blow and booze will be stored. For safekeeping. ”
Yeah, well, remember Mr President that the WH is the PEOPLE’S house.
Which reminds me, I’ll be in the neighborhood for a few weeks next January, so put that in your Fing executive calendar, OK?
Satby
I’m sticking with Baud. Baud is the candidate I’m going to the wall for.
Besides, I’m hoping being Secretary of Intense pays better than job coach.
Baud
@jl:
Of course. That’s why I plan to have Kegger Thursdays on the White House lawn every week. I want Americans to feel welcome in the Baud House.
PurpleGirl
I’m with burnspbesq — In the general I’ll vote for whoever the nominee is. I’ve been telling people for YEARS that the important issue who gets to appoint someone to the Supreme Court.
Baud
@Satby:
Yay. Another brick in the wall for Baud!
Gimlet
@Satby:
Bigger van down by the river.
Baud
BTW, the fact that, after the last 40 years, people here feel the need to say that they’ll vote for whoever wins the nomination makes me a little sad.
Baud
@Gimlet: A van by the Potomac River.
jl
@Baud:
Yep, We’re all thick as a brick for Baud!
Might be able to work that up into a nice campaign song.
redshirt
I still have lingering symptoms of Joementum and thus will be voting Lieberman, as usual.
NotMax
New episode of Black Mirror up on Netflix as of December 25. Recycled SF trope, but the special effects are top notch.
redshirt
@NotMax: Have you watched “Man in the High Castle” on Amazon?
Anoniminous
Working for Bernie in the primary, will work and vote for the Democratic Party nominee, no matter who she is.
NotMax
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
No bones about it, we must address the skeleton gap!
jl
@Baud: If you are the Obama to come, why don’t you go back in your Nobamatocome time machine and strangle the baby loonshow GOP in the crib?
Jeb? made a clip on that theme and look what it did for his campaign.
Not my fault the current GOP is so bad that I’ll gladly crawl over broken glass to vote for whichever Dem nominee wins. And neither of them are even promising hookers blow and booze Thursdays, so, yeah, I’ll take what I can damn well get at this point.
jl
Baud lets deadly but silents at his public addresses.
Oh, that is just teaser for the Baudscandals to come.;
redshirt
I am 100% voting anti-Republican at this point, and with a passion. I don’t care which D I’m voting for, in any election.
This makes me exactly like them, I ponder.
Baud
@jl:
Temporal Prime Directive.
@jl:
It’s none of our faults. But it is our cross to bear.
NotMax
@redshirt
Don’t have Prime. Did watch the initial episode when it was offered for free like a year or so ago. Wasn’t terribly impressed. Stylish to look at while emotionally a tundra, cold and empty. YMMV.
redshirt
@efgoldman: Did you just hear about that guy?
He’s fascinating. Like a living time capsule in a lot of ways.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Baud: My pets already have better coverage than I do.
Satby
@NotMax: I didn’t like it either, and I had loved the book. But it didn’t connect with me either. Disappointed.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
KNEEL BEFORE BAUD!
Satby
Any Roku users run into the problem of the unit not responding? It keeps having me reset the remote, but it’s the Roku itself that seems to get hung up. I can fix it by pulling the power and then reconnecting, but it’s a PIA to do almost every day. #firstworldproblems
schrodinger's cat
Baud for 2016, because he knows Newton’s Second Law of Motion.
magurakurin
Bernie Sanders? Nah. Unless someone can explain to me how proceeding with a lawsuit against the DNC helps anyone, anywhere at all. I mean, how does that even work? You’re suing the party you want to be the leader of? It’s starting to look like the goddamn Russian Revolution with this level of infighting. Enough.
And having Devine and Weaver running the general election. No thank you. Those two ass clowns shouldn’t be anywhere near the big show.
And shit is crazy over at DKOS, but I’ve been spending a lot of time there. There is still a core of sane people who continue to try and hold back the crazy. They are to be applauded. More and more it is being revealed that the hardcore Sanders people are not Democrats and many aren’t really even voters. One of the most vocal of the lot admitted a few days ago that she had only ever voted in two elections in her life…and she isn’t in her 20’s.
Time to get this done. Iowa can’t come soon enough. Bernie Sanders deciding to go to war with the DNC is one toke over the line for sure. He’s worn out his welcome as far as I can see.
redshirt
@Satby: I’m afraid I’m at the point where I just like watching a TV show, the experience is so strange. I feel as if perhaps I am the Man in the High Castle, watching these films brought to me in difficult circumstances.
NotMax
@Satby
Presume there’s a tech forum, or FAQs or contact info at the Roku website.
First though (if it’s a box and not the stick) try shifting the box a little to see if maybe there’s an impediment to stable wireless connectivity from where it now sits.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Satby:
EDIT: Deleted. Because GOOD GRIEF, you said you’ve been doing exactly that. Sorry! (Note to self: stop posting from hockey games. I shall wait until I return home from now on.)
BruceFromOhio
@burnspbesq: This. This country can tolerate a Rethuglican legislature and its mobs of two-bit ratfucking right-wing criminal morons for periods of time, but not much more in the Executive or Judiciary – that oxygen is almost out.
Davebo
You people supporting Baud are ludicrous!
Have you seen his tax plan? It’s a total budget buster! And rumor has it he’s considering Kim Kardashian West for his running mate.
Look, I’m not saying he’s a guy you wouldn’t want to have a beer with (but he’ll stick you with the check) but there is absolutely nothing in his background to qualify him to be the leader of the semi-free world.
Also, have you ever seen Baud and Trump in the same room? Because I haven’t.
ArchTeryx
@magurakurin: I actually think he SHOULD declare war on the DNC. While I don’t buy into a lot of the conspiracy theories that circulate around it, the level of incompetence there is pretty damn high when it comes to downballot races. That’s grievously wounded the Democratic state-level parties and led us, in part, to this terrible Congressional snake pit. (Natural voting trends against the incumbent party in the Presidency did the rest of the damage).
DWS is a pox on the party and very badly needs to go, for reasons that have less then zero to do with debate scheduling, Bernie, Hillary and the primaries.
BruceFromOhio
@magurakurin: The firedogs have always been with us.
Gaia, haven’t been at GOS in two cycles now, the shit of the purity troll squads got so toxic.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Davebo:
I think he’s just planning to mate with her. Sorry for the confusion.
Pogonip
@Marc: What, is Baud changing his name?
Baud
@BruceFromOhio: Yeah, I quit that place a long time ago.
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I’m more of a Scarlett Johansson type of guy.
@Davebo: Trump is too scared to be seen with me because I am proof positive that America is still great. Undercuts his whole campaign theme.
magurakurin
@ArchTeryx: No. A public, legal fight before the election? DWS is for all intents and purposes an Obama “appointee.” He wanted her there. So, any issues with her should be on Obama and have zero to do with Sanders and Clinton. And all that aside, it is internal party politics and having an independent lead the fight against elements inside the Democratic Party is shitty optics beyond belief. DWS is a tiny piece in the cog. She does appear to suck pretty bad, but removing her isn’t going to solve the Dems down ballot problems. And having a public legal battle with all the innuendos of conspiracy and foul play is really bad. You don’t believe that shit, but the Sanders campaign is claiming that it does. That they happen to agree that DWS sucks but for the wrong reasons….still makes them the wrong reasons.
Nah. Fuck Bernie. And double fuck Weaver and Devine. They suck way worse than DWS, I’ll tell you that.
redshirt
@efgoldman: Is this for the Purina Dog Bowl?
Pogonip
@ArchTeryx: Good heavens. That’s serious enough that I’ll vote even though I’d given it up in disgust. You pick your candidate that you think will keep you alive, post your pick, and I’ll vote for that person.
Emerald
@Satby: I’ve had Rokus for years, starting with the first one when it got only Netflix (and that one still works, btw). Occasionally they freeze and you have to reboot them by pulling the plug, and occasionally they reset themselves, but never that often. Call the support line. If it’s still under warranty you might get it replaced.
Baud
@Pogonip: I thought you had to change your name as president. Or is that the Pope?
Gin & Tonic
@efgoldman: How much are they paying you to watch the game on TV?
redshirt
@Baud: Pope Leonidas Maximus Washington the VII
Frankensteinbeck
@Baud:
It’s when you become a Buddhist monk. I’m voting for you for all three positions, plus Grand Poobah of the Royal Order of Water Buffaloes!
Emerald
@efgoldman: Yeah, but it has side effects.
Mainly, cable bills.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
Cool. I look good in a fez.
Davebo
Don’t forget, there’s Thursday Night Football on Saturday night!
Talk about silly…
Frankensteinbeck
@Baud:
I was going to vote for you for God, but then I thought: ‘Baud is a humble man. Supreme authority spiritual and temporal over this Earth, and all that walks, swims, and flies within its embrace, is enough for him.’
Matt McIrvin
@jl: I’ve been looking at those general-election polls myself, via Huffington Post’s aggregator, and it seems to me that they show Hillary and Bernie leading most of the Republicans by about the same amount… except that the question with Sanders is way underpolled, so it’s a lot less certain in his case and consequently easier to believe crazy high or low outliers. In any case, I see little strong evidence for one of them being more electable than the other, despite what their fans will tell you.
ArchTeryx
@Pogonip: Any candidate that will keep my health coverage intact. That’s the Ds, across the board. The Rs, across the board, want everyone like me to die. Really, it’s that simple, and most of the upmarket Purity Ponies will not ever face a situation like what I face.
Felonius Monk
@efgoldman:
Well, then this Baud’s for you.
redshirt
@Davebo: Saturday’s the new Thursday!
magurakurin
@Matt McIrvin: I agree. I don’t think those general head to head polls tells us much. I imagine that Clinton and Sanders have a fairly equal chance, but I think that the Clinton campaign machine is better poised to take advantage of that chance and put up the win. Bernie seems like a decent enough guy, but he has surrounded himself with buffoons. The fact that he didn’t know about the data breach on that Wednesday night until the Debbie Wasserman Shultz called him on Friday morning basically discounts him in my book. He’s not up to the task of running the general. But that is my opinion on the campaigns and it isn’t based on who is beating Ben Carson by more points this week or not.
jl
@Felonius Monk: Thanks.
The clips says that squirrelly little effer Baud refuses to prove that he exists. Another scandal.
If I were Baud, I’d up the ante on his booze for all proposal. he’ll need it.
mclaren
This is pure bullshit and spin. The usual frantically failed effort by media lackeys to convince the public that white is black, up is down, right is left, the Iraq invasion is a huge victory, yadda yadda yadda.
I’m voting for Bernie Sanders in the primary. And he’s going to win. And he’s going to blow away the Republican nominee next November. Everything else is spin doctoring and noise.
redshirt
@mclaren: LOL. You’re usually more pragmatic then this.
jl
@mclaren: I’m holding you to that. I note the time and date of your
predictionsolemn promise: 6:30 PM PST Dec 26, 2015. Anything goes wrong it’s on your head.redshirt
@mclaren:
I’ll quote you just for the record. And the LOL’s.
magurakurin
@jl: Holy Jinx, Batman. Having Mclaren come out for your guy is kind of like having Eddie Mush bet on your horse. Just tear up the tickets now.
mclaren
In case anyone wasn’t paying attention, Washington Post broke the story about Rubio’s dicey background on 12 December. Turns out Rubio’s brother in law is a major convicted drug dealer.
The big question now revolves around whether the guy financed Rubio’s campaigns at any point. No word on that…yet. This pretty much nukes Rubio’s chances as the Republican nominee, and also explains the ugly secret in his past that the Bush crime family has been smearing Rubio with to potential donors. Also explains why Romney passed on Rubio as a potential VP.
So what skeltons will erupt from Ted Cruz’s and the Donald’s closets? Child sex slaves? Crashed learjets carrying 4 tons of cocaine? Wife confined to a torture chamber in the family basement? Candidate beat a servant to death for getting the creme broulee to the dinner table too late?
chopper
like bernie sanders, i’m voting for clinton in the general.
redshirt
I like Sanders as the Senator from Vermont a lot.
I don’t think he’s got the game for a general election.
And Hillary does. Case closed.
chopper
@redshirt:
no, he’s not.
mclaren
@magurakurin:
I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again. In politics, no one can tell what’s gonna happen. We’ll see.
Pretty sure a Republican won’t be the next president, though.
srv
@mclaren: Everyone in the Beltway tells me Sanders has no chance. You need to start living in the same reality these people do:
magurakurin
@redshirt:
pretty much. It’s not personal, Bernie, It’s strictly business.
redshirt
@mclaren: You should listen to me. I’m correct in all political predictions. I’m like 538 times 2.
magurakurin
@srv: yeah, but 98% of the Democrats at BJ think you are a douche nozzle. But, you can’t trust polls.
redshirt
@magurakurin: Indeed. But I totally value Bernie’s contributions to this election, since he is indeed pushing Clinton left. We need to go left.
magurakurin
@mclaren:
I agree with you there. Strange bedfellows and all. But whatever gets us through night, I suppose. We gotta come together to beat the GOP that is for damn sure.
mclaren
You guys act like everything is decided. Here’s a wake-up call: the Rasmussen nationwide polls for the Democratic nomination in 17-20 December, 2008:
December 17–20, 2007 Hillary Clinton 39%, Barack Obama 27%, John Edwards 17%, Bill Richardson 3%, Joe Biden 3%, Dennis Kucinich 3%
Source: Wikipedia page for the 2008 Democratic election
Sound familiar?.
mclaren
@redshirt:
So you’re 200% correct?
Man, that’s impressive!
redshirt
@mclaren: Totally different cycle.
Would you like to make a friendly wager? You bet Sanders, I’ll take Clinton, the winner gets to rub it in the loser’s face?
redshirt
@mclaren: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.
magurakurin
@redshirt: His contribution will be severely lessened if they take this legal fight public throughout the primary. He is in danger of pissing away his legacy in my opinion. If he insists on making this some sort of crusade against the DNC “establishment” and not about inequality in society, then he becomes nothing but another two bit piker in my book.
redshirt
@magurakurin: Indeed. Especially over such a trifling matter in the scheme of things.
Let’s be clear, BJ: Sanders is the Paul Clan of the Democratic Party. In precisely the opposite meaning except when it comes to straight up fundraising.
mclaren
@efgoldman:
Read between the lines. Rubio is one of the few sane-seeming Repub presidential candidates. This blows him away. So now we’ve only got three sane-seeming Repub candidates left, Kasich (who is basically dead in the water) and Jeb! (who is even deader, polling nationwide at 3% and still dropping) and Cruz (who is so vehemently hated by the Republican party elites that they’d rather nominate Vladimir Illich Lenin’s mummified corpse than him).
So this means that we are increasingly facing a situation in which only the certifiable crazies are likely to get the Republican nomination. Trump or Carson or whoever.
That in turn means that any nominee the Democratic party puts up is very likely to win. If the Democrats nominate a dead armadillo scraped off the center line in the highway, it would probably win if the Repubs nominate a crazy person like Carson or Trump.
So this is the perfect situation for the Democrats to push it hard and nominate the most far-left candidate they possibly can. We’re never going to get a better chance to do that and win the election in my lifetime.
That’s the reasoning. Gabiche?
redshirt
@mclaren: That’s pretty good reasoning, actually. Bernie’s still not the guy.
We should import PM Trudeau from Canada. He could pull it off.
magurakurin
From Eddie Mush’s lips to God’s ears.
dogwood
@mclaren:
In order for these numbers to mean what you think they mean, you have to believe that Bernie Sanders has political skills and personal appeal comparable to those of Barack Obama. I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@mclaren:
Bales of cocaine.
magurakurin
@dogwood: You also have to pretend that a three-person race is the same thing as a two-person race. And that a 39 to 27 spread is more or less the same as a 60 to 30 spread. But otherwise, the similarities are stunning.
redshirt
@mclaren: Also, I would argue that having a woman President will cause enough change in and of itself to produce a highly invigorating effect on the Republic. Back to back with the first black President and it will be enough to open a new Overton Window.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Every election cycle is different. That said, it’s only clear that this election cycle is different from 2008’s in hindsight. Everything is 20/20 in hindsight.
A lot of things could happen between now and next November. That’s 11 months away. The economy could crash. There could be a major terror attack. There could be some massive scandal that upheaves the entire political dynamic. Some issue that’s way off the radar right now, like students loans, could become central if there’s a huge default or a major institutional collapse. One of the Supremes might kick the bucket. The Repubs in congress might come up with something so batshit insane that it completely changes the political landscape.
We don’t know what the political dynamic is yet. Remember that the 2008 election only started to get defined after the extent of the subprime housing crash rippled into the rest of the economy and we got a global financial meltdown. That took a while.
We just don’t know the overall shape of this election cycle yet.
magurakurin
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
+1 like
mclaren
@dogwood:
I’ve heard Bernie Sanders speak in person. Have you? I found him electrifying. Maybe it’s just me. But they packed a stadium to full capacity and had to turn people away and play his speech on jumbotrons for 8,000 people outside the building.
Bernie kicks ass and takes names. I would put him up against Barack Obama as a public speaker any day. Obama comes off as more Spocklike and distant, Bernie is like a working stiff with an I.Q. of 150 telling it like it is.
redshirt
@mclaren: All true.
Are you ducking my bet?
gogol's wife
I’ve heard Barack Obama speak in person. He is not distant.
Even on video he is not distant. I could find at least five speeches on YouTube that will bring you to tears.
magurakurin
@mclaren:
You’re just fucking with us now.
redshirt
@mclaren: I have not, but I respect that a lot of people are fired up and ready to go because of Bernie.
If Sanders is the nominee I will support him 100% and do everything I can to help him win. I just rather like Clinton’s chances against hypothetical Rethug at this early stage a LOT more. And so I will vote Clinton because nothing else matters than crushing Rethugs.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Now that’s probably true. This is why I like this election. Either way, we’re likely to get a major change for the better. Good times! Plus, once the next Democratic president nominates some sane liberal judges to the Supreme Court, we can look forward to a decision to revisit that wretched Citizens United bullshit and reverse it. The constitutional amendment was never gonna fly, but the Supremes can reverse themselves. Dred Scott and all that.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Dred Scott wasn’t overturned by the Supreme Court. It was made bad law by the 14th Amendment.
ETA: What you want is Plessy v. Ferguson being overturned by Brown v. Board of Education.
Davebo
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I just don’t see anyone gaining traction for something Rubio’s brother in law did when Rubio was 16.
Gin & Tonic
@mclaren: I’ve heard Bernie Sanders speak in person. Have you? I found him electrifying.
Not to Godwin this thing, but my mother always said the most electrifying public speaker she ever saw in her life was… you know.
Aaron
Some good poling is showing Sanders being stronger then clinton in the general. I suspect its b/c Sanders would motivate the base more.
With that said: I nominate Lizard Man.
Bobby Thomson
@magurakurin: this. I was thinking fo throwing a protest vote Bernie’s way if he was still around when my state gets to voting, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to reward that shit show.
redshirt
@Aaron: Links?
I find it hard to conceive that a frumpy 70 year old white man would have more juice then the first woman president ever. And the wife of a former President to boot, oddly.
Davebo
@Aaron: So Dean Chambers is at it again?
brantl
They don’t love Bernie, cause they don’t know Bernie. It’s a bullshit reason, but it’s true.
mclaren
@redshirt:
I think Hillary’s chances against any Republican excellent because Hillary has inherited essentially all of Obama’s finely tuned digital-media and polling ground game. All the experts who put together Obama’s 2012 electoral juggernaut have been poached by HIllary, and the Repubs have essentially had to start over at zero with nothing after the fiasco of Romney’s ORCA system melting down.
But notice something… If Bernie is the nominee, Hillary’s entire Obama-legacy DNC apparatus will become his. So in effect Obama’s finely tuned micropolling and social media juggernaut will get repurposed as Bernie’s. And that can very easily happen. If Bernie blows out the early states with a big lead and turns Super Tuesday into a non-linear runaway, Hillary could well wind up dwindling to a distant second.
Source: “Can Republicans Get Ahead In The 2016 Digital Race?” NPR.org, 26 March 2015.
Here’s another way in which this election is different from the last one: independents are on track to outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined.
Source: Poll: inpdendents will soon outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined, 6 July 2015.
Bernie polls especially well among independents.
dogwood
@mclaren:
Of course it’s not “just you”. There’s always a real market for the “kicks ass and takes names” candidate. That might very well make him a great agitator, but not necessarily a great orator. I doubt the the people at Emmanual AME found the President’s eulogy “Spock like and distant”. Likewise those who heard his remarks in Tuscon. When Bernie has to speak to a wider swathe than his political fans about something other than economics, then we can compare him to Barack Obama as an orator.
mclaren
@Davebo:
What if Rubio’s drug-dealer brother-in-law contributed to one of his early political campaigns? There are a lot of worms left to crawl out from under this rock.
redshirt
@mclaren: This cycle, Independents might be just as likely to vote for Trump. Are you willing to roll the dice in a Sanders v. Trump election?
dmsilev
Presented without comment, an article blurb from the front page of the NYT website:
Bobby Thomson
@mclaren:
A front runner ten points shy of 50% nationally? Third place only twenty points back? Six candidates with at least 3%? Second place only ten points back nationally?
I’m not seeing any of those things today – on the Democratic side.
Davebo
@mclaren: Well, he’s been out since 2000 so I suppose it’s possible but what if he did?
Last I heard he lived with Rubio’s mother in Miami. All things considered, I’d imagine there’d be a certain backlash to anyone trying to make hay of it which is probably why no one has.
mclaren
@redshirt:
That would be the perfect Platonic ideal situation for Bernie to blow away the Republicans in a landslide. Bernie’s whole shtick is running against greedy ignorant sociopathic billionaires…and Trump is a greedy ignorant sociopathic billionaire.
Bernie would nuke Trump from orbit. It wouldn’t even be close. If Trump were the nominee, it would also probably destroy the Republican party. So a win-win.
mclaren
@Bobby Thomson:
You make good points. Also we’re not living in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq debacle or the global financial meltdown.
Every election cycle is different. Still, history never repeats — but it does rhyme. This election has a lot of the same feel as the JFK-after-Eisenhower election, from what I’ve read of the 1960 election. People want a more liberal progressive turn and young people are especially energized.
I could be wrong. Time will tell.
Bobby Thomson
@mclaren:
None of those things point to Sanders being elected. Supreme court fights motivate Republican voters much, much more than Democratic voters. There’s probably nothing more effective at turning out Republican votes. They are the evil party and Democrats are the stupid party.
You want to know what’s actually much more likely than any of those things? Sanders dies before the election. There’s no way he could even live through his first term, with the stresses of the office and his temperament.
magurakurin
I’m over Bernie Sanders. This clip is how I see the primary now. And Bernie Sanders ain’t James Coburn in this scene.
redshirt
@efgoldman: Do you have a “most terrifying” Cold War memory?
I’d like to hear of it if so.
Gvg
Bernie really is still suing the dnc, the idiot per Google search. I do not like that, even though I don’t really like the dnc myself. It already makes me uncomfortable that a lifetime independent now chooses to run for the democratic nomination. It has bothered some here and not others. Well this is not going to reassure whatever percent agree with me and I am so sick of conspiracy theories I don’t want to hear them from my side. I consider it bad judgement on Bernie’s part.
Davebo
I like Bernie. He seems to be a good man with strong convictions.
But he doesn’t have a chance at the nomination. First, he’s been a democrat for a little over a month.
If he moves Clinton to the left a bit during the primaries it will only last through the primaries and I’m not sure he’s even accomplished that.
redshirt
@Davebo: Seriously, this: He just joined the Democratic Party.
dogwood
@redshirt:
When did Bernie join the Party?
Davebo
@dogwood: November of this year. He had to to get on the ballot in New Hampshire.
redshirt
Not that I care – I’m not a member of the Democratic Party just like I’ll never be a member of any party.
redshirt
@efgoldman: Yeah, I imagine this is it.
Can you share any thoughts/memories from then?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@mclaren:
Disagree.
This is the perfect time for the Democrats to try to make sure they have the longest and widest coattails possible in the House and Senate elections, and in the State and Local races running at the same time. The Leftestmostest Leftist in history isn’t going to be able to do much without Democratic majorities in the legislature. Hillary, and Bernie and Martin, should be working hard throughout 2016 to make sure Team D runs the table.
There’s also redistricting coming after the 2020 Census. Having a weak team in place in January 2017 would make it very tough for the 2020s to be good for Democrats and the country. :-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
What bugs me about the Sanders phenomenon is the way it feeds and feeds off the cult of the presidency
redshirt
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I agree 1000%. The goal should be to get Democrats elected everywhere possible.
dogwood
@Davebo:
That doesn’t cut it with me. If he wanted to run for the Democratic nomination, he should have joined the party before he announced his candidacy. Suing the DNC shows how ridiculously naive and perhaps even arrogant the Sanders people are. As a President with no real ties to the Democratic Party, he can’t afford to piss of congressional dems. if he wants to accomplish anything. And since democrats don’t show much loyalty to presidents of their own party, I doubt that many will be willing to go out on a limb for Bernie.
Kropadope
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Funny you should say that, because it seems that Clinton’s supporters’ only argument is that winning the presidency is all-important while I’m pretty sure Sanders and his supporters are under no illusions that the aspirational “revolution” at the ballot box wouldn’t need to include every public office.
Frankensteinbeck
@efgoldman:
Man. And I thought being a child in the early 80s going to bed at night wondering if nuclear war would kill me in my sleep was bad. The Cold War SUCKED.
Kropadope
@dogwood:
Why? What have congressional dems done for him except line up their superdelegate votes behind Hillary before the first vote is cast? If Bernie’s elected the Democrats will work with him because, when it comes down to it, they want approximately the same things and it’s their own asses on the line in 2018 if they don’t.
22over7
@dogwood: This, exactly. Bernie has no coattails, no influence in the states. Say what you will, the Clintons do.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Why would Congressional Democrats take a risk for a person who is not a Democrat? Has Bernie ever worked to help them be re-elected? Has he ever done the rubber chicken circuit?
redshirt
@22over7: This more than anything. Clinton will bring things to your state based on promises. Promises given for favors. Favors to be used later. That’s politics.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope:
I suspect that you ascribe far too much power to the presidency. Please tell me you didn’t major in government or political science.
dogwood
@Kropadope:
Really? They’re gonna work with Bernie because they’re asses will be on the line in ’18 if they don’t? Dems will still be in the minority inCongress so neither Bernie or Hillary will be accomplishing much of anything. And their asses will be on the line in ’18 because dems don’t turn it in midterm elections.
chopper
@Omnes Omnibus:
so far as I can tell the only person sanders has ever lifted a finger to get elected was sanders, and that ain’t lookin to change anytime soon.
i guess if you believe hard enough, coat tails magically appear. in the real world, not so much.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
You’re forgetting the political revolution. Because Bernie is magic.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus:
Please tell me what I have said that makes you believe this or else I will continue to perceive this line of argumentation, as I already explained earlier, as mere projection.
gwangung
@dogwood: A lot of Sanders supporters, despite their rhetoric, seem to believe in top down diffusion of change. I don’t see a lot of work of bottom up or grassroots efforts to give him a coalition to work with.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Then why focus on Sanders? Me, I want a Democratic candidate who might have some coattails. I don’t thing Bernie is that person. He has no following in the Democratic Party. For some reason…. HRC has people at every level who either like her or owe her. She has can have coattails.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus:
Hey, Bernie’s late to the game of high-profile campaigning and I think it’s a major fault of his that he hadn’t stepped up sooner regarding candidates or issues of national importance. I take issue with a lot of his votes too. He’s an imperfect candidate, passable. I’ll settle for him.
Hillary Clinton has been decade upon decade of failure to outright destruction.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Not really an answer, but thanks…
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus:
Coattails don’t come from the party elite, they come from voters showing up to the polls. The DNC’s and elected Democrats’ actions surrounding this primary will depress turnout because it is feeding the impression that votes don’t matter. My vote for President in blue MA sure as hell doesn’t count for a damn thing, so forgive me for thinking that the primary shouldn’t just be glossed over by the byproduct of an elite Democratic circle jerk.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: I disagree with your analysis. Honestly, I think your vote and your opinion touches about seven people.
dogwood
@Kropadope:
What exactly is the DNC doing in this primary season that is going to depress turnout? If you mean that Bernie’s voters won’t turn out if he doesn’t win the nomination, then that’s about those voters not the DNC.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, sorry, I didn’t really know how to answer the particular question because I didn’t know any particular place to determine whether the assertion underlying your question about him supporting candidates was, in fact, true. Meanwhile the Google machine only wants to cough up information about the 2016 Presidential election. I’ve decided to treat it as true, for the sake of argument, despite not finding you generally very credible.
So, I don’t honestly think there is any reason that Congressional Democrats should declare for Bernie Sanders other than his qualities as an individual candidate. That doesn’t mean they need to line up behind a single candidate who already has all the advantages and have the machine try to decide the outcome before the Iowa caucus. It creates a bad image.
And honestly, who cares who owes whom favors in the party. That’ll grease the wheels for the nomination, but people actually need to come out and vote for the candidates in the general no matter how you slice it. HRC and DWS have gotten far in the party by raising funds and trading favors but HRC’s “accomplishments” are near-uniformly negative. DWS has me contemplating a full boycott of the Democrats in 2016. I’m not too fond of my seat-warming Senator Markey either.
Kropadope
@dogwood: You don’t think trying to curtail any potential competitiveness in the primary will reduce turnout? It’s literally the only point where I could conceivably cast a vote that matters with respect to the presidency. I’ll show up to vote regardless, but other people aren’t as dedicated as I am.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Good luck, kid.
Matt McIrvin
@mclaren:
No, actually. What that 2008 poll shows is a three-way race, where the major non-Clinton candidates combined poll higher than Clinton. What we’ve got now is a two-way race breaking toward Clinton nearly 2-1.
Now, as a suggestion of how someone other than Donald Trump could get the Republican nomination, the Democrats in 2008 might be a useful analogy.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: Huh?
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: Wait, a different situation may end in different result?
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: See, above.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s just crazy talk.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus: There were three paragraphs in that post. Help me out here.
dogwood
@Kropadope:
You’re not really answering the question. What is the DNC doing to curtail competeiveness? Bernie hasn’t been stopped from raising money, organizing a ground game and hustling for votes. There’s no evidence that party establishment endorsements have much if any effect on voting behavior.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropadope: Why should I? I’ve indicated the you bore me. I was going to bed… you seen to want validation from me…. Cheers…
NotMax
@efgoldman
IIRC, the cloth coat reference was in the Checkers speech, some years before the JFK – Nixon contest. The speech that kept him from being hounded out of the vice-presidency.
Kropadope
@dogwood: They’re curtailing competitiveness through the superdelegate system, the limited debate schedule, and MSM influence. They spread misinformation regarding this datat breach; including some I’ve seen repeated here like Bernie didn’t know about the breach til Friday. That’s funny, since Josh Uretsky was fired on Thursday. They also violated the agreement surrounding the voter information software by cutting off the Sanders campaign’s access without giving him written notice and 10 days to address grievances.
Kropadope
@Omnes Omnibus:
‘
I want you to stop going out of your way to be a dick to me. You make all these weird assertions about me that have no grounding in what I’m saying. Today, in fact, one such assertion about me was directly contradicted by one of my earlier posts. You’re mad at me because I vote the person, not the party, and you can’t bear any criticism of the party’s near-inevitable candidate or the party’s effort to close the gap with 100% inevitable.
divF
I’ve seen a fair amount written about this issue, and my impression is that the DNC’s actions were quite in line with what I have seen professionally over the years. I’ve been responsible for systems that were the conduit for security breaches into a larger organization, and the standard practice has been that, once the breach was detected, they cut you off completely until the computer security people were completely satisfied that the leak has been fixed. They restored access to Sanders’ campaign in less than 48 hours (IIRC, it was closer to 24). That is pretty rapid turnaround, under the circumstances. In any case, there is no nonsense about giving anyone 10 days to respond – they will (and should) cut you off immediately.
The last time it happened to me, it cost us a couple of weeks of productive work. To prevent it from happening again, we had to set up a pretty elaborate firewall system to make the system administrators happy.
Emerald
@redshirt: I can. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis clearly. I was 11. I remember standing in front of our console black & white TV and watching Huntley and Brinkley tell us how close we were to an atomic war (we said “atomic” in those days.)
It was the first time in my life that I realized I could die.
I started to cry.
Kropadope
@divF:
Umm, the breach was from a known issue that provided all the campaigns access to one another’s information and was resolved in 30 minutes days before the Sanders campaign had its access cut off. So, the practice you describe isn’t relevant to this situation.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Some people high up in the Sanders campaign apparently think that politics is a blood sport rather than a battle of ideas where teams are important.
Booman Tribune
Sheesh.
Cheers,
Scott.
dogwood
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I saw that post on Booman. It’s obvious that the Sanders people are getting deep into conspiracy theories. I don’t like that crap when wingnuts spread it and I really hate it when liberals engage in it. The people running the Sanders campaign are not an asset to the candidate. If it was perfectly legitimate to reject Hillary Clinton for surrounding herself with people like Mark Penn in ’08, then no one should bitch when people are turned off by these unprofessional Sanders hacks.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: @dogwood: Seems like people are noticing
magurakurin
@Kropadope: Sanders himself told Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Friday morning that he didn’t know about. So, he’s a liar? Or he forgot? Or DWS lied, but Sanders didn’t feel the need to correct her. Fuck this shit. Fuck Bernie. Fuck Devine. Fuck Weaver. They are speeding toward hackdom faster and faster with each passing day.
Vote for who you want. Do what you want. I’m gonna vote for every single Democrat I can find on my ballot. If Sanders in on there, so be it. I seriously, seriously, seriously doubt that he will.
mclaren
@Kropadope:
Actually, coattails come from a major issue that galvanizes most of the party plus massive prolonged ground work at the state and local level. Years and years and years and years and years of hard work at the state and local level.
Talking about “coattails” without those years and years and years and years and years of hard work at the state and local level is simply silly.
Democrats have let the state and local elections slide for many years. Democrats have not developed the kind of intensive political infrastructure that Republicans have at the college and state and local level. Until and unless we do that, we’re not going to take back the statehouses or the governorships or the congressional seats.
Confusing the presidency with the state and local level is just a misconception. Congressional majorities don’t materialize by magic — they appear as the result of lots of message discipline on an issue that most of the voters care passionately about, combined with immense amounts of prolonged intensive hand-pressing and showing up at school board meetings and city council meetings and mayoral races and congressional districts. The Republicans have Fox News plus Young Republican clubs in the colleges plus think tanks that support them by spewing out white paper bullshit to make the Repubs’ crap seem intellectually respectable. The Democrats haven’t bothered to create anything like that. So we lose and lose and lose at the state and local level even though the issues are mostly on our side. Isolated guys like Krugman debunk the Republican con jobs but the Demos have no systematic organized setup to push back against the Repub lies and constantly push back against the Repub propaganda to the newspapers and TV channels.
Let’s not misperceive this election as being about taking back a congressional majority. This election is about the presidency. If Democrats want to get a solid congressional majority, we’ll need to do a lot of work over quite a few years and build lots of boring political infrastructure to get there.
divF
@Kropadope:
The 30-45 minutes refers to the amount of time the firewall was thought to be breached. The rest of the 24 hours was spent (1) determining from the logs what data was compromised, and by whom; and (2) some agreement being reached between the Sanders campaign and the DNC about remedies. I also suspect that there were other assessments of the overall security of campaign data, even after the proximate cause of the breach was fixed. Again, if anyone in my organization had been caught grabbing data to which we weren’t supposed to have access, even in the relatively innocuous part of the computing I am in (i.e. no proprietary or export-controlled code / data), I would have been asked some tough questions before having access restored: a complete accounting of who / what / why, an audit trail demonstrating that the compromised data had been deleted, and disciplinary action against whomever had been responsible, would have been the minimum. That is, in fact, what took place. In any case, 24 hours is still a short time for such a process to be carried out, and I suspect that there was a handshake agreement between Hillary and Bernie to get it settled before the debate.
divF
@divF:
One more thing: the reason why computer security people tend to be tough and nasty about this sort of breach is that, on a shared user facility, there is a much higher level of risk, against which the final line of defense is that the users themselves are trustworthy. That is why firing was an appropriate remedy.
Applejinx
@Kropadope: This. Bernie’s campaign isn’t suing Hillary. We need Hillary to be as untainted as possible, and pushed as left as possible, in the event that the Democrats have to run with her as Bernie always expected they would.
Note the framing of that. It’s like after the collapse of the economy, two Bush terms, a pointless Iraq war and the rise of a demented fascist named Trump, Hillary still has to be pushed left and defended by those who are expected to run AGAINST her, just to protect what usefulness she’d have.
It’s true. Bernie did the ‘nobody wants to hear about your damn emails’ for a reason. Suing the DNC (over $600,000 in lost fundraising and an irreplaceable day of primary campaigning, which is a big deal) is specific to the DNC for a reason, and that’s politics, they are still fighting for Hillary just as hard as they possibly can, as if Bernie was some Trump-like challenger and not presenting issues right at the heart of the Democratic party, as if he was not representing the people who’ll be voting.
That’s politics too. No complaints here, it was always going to be a very serious fight.
Let’s (like the candidates) make an effort to keep from sinking into the mud, and remember they’re both way better than the Republicans or Trump. Remember, Hillary coattails are machine pol coattails and a big deal, furthering the ends of the same DNC that was prepared to cancel Bernie’s campaign as long as they wanted just because they could—and Bernie coattails are mostly about turnout and engaging a new generation into the political process even if it’s kind of grimey and awful.
And let’s not be over-precious about this political process even while ratfucking away like maniacs. Come January I’ll already be canvassing and data-entering for Bernie, whether or not the usual Clinton operatives are pushing their old inevitability/coronation narrative as hard as they can in every possible way, fair or foul. I respect the skills and connections and determination, truly I do. I also think it’s taking a risk with the country and we’re better off trying to run with the more energized young voters and Bernie.
We WILL win either way, which is why this primary is so amazingly hotly contested. That forgives a lot.
Zinsky
The Clintons have semi trailers full of dirty baggage they are dragging behind them. I can hardly wait to hear how Hillary nuances the “Bill is a rapist” allegations that are inevitably coming from Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers. “So, tell me, Mrs. Clinton, how you can be against Donald Trump’s misogynistic comments, when your husband has been accused of rape by at least three women?” Yeah, that should be fun…NOT! Vote Bernie!
Cleos Mom
@Emerald: I was 12, and my most vivid memory of that week is watching my father leave for work and wondering if I’d ever see him again.
Later we found out how well-founded our fears were.
Cleos Mom
@Zinsky: Yep, we’ll see lots of sexism on parade in 2016 if Mrs. Clinton gets the nomination. In fact, we just did; i.,e., she won’t be a “real” President. Still just Bill’s wife.
different-church-lady
@mclaren:
It’s all fun and games until someone elects the greedy ignorant sociopathic billionaire.
cmorenc
@efgoldman:
I was in 6th grade when the Cuba missile crisis was ongoing, and vividly recall how white-knuckle nervous all the adults in my small NC hometown were – I specifically remember a discussion in the local barbershop where everyone was discussing blast radius and lethal radiation radius etc. because our town was only 35 miles from the huge Fort Bragg army base and only 80 miles from the SAC bomber base in Goldsboro, both for-sure nuclear targets of the Ruskies.
David Koch
Debates helped Hillary?
but, but I was told by our ProgressiveBetters™ debates could only help Sanders.
How could the vaunted blogosphere be wrong?
David Koch
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@mclaren: You make some good points, but I’m not so pessimistic.
Remember the 1980 election? We had a Democratic president famous for “malaise”; one holed-up in the White House and not campaigning because of the Iran Hostage Crisis (with a nightly TV counter to remind us about it); a high-inflation economy (with popular magazines telling people how to take out student loans at 7% and invest them in 14% CDs) that was being crushed by high oil prices and about to be squeezed by Paul Volker’s 20% interest rates.
Even with all of that, the election was close and Reagan wasn’t expected to flip the Senate. Election night was a surprise.
Messages like “are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?” “There you go again. I was for a different bill…” were sufficient to give RWR the margin to give him a big victory.
Sure, years of preparation and building a strong foundation in state and local government is the best way to ensure an enduring national majority. But it’s not necessary nor sufficient. Each election is different. But one thing that is always important is having a compelling message that a broad and deep fraction of the electorate can internalize and agree with. Running as the Leftiestleftist Lefty Ever isn’t a good strategy now (and may not be in my remaining lifetime). Party discipline is vital – e.g. “We’re all Democrats and we can do great things together! (We can argue about the details later)”. Once we have a nominee, s/he needs to build a national message and get as many candidates as possible to sign on to it. They need to run and campaign as a team if they want to have enough votes to govern effectively.
Will they do it? Can they find a national message? Dunno. We’ll see.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Uncle Cosmo
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Foolish fellow, trying to reason with the BJ Village Idiot post(ur)ing from his padded cell in the Unreconstructed Stalinist wing of the insane asylum.
Still, I’m glad you took the trouble. Brilliant, succinct & about 140% correct.
Lurking Canadian
@Zinsky: You don’t think “My husband isn’t running for office. In fact my husband is constitutionally barred from running for office” will suffice?
sparrow
@Aaron: There are people I know, and I disagree with them strongly, that have sat out the last several elections, hate Hillary, and want to vote for Sanders, and claim (now) that they will never vote for Clinton. One thing I will give the “pragmatic” Hillary voters is that I don’t think they are stupid enough to stay home if Hillz loses the nomination. To put it more positively for Sanders, he is motivating people to vote that will not ever get motivated by Clinton. Fair or not, she carries a lot of baggage and alienates a lot of people. This is something I find odd about the “pragmatic Hillary” supporters. I’m not actually convinced she does better than Sanders in the general, because of her “chilling effect” on people who are not plugged-in die-hard democrats.
Brachiator
It’s not just pundits who were wrong here, but many Balloon Juicers who were whining that there weren’t enough debates or that the DNC was deliberately hiding the debates or doing something that would make it hard for people to watch them and to form an opinion.
Sanders lost me over his foreign policy and national security incoherence. And he keeps harping on his Iraq vote in the past, as though that alone was sufficient to give him foreign policy bona fides. It’s not.
Yeah, I would still vote for him if he became the nominee, but I don’t think that is going to happen. I also am not sure that his support will be all that important if Clinton becomes the nominee. Could he rally his supporters and the purity ponies or will that be the job of any VP candidate?
The polls need to look at gender and the Democrats need to adjust. Males, especially white males tend to vote for the GOP and do more so when there is a strong conservative sentiment. Clinton needs to chip away at this, especially among the high school only group and those who have felt alienated from both parties. She may also have a tougher time with some women than many might expect. The early matchup polls don’t mean all that much.
Applejinx
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Might never be a better time to run as Lefty McLefterson (in THIS country, that’s not saying much!)
Media’s more discredited than ever: did you see the one where they tried to debunk a bunch of Trump supporters and the Trump supporters just doubled down on their position? People have been lied to waaaay too much and are mistrustful and looking for authentic personalities to come in and clean house.
You can do that in various ways. One is, like Trump, be a big authoritarian blowhard.
Another is to be earnestly committed to policies that ‘might work’ (Bernie’s stuff WILL work given that he’s correct about the causes. If all good things are only brought by kajillionaire wealth and job creators, we dun fucked up if we elect Bernie. On the other hand if finance and the wealthy are a massive cancer eating all of America, we more or less need a general of the opposing forces if we’re going to deal with them at all)
In that sense it’s not super important whether we can get all the people everywhere to watch Mark Blyth videos, learn about global economics and how much it’s not kitchen-table economics, check out what’s really happened in countries pursuing austerity politics… this in an environment still primarily controlled by various Pravda-like media and barely countered by a ‘tech alternative media’ that’s nine parts loony bin to one part real truth.
It’s more important to SEEM populist in a convincing way. Some people will do that by hammering away at their core issues and taking the simple (if not easy) approach of being a mensch, about all things, whatever happens. It’s easy to get inspired by that because it’s not calculated, but you have to trust: both that the guy does his homework and isn’t faking, and that other people can also be turned on by him. With that, the fundraising records and stadium filling are a big help, otherwise you’d get cynical quick.
Another way is to sign off with a hearty ‘may the Force be with you!’. With that, you have to trust that people are pretty dumb, and people ARE pretty dumb, and you can generally count on people to not care about policy or even know what it is, just whether they can relate to the politician. Can we count on that being a help and not a hindrance? Too early to tell.
The one thing I am absolutely certain is this: no, that wasn’t an ad paid for by JJ Abrams :) it would be freaking hilarious if it was, but that’s impossible. It was a high-octane topical pander establishing that by God, Hillary Clinton knows what year it is, and what movie people want to watch. Woot :)
Could be worse. The first Bush famously didn’t know what a supermarket barcode scanner was, because the servants buy and cook his food for him.
Brachiator
To the contrary. The Tea Party gained power by promising simple answers to complex problems. They promised a return to the America of 1840, when life was good for a few.
Trump doubles down on this and appeals to stupid, fearful people. “Throw illegal immigrants out and your problems will be solved. Keep Muslims out and your problems will be solved. I pretend to be a successful businessman, so jobs.” This is not even populism for dummies.
Sanders has the honesty and integrity that Trump has never had and never will have, but I am not convinced that Sanders has all the answers. I think his populism is more sincere, but still flawed.
And we are still trying to recover from the flim flam artists of the Bush/Cheney regime, another bunch of grifters who promised much but who delivered only pain and hardship. We need better.
Applejinx
@Brachiator: I gotta encourage looking into Mark Blyth. Spend some time learning how large-scale economics works, from the guy. There’s a lot to learn.
The point isn’t that our world is precarious and getting by on scraps and pittances, needing to be nursed back to health so we have to go carefully.
The point is that the world is continually affected by a BIG HONKING THUMB on the scales, this whole time, distorting things about as hard as they could possibly be distorted. That is Capital, protecting itself in an exponential feedback loop as it begins to tell itself stories and believe them.
The world, the economy, are nowhere near as fragile as it’s made out to seem.
Restoring a society that works noticeably better than what we’ve got is not complicated. It involves kicking some of the big honking thumbs off the scales. Yes this would create a power vacuum, but what else is new! Things can stabilize if we’re not trying to stabilize them in a way that’s killing 90% of the citizens.
Brachiator
@Applejinx:
I did not say that the economy was especially fragile. I said that the Bush/Cheney regime wrecked the economy and created a fair degree of chaos with respect to foreign affairs (and shamefully and needlessly devastated Iraq for vile personal and political gain).
However, no matter how you look at it, the economic recovery has been slow and fitful. I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that Sanders (or even Mark Blyth) has the magical solution.
One huge error on Obama’s part has not that he has been dependent on a Wall Street view from his advisors, but that his advisors were good on the initial macroeconomic perspective, needed in restoring elements of the economy, but have been relatively useless on the nuts and bolts of tax and lower level economic policy, including long term job creation outside of any large scale economic stimulus.
Paul Krugman had a good review of works of key economists, including Blyth, if the link is still active here, in a look on the weak case for austerity in 2013.
Applejinx
@Brachiator: Fair enough. Maybe there’s no magical solution, we just need to not be dragged in the wrong directions, kicking and screaming.
Bear in mind that jobs are increasingly a thing of the past in market sector after market sector, so we’re kinda transforming from a ‘money is reward for jobs’ scenario to a ‘money is reward TO jobs’ scenario.
In that light, large scale economic stimulus is fine and how things will work going forward. To get rich, you sell to the proles faster than taxation can take it away. I don’t see a future for ‘capital investment’, it’s way over-leveraged already. I’m looking for a ‘investment in the consumer, directly’ model, and then capitalism can work as intended. Doesn’t work unless people can all be producers, and in the robotic future they simply can’t.
gorram
I’m not clear on what exactly they’re comparing in terms of the support percentages before and immediately after the debate, but it sounds like they might be dividing the recent polling responses down the middle between those before and after the debate. If that’s the case, then what are their sample sizes? They might have whittled it down to something that’s not terribly meaningful.
Thoughtful Today
…
Hillary supporter magurakurin: “Fuck Bernie. And double fuck Weaver and Devine.”
Hillary supporter Jim, Foolish Literalist: “What bugs me about the Sanders phenomenon is the way it feeds and feeds off the cult of the presidency”
Hillary supporter dogwood: Davebo: “Suing the DNC shows how ridiculously naive and perhaps even arrogant the Sanders people are.”
^ Insults attacking Bernie and insulting his supporters in very Trump’ian language.
At least they are more direct than Clinton supporter Omnes’ serial falsehoods.
Yes, Bernie helps Dems, yes, Bernie has considerable support _in_the_Democratic_Party_, and, yes, it’s fair to claim Bernie has better coattails than Hillary based on polls and demographics.