The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    Donal's picture

    Can Sanders Overtake Clinton?

    By Donal on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 8:58am |

    [Doc asked me to crosspost, so here goes:]

    FiveThirtyEight has a little chart on the right of their main page today [Thursday 3/3/2016]. They have established a target number of delegates that they feel each candidate needs by any given date to eventually capture the nomination:

    Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
    Trump – 338/297 – 114%
    Cruz – 236/384 – 61%
    Rubio – 112/242 – 46%

    Clinton – 609/529 – 115%
    Sanders – 412/492 – 84%

    As you can see Trump is overperforming at 114%, while Cruz is way back at 61% and Rubio is failing at 46%. The corresponding headline: Donald Trump Is Just Barely On Track To Win The GOP Nomination.

    Clinton is overperforming at 115%, while Sanders is much more competitive than the GOP rivals at 84%. The corresponding headline: Hillary Clinton’s Got This.

    What gives? One difference is that Hillary is winning two-person primaries with margins around 60%, while Trump is often winning six-person primaries with just 35%. Things will certainly change, but at that rate Trump would never get to a majority of delegates.

    Another is that Hillary Clinton has the full support, and collusion, of the Democratic National Committee, and a slew of uncommitted delegates that will fall her way unless she is trounced by Sanders. Trump is currently the bane of the Republican National Committee, and cannot count on uncommitted delegates. He has to trounce his rivals to avoid a brokered convention.

    A Young Turks segment (on youtube) claims that Sanders actually did well on Super Tuesday, winning three out of the four tossup states and essentially tying for delegates in Massachusetts. They feel that he will overperform in enough tossup states to make it a real race.

    Sander does have a lot of donated cash to work with, and time to campaign, but what has yet to be proven is how many of his younger supporters will turn out to vote. A recent Washington post piece claims that millennials only turn out for blockbuster films and big election days. His Super Tuesday victories proved that wrong in a few states.

    In, War, Peace, and Bernie Sanders, Common Dream talks about Tulsi Gabbard’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders:

    Gabbard, an Iraq war vet, congresswoman from Hawaii and “rising star” in the Democratic establishment, stepped down as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee in order to endorse Sanders — because he’s the only candidate who is not financially and psychologically tied to the military-industrial complex.

    “As a veteran of two Middle East deployments, I know firsthand the cost of war,” she said, cracking the mainstream silence on U.S. militarism. “As a vice chair of the DNC, I am required to stay neutral in democratic primaries, but I cannot remain neutral any longer. The stakes are just too high.”

    Because of Gabbard — only because of Gabbard — the multi-trillion-dollar monstrosity of U.S. militarism is getting a little mainstream media attention amid the reality-TV histrionics of this year’s presidential race, the Donald Trump phenomenon and the spectacle of Republican insult-flinging.

    As the results of Super Tuesday started coming in on Tuesday night, Gabbard was given a few minutes to talk on MSNBC. While Rachel Maddow wanted to discuss the risk her Sanders endorsement might have on her career, Gabbard insisted on addressing the slightly larger matter of our unchecked, resource-hemorrhaging military adventurism across the globe.

    “War is a very real thing,” she said. “If the Syrian war continues, we won’t have the resources to fund important social programs. This isn’t a question of the past — it’s a question of today. Regime-change wars do nothing to strengthen our national security, but they do strengthen our enemies.”

    Comments

    Donal! It's great to see you back at dag. Thanks for posting!


    by Michael Wolraich on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 2:05pm

    I was feeling the Bern, and Doc to said to apply topical posts liberally.


    by Donal on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 6:20pm

    Hell yeah. We Berners are outnumbered here.


    by Michael Wolraich on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 6:53pm

    This whole exchange is both topical and funny.


    by Michael Maiello on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 10:46pm

    Quality over quantity, no? Think of yourselves as the iPhones of the mobile world. Including a rather cryptic platform, excellent marketing.and widespread yuppie appeal - expensive but worth it. Not for the cost-conscious. Dare to be different, to dream. We droiders salute you.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 3:02am

    Thanks for posting, Donal!


    by Doctor Cleveland on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 11:55am

    I'm having trouble understanding what Gabardine wants except to just complain about everything Obama. The cost of the war in Syria/ with ISIS is about $3.8 billion a year, which is cheap compared to our $10 billion per month and more we were paying for Iraq and Afghanistan. She doesn't want us to topple Assad but wants us to support the Kurds to beat ISIS which of course costs money and pisses off Iraqis and Turks, and she doesn't want us to go close to Russian troops/planes there, which is ceding power in the region to them - not the coolest strategy. Just ignore her, she'll go away. When she grows a consistent strategy and less annoying, self-righteous demeanor, invite her back. Aloha. 


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 2:29pm

    As your faithful reader, I read this the other day. Cenk Uygur did a very good job with Super Tuesday and I think he had more eye balls then the cable channels. He is my go to site for commentary on the election.

    Sanders does still have a path and will be in friendly country.  His supporters are still donating and crash the servers from the volume after an event. He says he will take it to all 50 states and his supporters have his back to do it. He isn't going to run out of money.  He does very well when it is an open primary because of the independent support. Independents are the largest voting block now. The 2 parties have shrunk in the recent years. 

    Sanders has a big enough machine built that if he wanted to run as a Independent, he could.  He has one amazing campaign going. Who would of thought? He sure caught the DNC off guard. 

     


    by trkingmomoe on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 10:17pm

    Momoe, you certainly are a faithful reader. It's a trap to believe the headlines claiming that it is already over. They were saying that last year, too.


    by Donal on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 5:52am

    Guys, they're saying it was over for *Hillary* since last July except maybe 2 weeks following  her Benghazi hearing. 

    I'm not where the great hope is with LA, MS and MI coming up - expect delegates 2:1 for Hillary or net gain 70, putting her near halfway mark. Bernie got whacked in Open Primaries from Texas to Virginia - he did better in semi-private ones and caucuses - this weekend's may give him a few extra delegates. But even there, we're ignoring superdelegates - Hillary tied Bernie in Colorado counting them, as she did in New Hampshire. Talk about shifting superdelegates goes nowhere if Hillary takes the popular vote, which she did on Super Tuesday by 1,100,000 votes plus 180,000 advantage in South Carolina. Caucus counts are puny in comparison, but even there Hillary dominated Nevada taking Vegas/Clark County by 10 points. 

    It may not be over, but it's getting crisp.

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 8:29am

    Cenk is a joke.  He dismisses the votes of Southern Democrats and oddly asserts that Clinton "pivoted toward the right again" (WTF?) because she "can't help herself; she lives and breathes arrogance."  Substantively, he's wrong.  He points to critical upcoming contests in MI, FL, OH, IL, NC and MO in which he expects Sanders to gain ground. The most recent polling from all those states has Clinton comfortably ahead by double digits. I do think Sanders has "won," though, but for a different reason. He has succeeded in framing the issues in the campaign, has energized a constituency and at least rhetorically, pushed Clinton to the left. That was the main reason for his candidacy in the first place, and he's done far better than expected.  We will see how far those carry through, if his supporters stay engaged, and if those prove helpful to electing the Democratic nominee in the Fall.  


    by armchair guerrilla on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 7:38am

    As much as I would like to believe Bernie is still competitive, the overwhelming margins Clinton is receiving in southern states make it near impossible for Bernie to catch up.  Going forward, she is certain to win Florida by 25% or more and Ohio and PA look out of reach now too.  She's racking up too many delegates in the states she wins for his narrower victories to keep him competitive - especially when you factor in the establishment (er super) delegates.  One faint hope for Bernie - indictment.  If it happens, let's hope it happens sooner rather than later.  In retrospect, he should have made an issue of her email server setup and her dishonest insistence it complied with federal rules. There is much else that is extraordinarily frustrating about all of this - especially her supporters' insistence that her record shows her to be pro publica and the fact that if Joe Biden had run, Bernie probably would win this thing.  That's why the establishment fought to keep him out.


    by HSG on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 7:52am

    If Joe Biden had run, she would have kicked his ass in a New York minute. Biden was shit on the presidential trail. The only thing that would have happened is he would have lost his nice guy image and halo and looked as pathetic as Jeb Bush. And it's so weird that people who hate "establishment" candidates wanted Joe to show up - what the hell is he but establishment, and not particularly exciting. His big claim to fame is raising kids single, taking in lots of insurance contributions, and milking his grown son's early death for a presidential run soap opera. Maybe he did something as Vp besides going behind Harry Reid's back, but I don't know what it was. 


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 8:40am

    I wanted establishment-lite Biden in the race for two reasons in this order: 1) He would likely have taken more than enough votes from establishment-heavy Clinton for Bernie to win Iowa and NV easily.  With 3 early wins and the much higher-profile accompanying them, Bernie would have been more than competitive in the southern states and best-positioned now to be the Democratic nominee.  2) Even if Bernie didn't win, perhaps Hillary would have been denied a majority going into the convention.  This could have resulted in a number of interesting possibilities - several of which might not lead to Clinton being the nominee. 

    You're right of course that Biden isn't nearly as good as Sanders but he is significantly better than Clinton.  All you need to do to come to this conclusion is to look at their recent earnings statements and recognize that Biden is far less likely to embroil us in destructive foreign military adventures.


    by HSG on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 9:15am

    The left's flirtation with Biden has little to do with the VP himself, who was a terrible Presidential candidate twice and whose record is more conservative than Hillary (as a Senator from Delaware, he had little choice but to represent the banking/credit card industry).  It's all about Clinton hatred.  They never got over Bill's heresies and have re-imagined his presidency as a dystopian nightmare. 


    by armchair guerrilla on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 9:49am

    Hal, this was always going to be a race between Bernie and Hillary and I don't think Biden would have gotten any more traction than Webb and Mallory. One factor has been the media's horse race ratings mentality, operational here and in the Republican's Trump phenomenon.

    I was a lot more excited about single payer and breaking up banks before Bernie became the actual proponent and the primary process got underway, including the R's. You actually startled me with some of your rhetoric about taking things away from "privileged" people---I liked the idea more in its abstract form.

    I think Trump will get the nomination and I think Clinton has the experience to adapt to his campaign more so than Bernie---it's mostly a gut feel..

     


    by Oxy Mora on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 10:07am

    "I liked the idea more in its abstract form." - the Communists took away one family member's livestock except for a horse and a cow, I believe - just too much wealth aggregated. Another family member sold off half of his back yard (a bit smaller than a standard US lot) because they were going to take it all for being too big. It's all good fun until someone puts an eye out.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 11:39am

    Good to see ya Donal.

    Missed you.

    Here is an enlightening thingy about nihilism:

     


    by Richard Day on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 2:26pm