Bernie Supporters: what result by 3/1 would convince you it is over?

Politics & Elections
61

If it needs to be put into the SDMB cliche of “put a fork in him” then fine. I know that some, including some of his supporters, always had the fork in him as far as getting the nomination went. Some of us concluded the fork could be placed after Nevada. Some won’t believe the fork can be placed while the numbers are such that he could still win so long as he gets every single remaining delegate or until he has suspended his campaign. It’s not over until that final buzzer blares! Fine.

Yes, MfM, I have seen 538’s previous and newer list of his state targets to even be hitting 50/50 given demographics. That he has performed below those metrics in each state so far. Which paints a pretty pessimistic picture. And that according to 538 there is not a single state with polling data in which he is not currently behind those metrics, sometimes quite significantly. By those demographics he should fairly easily sweep the lot of Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma. By that metric failure to win all of them, sizably, would be most consistent that he is in fact nowhere near close to having the support of half of Democratic primary and caucus voters overall. He is advertising almost exclusively in those states and pretty much ceding the rest, and their delegates, to Clinton (where her team is spending money). In Colorado, demographic advantage him +11, he is outspending her more than two-fold.

So let’s for now leave off whether or not he is able to generate enough new funds to keep it up. Let’s for second leave the subject of whatever the delegate deficit becomes if he indeed loses delegate rich states like Texas, Georgia, and Virginia by significantly more than what the 50/50 national metric would predict. (And given that Clinton’s team is outspending Sanders in those states where she already is expected to win by a wide margin, yeah that delegate deficit is gonna be substantial.) Yes, it is true that the more he underperforms those 50/50 national metrics in those delegate rich states the greater he needs to overperform his 50/50 national metrics in the remaining states … but just place all that as neutral.

With all that as neutral, ignoring it all, the implication of being not able to hit the 50/50 metric in states that he outspends her in by wide margins is that he is forked, even if he were to still (relatively narrowly) win those states. Actually lose any of them? Pretty conclusive proof that his support is far below a majority of Democratic primary and caucus voters.

Now to me that is overwhelmingly obvious and putting that back together with other bits, the need for momentum to generate the buzz that funds a putatively emerging movement, the need to far outperform the 50/50 metrics once you go into a substantial hole, so on, well I remain curious about how much it would take those who feel he still has a realistic path to the nomination to accept that there is none left.
As for the claim that “If Bernie attains 40% of the vote, that would show significant (though not majority) support for hard-left policies (soft-left in a European context).” … nah. It shows that a sizable minority of Democratic voters are wanting to vote against what they perceive as status quo, and/or against the incrementalist approach. For some just as a symbolic protest. Add that to some who have always just hated all things Clinton actual issues be damned. Some who just find Bernie more likable or trust him more … In reality he is not all that “hard left” in positions as much as in rhetorical approach. He takes the tactic of “We need to move in these radical directions!” while the Obama/Clinton tactic is “This (the same direction) is not radical, it is where you, the center, actually want to be and we need to defend going in that direction from the radical forces of the far-right.”

Reports of him building a movement are greatly exaggerated; there has been no outpouring of new voters and established elected progressives are not rallying around him waving the banners of revolution. I hope he can bootstrap the attention and enthusiasm he has garnered into helping some down ticket races and help achieve the Congress that can implement change in the direction that we, more of the center, do want to go … which is the same general direction he wants to head in. And he has decreased the toxicity of the word “socialism” even if he actually means EU style “social democracy” - so he moved the Overton Window some.

I do wonder if you would accept the contrapositive MfM: would failure of Sanders to achieve 40% of the vote prove to you that there is no significant support for “hard-left” policies?

62

FWIW 538’s polling plus gives odds on a couple of the above toss-ups and leans:

Massachusetts 82% likely Clinton
Oklahoma 78% Clinton

Colorado and Minnesota just don’t have any recent polling data. By demographics he should win both by double digits. And he is outspending her sizably in both.

63

PredictIt has reacted to a poll of Massachusetts so they are now more closely aligned with 538.


		Clinton	Sanders
Vermont		2.0%	98.0%
Colorado	33.0%	67.0%
Minnesota	48.0%	52.0%
Massachusetts	67.3%	32.7%
Oklahoma	76.0%	24.0%
Arkansas	97.0%	3.0%
Georgia		97.0%	3.0%
Tennessee	97.0%	3.0%
Virginia	97.0%	3.0%
Alabama		98.0%	2.0%
Texas		99.0%	1.0%

I live in Colorado and plan to caucus for Clinton on Tuesday, but my finger is not really on the pulse of Colorado politics. I haven’t lived here very long and almost no one I work with has either. However, from what I gather, Boulder is bonkers for Bernie.

64

DSeid, you just need some patience. You have predicted the likely course of events, but reality doesn’t always unfold so neatly. Wait it out, you’ll likely get to say ‘I told you so’ in the end.

65

Since you haven’t been in Colorado long, you may not know it, but the correct name of the city is The People’s Republic of Boulder. :slight_smile:

66

Actually no. I am asking for what range of realistic scenarios come out otherwise and what would have to happen to make those occur. Accepting that he has decided to focus on only those 4 states (taking VT for granted) while Clinton continues to work at racking up her margin and delegate count in the others.

Not so sure why it such a hard question for people to answer, seriously.

If the only answers to the what would need to happen are her death or found in bed with a dead Monica Lewinsky, well, okay.

67

Perhaps you could phrase the question this way, “For those of you who think Bernie is going to win the nomination, is there any result on Tuesday that would change your mind?”

68

A) Sanders starts polling higher than Clinton. The RCP average showed a 25 point gap two months ago, now it’s 5. Next month he might be polling 10 points higher, and then he makes up his delegate deficit and then some.

B) Clinton gets indicted.

As I said on page 1, I don’t think Sanders has hit a ceiling yet. If his polling average flatlines for a month and/or starts to drop, well, that’s probably it for him. But right now, he’s still building momentum, and I’m going to wait and see where it stops.

69

Thanks for sharing steronz.

Meanwhile based on SC’s (not at all surprising) results, and current polling, 538 (Harry Enten) is stating:

He should stay in and fight to get his progressive message out as best he can for as long as he can keep fundraising enough to do so. More power to him and I think it helps Clinton in the general if he does.

But both this last result and his average performance across the races thus far are consistent with his being roughly 10% behind Clinton nationally. Moving up by not 10%, but 15 to 20%, in the face of what will be a series of losses? Does not seem like a realistic possibility to me.

But hang on to hope of something catastrophic happening to her!

70

The polls all along showed that Sanders was polling from 2-20% of black voters, and that’s right where he fell in SC, where the exit polls showed 84-16 for Hillary.

This should have been the story all along. If the first two states weren’t approx. 95% white Sanders would never have been taken seriously.

Did people not realize this widely reported result? Did they think that Sanders would magically triple his support among black voters? Did they really believe that the youth vote would materialize out of nothingness?

How did people not see this coming? I understand the self delusion of wish fulfillment but I still don’t understand how Democrats who have lived through the Obama years could be so blind to how the party works.

71

Yes, this is exactly what people expected would happen. They typically used the argument that “black voters don’t really know Bernie yet, but once they do, he’s going to get more of their vote than he has now.” In South Carolina at least, that ended up not being the case.

The reality is most of the more sober realists recognized Bernie could not win. My only personal explanation for the “zomg Hillary could lose” media explosion is that it was entirely created by a media desperate for a good story. Hillary crushing Bernie isn’t exciting, Bernie potentially winning is, but we now see that the latter will simply not happen.

Bernie also never learned to talk to black voters. His technique for talking to black voters was to add to his stump speech economic statistics about disparate poverty and incarceration rates between whites and blacks. At one black church while he was rattling that stuff off the churchgoers couldn’t be more disinterested, and were apparently lining up at a buffet line. The reason is the black community already knows it has a raw deal, just rattling off the statistics does nothing for them.

Hillary’s campaign tactic has been to meet with, personally (in person or via phone) every mother of a black youth killed by the police in recent times who got any kind of media attention, to meet with black pastors in the South, to meet with black community leaders in the South. She turned them then into surrogates for her, who went out and did campaigning for her. Bernie doesn’t understand the personal dynamics in the black electorate are far more important than in the white electorate. Young liberal whites have little sense of community, so for them the big rallies, being able to gather around a hash tag on Twitter and listen to him blast Wall Street is what they want. To campaign successfully in the black community you need to forge strong interpersonal relationships with black community leaders, that would take time out of Bernie’s day bashing Wall Street in front of thousands of people who were already going to vote for him anyway.

72

Yes, his team thought that his message of economic populism would pull in Black voters. They just had to get to know him and hear his message and they would rally to the cause.

Meanwhile I cringed on his behalf when he did his Thurgood Marshall thing. Who knows? It might even be true. But it came off so pandering and insincere. It came off to me like Trump saying “I love Hispanics! Great workers!”

73

I think there’s a fundamental assumption with his broad stump speech and message in general, “I’m telling you something about the economy many of you do not know, it’s rigged, and you as the working class are getting a raw deal! And here are the reasons why…” now, some of them already know this argument and buy into it, but some people genuinely either haven’t heard it before or haven’t heard it so convincingly before. Maybe they just know that “things haven’t been great for me.”

But blacks are in a very different position, there is no fucking doubt in that community the system is stacked against them. And a white man coming to tell them about it comes off like a fucking clown, not like someone telling it like it is.

74

The media unquestionably loves horse races. And they unquestionably will artificially boost each and every tiny day-to-day variation into a major story. They’ve been doing it for decades, so nobody should be surprised that 24/7 news will feature the horse race above anything else simply because it fills so many minutes.

But while they expand tiny bits of news to fill hours, they don’t actually invent those tiny bits. If the first two states weren’t Iowa and New Hampshire, they’d have to fill the time with expansions of bits perhaps more connected to reality. The underlying fault is that of the major parties for the farcical timing. Bite the bullet, dump the all-white states, start with representatives of 21st century America.

75

Martin, even that gets complicated. Overall Whites, and those under 30 and those nearing retirement age, are pessimistic about the future and giving up on The American Dream. Meanwhile Blacks and Hispanics are (perhaps paradoxically) increasingly optimistic.

This pdf gives more data with some nice graphs.

76

Bernie Sanders will win states, and deserves to stay on until at least May. Look at the Republican field, when the likes of Ben Carson is there despite having a snowballs chance in hell, or John Kasich and Marco Rubio, who have not won any states, and if polls turn out to be true, may lose their home states and effectively win NO states, then Sanders SHOULD stay on.
As for Ted Cruz he may win Texas and nothing else after that. So Donald Trump sweeping as predicted, many of the Republicans will never win any states. Sanders WILL states and could do well after Super Tuesday afar the west, mid west and northeast and east coast vote.

So this is my answer, scratch off my earlier response from a few days ago. Why should Sanders drop out?

77

Personally I don’t think he should. He might, however, after Super Tuesday, as funding will begin to dry up and continuing to state, as he did tonight, about how well we are doing across the country, will begin to ring hollow.

He’ll continue as long as continuing in the manner that is open to him serves a meaningful purpose, and stop when it does not.

IF SC is an indication Sanders may be in trouble even in heavily White states (he even lost that demographic apparently). If Tuesday confirms that Black voters widely are choosing Clinton over Sanders even more strongly than they choose Obama over Clinton, and he fails to connect with Hispanic voters in Texas, and his wins other than Vermont, if any, are anemic compared to his losses, then it is hard to see how continuing in any manner that will still be open to him much serves any meaningful goal that he has. Unlike the likes of Carson, he is not trying to sell books and set up a lucrative speaking circuit. He is not aiming for a contested convention and serving as a power broker, like Kasich might be. He wants to either be the nominee or minimally impact the conversation. He’ll drop when it is clear that the former is clearly not to be and his position no longer serves the latter more than it already has. Staying in to be drubbed badly only diminishes the impact. It won’t be May. It won’t be April. It may be not be even to March 15th.

78

And the betting markets have reflected that; Sanders has gone from about 5:1 odds at best to 10:1 before SC and now his stock is in the dumps. Still, I think that as long as his poll numbers continue moving in the right direction, there’s no reason to count him out.

Like I said on page 1, “hope” isn’t anywhere close to the right word. At this point it’s dread. I’d like Bernie to win, but this late in the game I think a Clinton indictment hurts both of them. I don’t think Clinton supporters are being realistic enough about the potential of this scandal to turn into something legitimate, and then we’ll be left with a damaged Clinton and an unpopular Sanders to choose to go up against Trump.

79

I’m convinced he’s not going to win. That’s been the likelihood from the get-go and was sealed in SC. So in that sense I’m convinced “it’s over.”

In another sense, it’s important to give the DNC and the Clinton campaign the message that Bernie’s priorities resonate with people. I am still voting for him tomorrow, even though I’m under no illusions he has a chance to win here. He’s the only candidate in either party that didn’t even campaign in this state.

80

Finally cable news is actually vetting Bernie. His environmental record for a progressive is very questionable. So once MSNBC goes negative the writing is on the wall.