Don’t get me wrong, I think Bernie only has about a 30 percent chance of getting the nomination, but if he doesn’t it won’t be because of anything that comes from SlackerInc’s mouth. And you’re thinking of preferential voting, where you number the candidates in order of preference, lowest scoring candidate is eliminated then preferences go to the next until one candidate has over 50 percent.
We have both preferential voting in our lower house and proportional representation AND preferential voting in our upper house in Australia.
Thank God-I hope we drop those bourgeois shills as they’ve been naught but a parasite to the Democratic Party. Since politics is rarely a strict left-right binary, Bernie needs to go nationalist and go over the heads of them to appeal to the TRUMP supporters. Simply tell the truth on illegal immigration-that it’s been forced on America by the greed of big business-and generally attack Capital as unpatriotic and treasonous. Of course at the same time he should deemphasize the cultural issues of guns and abortion
By the next presidential election, four Supreme Court justices will be in their eighties, including one who will be pushing ninety. So we could easily see as many as four retirements just in the next four years. It’s reasonable to assume a Republican president would appoint jurists similar to those appointed by Dubya (Alito, Roberts) and that Hillary would appoint judges that resembled those her husband chose (Breyer, Ginsburg). Do you really not see any difference there?
This group would then impact the direction of the court for decades. Currently, it’s a 5-4 majority for Republican-appointed justices; if Hillary replaced those four octogenarians it would flip to 6-3 Democratic, while if a Republican was in charge, it would go to a hopeless 7-2 GOP.
It’s kind of hard to care too much about Supreme Court justices in six years time when you’re buried in debt living paycheck to paycheck. Only the comfortably well off have the luxury of caring about things like that . Isn’t the stat that 50 percent of Americans have zero savings ?
Edit: it’s worse than that, only 29 percent of Americans have savings of more than $1000
On illegal immigration: this. Won’t. Happen. And if it did, Bernie’s support would collapse. You can’t screw around with your base like that and Bernie isn’t going to change his spots.
Recall that the bottom 20% has very low voter turnout. And plenty of those in the middle resent their cousin who is on welfare. For example, in Kentucky, “counties with the highest number of Medicaid recipients were also the most reliable voters for Republican Matt Bevin—despite the fact that Bevin had loudly insisted that he would slash Medicaid if he won the election. It’s not that all these Medicaid recipients were voting against their self-interest. They weren’t voting one way or the other—and all the while, their slightly less-poor neighbors were voting to cut them off.” What’s the Matter With Kentucky? – Mother Jones
I see upthread that you are not American, so maybe you don’t realize truly how absurd that statement is. Just in 2015, the Court decided the following cases 5-4:
And then there’s the 6-3 vote preserving Obamacare, which could flip the other way if a Republican’s appointees were not as accommodating as Kennedy and Roberts.
P.S. Mine is among the bottom half of American households in terms of economics, and I care deeply about the composition of the Court.
ETA: Measure for Measure, awesome point about the Medicaid thing. 'Tis sad (and frustrating, and galling) but true. Kevin Drum is the shit.
You’re framing it wrong. Hillary Clinton is not actually meaningfully to the left of average popular opinion. Not economically, nor even culturally.
This is partly because popular opinion, as it impacts the general election, isn’t really that politically solid and informed. But it’s also that Hillary is basically pretty conservative. Not right-wing, exactly, but leery of radical change.
Consider an absolute value of conservatism. Think of it like this: Zero change = conservative; moderate change = moderate; big change = revolutionary; fundamental change = radical.
But voters, while they’re pretty conservative about things they like, are pretty indifferent about things they don’t know about, and may be willing to accept radical change of things they dislike and/or don’t understand.
Who, exactly, likes going heavily into debt to get any college degree? Who, exactly, wants to pay a few hundred a month for what amounts to merely catastrophic health insurance? Most people aren’t making money off these things; they’re customers, and they will accept a better deal.
In fact, many of them will consider any different deal, and they will even accept a worse deal. Look at how many poor people will advocate for flat taxes, or a national sales tax of 30%, or individual health savings accounts. I can’t believe any of these are good ideas, but they’re different, and they sound like reform to the populace. These terrible ideas might even sound like progressive change to the ignorant.
Take that constituency–which is huge–and suddenly you have a lot of people who are open to radical change. If the left-wing party doesn’t offer it, then the right-wing party might offer their version, and some will take it; some have. But if the left-wing party offers something, and economists and experts say, “Yeah, that could work,” then you can get cooperation between those who just want something different and those with informed opinion. This is where something like socialized medicine can suddenly explode in popularity, and has in other countries. This is also where something like eugenics, or conquering eastern Europe, can suddenly explode in popularity, and has.
Hillary’s appeal is partly that she’s trying to be the First Woman President, but more so that she’s in a position to be the First Woman President while working within the system as a mainstream figure. She is in absolute terms more conservative–closer to the familiar, the conventional, the status quo, the “normal”–than the Republicans in this cycle (possibly excepting Kasich and Christie). Her policy deviance from “normal” has an absolute value near zero, and for a female candidate with experience and endorsements to be in that position is…kind of new. That’s why she is a heavy favorite; she’s in a historical sweet spot.
So Hillary is trying to run as an evolutionary step in feminism, with very restrained policy ambitions. Will she be a First Woman President, who dares not be any more radical than that? Is that enough? For many voters, it is.
What about people who want “leftward” change? Hillary might do a little, but if so, she shows no real sign of leftward ambitions.
What about people who just want “better,” and don’t care about left or right? Well, they can go with Hillary, who (given her ties to Wall Street) will probably go right sometimes too.
What about the left-right axis? Well, what does that even mean? If leftism is the change sought by the poor and the ethnic minority, then we can say that Sanders is left-revolutionary.
OK, well, most American voters are not Rockefellers. They’re relatively poor. They may be suspicious of a politician who promises what Bernie promises, but it’s not like they haven’t entertained the ideas themselves. If they want any change, they want change that helps them more than change that hurts them; they are more “left” economically by virtue of their economic position.
Bernie is to the left of the median voter. But Hillary is a little to the right. Bernie looks like a “fool who doesn’t understand how the world works”–at least to those who have convinced themselves that America must have good reasons for screwing them over. Hillary looks normal and sane–but only by that same logic.
OK, so you have (for the sake of gross oversimplification) some voters who want left-change, some who want right-change, some who distrust any change, and some who will take any change. Let’s call these, um, lefties, righties, zeroes, and seekers.
The present Democratic Party competes for zeroes (“moderates”) and exploits lefties (“progressives”) while giving them very little left-change. The GOP at present competes for zeroes (“conservatives” & “moderates”) while offering a lot of hope to righties (also “conservatives”) and seekers. The present Democratic Party offers very little to lefties and seekers. It doesn’t seem to believe they exist, and anyway, they don’t have as much money as the rightie and zero donors–except on a few issues, like same-sex marriage, that don’t map to income level.
In this election season, the right-change crowd are looking to Cruz or Paul or maybe Trump.
The zeroes are running hard away from those guys, but if they otherwise identify with the GOP, they might accept Bush, Kasich, or Christie in a pinch. If they are swing voters or Democrats, Clinton is an attractive choice to many.
The lefties are, depending on how moderate or immoderate they are, looking to Clinton (which is ironic, as she’s so moderate as to be a near-zero) or to Sanders (who ticks lots of progressive boxes).
The seekers? They’re looking at Trump, Sanders, maybe Cruz. And in the general, they may choose some other Republican in the general if Clinton wins. (Some might vote for First Woman President, though, because it’s a dumb version of “change” and that’s what they do.)
Clinton’s appeal to lefties and seekers relies on them misreading her as further from center-right than she actually is. But that also works against her with zeroes who identify as conservative. It’s going to be all about salesmanship and illusion, but she can get some zeroes, some lefties, and some seekers, and try to bully the other lefties into showing up. She gets moderates and liberals, per conventional wisdom.
Sanders only really plays to lefties and seekers, but he may do better with especially angry and desperate seekers. He gets extremist progressives, and people desperate for change.
• But wait. They’re running against someone. Let’s use Trump.
HRC vs Trump: Clinton gets most of the zeroes, and some of the lefties. Trump sucks up the seekers, maybe a few zeroes, and some of the righties. But a bunch of voters on the right and on the left (hating both of them) will stay home. I don’t know who wins that.
Sanders vs Trump: Mike Bloomberg says he would jump in in that case; his base is the zeroes, but he’ll be the independent–he probably gets neither lefties nor righties, and the three split the seekers.
If we take Mike out of it, because he’s not going to make it to the end: The righties go for Trump as against Sanders. The lefties go for Sanders. The zeroes will hate both Trump and Sanders, but maybe break toward Trump. The seekers will split, somehow, and possibly show up in greater numbers than the zeroes. It’s all about playing to people who want change; ** Sam Stone**'s referendum idea. Trump might win on sheer salesmanship.
• What if it’s Cruz? Cruz only really gets the righties, but he has a better chance to grab seekers from Hillary than from Sanders.
• Rubio has a better chance to grab zeroes from Sanders than from Clinton, but he loses the seekers to Sanders, I think.
I think the Democrats have to keep Bernie’s chances alive throughout the season just in case. Otherwise, the seeker vote in open primary states goes to Trump on the GOP side, and…yeah, he’s probably harder to beat than he looks.
This is simply false. Obama’s 111th Congress was by far the most productive and the most progressive in post-war US history. They did this in the face of the most vicious partisanship in US history - McConnell turned the system upside down by ruling out compromise in any way, shape or form. And he basically admitted it.
Health care reform, something that eluded 4 previous Presidents. Financial reform. Saving the economy from great depression with a stimulus package. An arms control treaty. Credit card reform. Of the major goals, only climate change was passed over, and Obama made substantial progress on that during his 2nd term.
John McCain had been very popular with the base, as I understand it. The party was unpopular at the time.
OK, just like the Senate’s only black member in 2008.
Seriously, this isn’t another Nader campaign. This is going to be the Democratic nomination. If he gets it, we’re back to a two-sided fight (Bloomberg aside) like most times. Yes, a lot of moderate Dems will stay home, but Bernie will pick up new voters as well. Even the political scientists in that Vox piece weren’t sure he’d actually drop ten points.
Like I have been saying, we don’t know that a radical leftist can’t win. We do know that candidates who run low-key campaigns, as inoffensive, centrist, moderate types–from either party–tend to lose.
I think voters respond to candidates they feel they know, and being shocking is one way to get there: They wonder how the candidate got so crazy, and then their curiosity makes the candidate more familiar, until they say, “At least I know what this one is about.”
Another way is to be a celebrity for years, apparently.
Hillary has the celebrity, and some novelty. But I don’t think that Bernie is as hopeless as you think.
The really strange thing is, while Bernie is certainly “leftist”, he may steal some of the right votes and I have no idea how many. I have quite a few friends who are typically pretty staunch Republican affiliates who want Sanders to win. Hell, I know an honest to god Randian objectivist that somehow supports him (no, I do not understand this at all). The usual logic seems to be “Even if I don’t like all his policies, I like his fervor and how much he sincerely seems to try and support average Americans. There are a few ‘outsiders’ on my side, but they’re either racist assholes, or kind of crazy.” I’ve seen very religious people who don’t like his policies on abortion or LGBTQ issues, and have an issue with his lack of religiosity, that nontheless support him because they believe in compassion and helping the poor, and think the current government has lost its way in caring for its citizens. I never saw this effect with Obama, and I haven’t seen the same degree of pseudo-migration from left to right this cycle.
I still think he’s a long shot, but I also think he has a chance to attract voters that on paper he has no business attracting. Not centrists, but Republicans who are tired of their party or the current government in general. This election cycle appears to have the potential to just be plain weird. I would not place bets on any candidate’s chances.
It’s, of course, possible that when the chips are down or the smears really start coming in they defect, but they’ve been remarkably supportive even through things like the USSR honeymoon news. It’s possible their churches might sway them back to the right by playing to their ethics about how bad abortion is. But I can’t shake the fact that I’ve seen friends who I would have assumed would never have anything positive to say about a Democratic candidate back the guy fully.
The caveat here is that my friends are in the Millenial demographic, which we’ve kind of already given to Sanders on paper, but it’s still absolutely striking to me how uncharacteristic it is for these people to support him.
I would be very suspicious of any conservative who claims to support Bernie. After all, I am planning to vote for Cruz or Trump in the primary unless Hillary needs my help. Conservatives can be strategic too.
A lot of voters who identify as conservative can be turned by populist appeals. Plus Sanders is moderate to conservative on immigration and guns, two big issues to poorer conservatives.
Funny how you’re normally so bullish on Republican chances in other threads, but here you keep coming back to whisper sweet nothings about how Bernie can win.
And which of those helped the poor voters in Kentucky & Maine we were just reading about?
Um. I have said before that I would have voted for PPACA just for the Medicaid expansion; but that never came to my state, and it never came to Maine. Is the banking reform even visible to the lower quintiles? You tell me.
And sorry, over all four Congresses, there is no way that Obama (tweaks to health insurance, some arcane banking stuff, increased deportations while giving lip service to immigration) matches the JFK/LBJ years (Medicare, Civil Rights, opening borders to non-Europeans, the Great Society). You are falling for the hype that half a loaf is better than a steak. That’s just sad.
I say this not as a Communist anti-American, but as an American. Your party fails at doing big things and your party sucks at winning.
Great, that’s more than I expected of most Dopers. I was thinking through some ideas there, and…honestly, without more numbers, I have no conclusions about actual results.
The tl;dr is this: I know personally poor people who will chase “change” from the left of the right. “Liberals” who are too moderate or too corporate don’t compete for those votes.
In fact, we can see that the Democrats don’t have a populist base, because the dynasts mostly are conservative/moderate Democrats who wouldn’t even want to talk like LBJ or FDR. Bernie Sanders can get the populist appeal, but he would be doing it without the party establishment of the “party of Andrew Jackson.” The genius of FDR is that he was able to marry populism to that party.
Clinton would be the better candidate if she wasn’t such a shitty candidate. Nominating someone who could be indicted, even if it’s only a small chance, is just lunacy.
