I’m not claiming Bernie would have won, but your argument against is not very good. Aggregate votes are not how you win elections, as Hillary supports should be well aware. It’s how the votes are distributed in swing states.
Hillary got 3M more votes than Trump in the general election, and Trump still won.
Clintonistas are the ones deflecting responsibility from their sainted one. Clinton broke records for being the most disliked candidate in history and that is who you want to lead the party?
Yes Clinton won 3 million more votes but she still lost. I’d take Sanders winning one more vote and winning personally.
And the primaries are not the same as the general election. She won the primaries and lost the general to a person who the smart money says would win the general.
And she won the primaries in part to co-opting the DNC and stacking the deck in her favor. If you want to know who the best candidate is have a contest that is fair. You cannot crow about winning the primaries when you cheated in order to win. She was not the best candidate. She was the best cheater.
Right. It’s exactly as reasonable as saying that Trump’s amorality would have been thrown into sharper focus by the contrast with Sanders, that Sanders would have been better able to keep the conversation focused on policy and not personality, and in the end Sanders would have won by 20. The polling numbers might well have moved, perhaps even dramatically, over the course of the general election. There’s no way of knowing whether they would have moved, or which way. The reasonable default assumption would seem to be that they wouldn’t move much, and thus Sanders would have been much more likely to win than not, given that only a LARGE shift in one particular direction could have stopped him from winning.
So. Does anyone have any opinions on the new superdelegate rules?
Because the polls said so.
Protip: Republicans and, in many States, Independents don’t get to vote in Democratic primaries, but they do get to vote in the general election.
Sorry I was not more explicit but that is really the same thing. I am noting that calling him a communist is not a big deal and never has been for him and Dr Deth suggesting “communist” would be a killer is no revelation.
Sometimes my arguments evolve a bit and become more refined as the thread progresses. Glad I could clear up your confusion.
I haven’t been able to find any polling, but I find it hard to believe that there are many people who have heard of Bernie Sanders at all who aren’t aware he’s a socialist. I mean, it’s kind of his brand. And yet he is still leading Trump by 12 points today in hypothetical 2020 matchups.
It seems with the last election it became clear the superdelegates could not override the will of the will of the people in the primaries without thoroughly wrecking their chances in the general election.
In theory they are there to stop a goof like Trump from getting a nomination but they can’t do that.
So there is no reason for them.
It would be very bad, Communism is very unpopular here- but there would be many, many other things.
However, the Superdelegates did NOT “override the will of the will of the people” as you here imply.
Good thing no one running was a communist.
And what “other things”?
I implied no such thing.
What I was saying is the only purpose of a superdelegate is to override the will of the people in the primary race. If they vote the same as the popular vote then they are superfluous.
Their purpose was always to be a check on the popular vote in the primary. If they cannot/won’t do that then they have no useful purpose and just make things worse.
The mechanics of politics really isn’t my forte so while I haven’t been participating, I have been following the thread with interest. There are several threads about whether Bernie would have made a better candidate/won against Trump, so could could you please take that line of discussion over to one of those and focus this more on the impact of nerfing the superdelegates?
Thanks!
ETA: Commas matter.
No, but do you really think the kremlin could produce a Communist party card for “Comrade Bernie”? And how many would believe it?
Gawd only knows, who would have thought of crap like Hillary personally killing people, of 'swiftboating" or any of a hundred lies and half lies?
That is not true at all, their purpose was to reward party stalwarts. At no times did they even try to overcome the will of the people. Why didnt they put Hillary in vs Obama then?
Understood, but going beyond just the nationwide vote count, there were several bellwethers that still didn’t really go Sanders’ way. Hillary defeated Bernie pretty easily in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. She also won in deep blue states like California and New York. She did better than Sanders in swing states and deep blue states.
There were certainly warnings that Clinton was going to face some challenges in the general election, which is the real significance of Sanders’ surprisingly strong finish. Nobody can say definitively that Sanders wouldn’t have done better, but what we can definitively say is that the available evidence – in terms of the actual voting results, not internal polling by one person’s campaign – suggests that this would not have been the case.
I acknowledge that Sanders would have enjoyed advantages that Clinton didn’t have, such as being a fresh face on the national political scene. But Clinton also enjoyed advantages that Sanders wouldn’t have had, such as her political machine, which is what she used to defeat Sanders in the first place.
:rolleyes:
Okay.
I do admire, in a way, the audacity of claiming that the candidate who got *more *votes was *less *popular. 
It’s almost as audacious as claiming a party should give non-members the same respect as members, especially given that the results were more in favor of the non-member.
But reality is whatever you want it to be, for some.
But she lost in Michigan and Wisconsin. Remember those states? As for CA and NY, those are safe so it doesn’t really matter who is running. Anyway, we’ll never know how well Bernie would have done. I’m skeptical that he could’ve beaten Trump, but we know Hillary didn’t.
Maybe. But primary voting is very different from voting in the general. Notwithstanding what we both said (as per above), I think drawing conclusions based on primary votes is, at best, problematic.
Bite your tongue! Only Bernie Bros would turn their backs on the Democratic nominee. Hillary would have marshaled all her resources, including the Clinton Machine, to back Bernie if he had won the nomination.
In fact, she won almost every state that had a primary, not a caucus with its procedures that effectively restrict participation by those with jobs or without an entire evening available to spend getting herded around a cold high school gym, or perhaps transportation to get there, thereby letting zealots of whatever stripe have disproportionate influence. Allowing absentee participation will help that problem quite a bit.
It’s deja vu all over again. You know who else did well in caucuses against Hillary?