BS. PhDs in political science, not to mention experts like Nate Silver, will tell you that those trial heat polls are less than useless. They nearly always favor the lesser-known candidate.
Can you show the predictive value of those polls?
I’ve got a BS in political science and I agree. Hypothetical head to head matchup polls are simply useless and I’d say that even if they favored Clinton. They favor underdogs, and the vast majority of people who don’t follow politics on a daily basis, only know Bernie as an underdog who is challenging Hillary.
As a disheartened Republican, I don’t want the Democratic party to move left. I like it being a centrist party. The far left can whine as much as it wants, but it would be dangerous for the country to move the Democrats too far off the center when the Republicans are very far right these days. If the GOP was more centrist, then it would make some sense for the Democrats to move back to the further left, though that would likely hurt them with moderate voters, but at least the moderate voters would have some place to go if the GOP were more sane
Yep. Same for senators. I think the idea is to make us vote the more effective, American way, by sending cash to our preferred candidates.
Do you have a cite for that?
And the enemies will be busy encouraging us to refrain from voting.
It’s good to recall, in election years, that there are people who are paid to pose as ordinary forum users (and some who do it on a volunteer basis), whose agenda it is to discourage readers from voting. Voting is uncool! The parties are just the same anyway, so voting is pointless! Voting is for those who lack the integrity required to refrain from voting! Voting is for compromisers! Stay Pure! Don’t Vote! Don’t compromise your ideals!
Etc., etc.
There’s a good write-up, with lots of examples, here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x967422
From the article’s introduction:
In this particular case, Sanders’ greatest weakness is his lack of popularity with black voters. That certainly wouldn’t be a problem for him against a Republican opponent.
It’s also a weakness that general election electorates are more centrist and conservative than Democratic primary electorates. Bernie is an atheist socialist, who has promised 10% tax increases for all of the lower and middle income tax brackets, I think the audience for those particulars in a general isn’t so receptive.
I could throw the same accusation back at you. Clinton’s supporters are selling a line of bullshit about how we might as well just lie back and think of England because Clinton’s paid her dues and now she’s owed the Presidency, but they were saying the same thing eight years ago. The claims of Clinton’s inevitability aren’t based on fact or what’s good for the Left, it’s an attempt to create that inevitability by convincing people that settling for the second-worst candidate is the best they can hope for.
This petulant PUMA bullshit was nonsense when it was jilted Clinton supporters in 2008 and its the same coming from Sanders supporters in 2016. Grow up. (General comment to the mindset in general, not to any specific user)
^Point being missed. Read the post again.
The stealth-advocacy/astroturf posts either discourage people from voting–not anything a Democratic party advocate would do–or attack Democratic candidates under the guise of ‘I’m a Democrat, but…’
That’s nothing to do with the arguments you mention (about Clinton being owed the Presidency or such). The claim that Clinton is “owed” the Presidency is not the Clinton-supporters position, by the way (check out the official website if you doubt me). If anyone does post such a thing, it’s quite possible that they are doing so disingenuously (in order to be shot down). *That *would be a sock-puppet sort of move—but that’s not what you were complaining about. You were complaining about a supposed argument for Clinton that Clinton supporters don’t happen to be using to convince people to vote for her.
It’s an interesting article. I note that it mentions that, in the past, Republican operatives have supported Hillary Clinton in order to sabotage the Democrats, and have also tried to damage Democratic morale by questioning the electability of some of their candidates.:dubious:
But maybe we should just give people who disagree with us the benefit of the doubt and assume they actually mean what they say, rather than accusing them of being secretly on the Koch payroll.
I think it’s closer to 8%, and to fund what amounts to Medicaid for all. As someone who’s been on Medicaid, I can endorse that plan. I personally think he should start saying “zero deductible” a lot.
Never mind, DSeid did it for you in his “Favorability Ratings” thread. One of Nate Silver’s minions advises people to ignore such polls (although he is speaking of polls taken a year out, and we are now at less than nine months). However, he describes them as"only weakly predictive", which is different from “less than useless” (of course, it’s logically impossible for a predictive tool to literally be less than useless). And despite his conclusion, his data shows that for 11 of the 14 elections for which data are available (going back to 1944), these polls DID correctly pick the winner, although they often got the margins wildly wrong.
So, I never said the available data strongly suggested that Sanders is more electable than Clinton, but I’ll stand by my statement that the amount of available data is nonzero, and does point toward that conclusion.
General electorates are also much more liberal than anyone the Republicans are going to nominate. And FYI, Bernie isn’t an atheist, he claims some sort of nebulous “spirituality” which is unconnected to any particular doctrine or behavorial obligation, but is nevertheless crucially important to his worldview. It’s a possible avenue of attack for the GOP, but it’s not like he has a trail of inflammatory Dawkinsesque statements that will come back to haunt him.
You lost me the moment your response was more than 10 words–the GOP smear ads will be simple and to the point, Bernie is an atheist. Bernie will raise taxes by 10%.
I do think foolsguinea’s approach of just emphasizing no more health insurance premiums or deductibles would be the wiser retort. You have to counter simple with simple–complexity gets no play in politics.
You got a deal.
Whoever runs against the current Republicans has my vote. If it’s Bernie, I’ll not only vote for him, but take time off work to go door-to-door campaigning for him.
The main thing would be to push the idea that not voting gives half a vote to the side you disagree with most. If you are truly a progressive, you need to vote for at least incremental progress.
It’s impossible to support Sanders so fiercely and not support the majority of what Clinton says. Is it not better to get some of what you want than none of it?
And if it’s all about your vote not mattering: if you thought it mattered enough to vote for Sanders, why does it not matter enough to vote for Clinton? (Edit: apparently someone else already said that.)
Not voting because you can’t get everything you want is no better than the Republicans who shut down Congress because they wouldn’t get what they want. Compromise is a necessary part of politics.
Has he?