You’re not exactly doing a bang-up job extolling his electability. But you’re also wrong on the facts (we on the Hillary side were just being lectured at for supposedly putting forth opinion rather than data, which I find highly ironic ATM).
Last summer, Gallup asked, conveniently, about a number of factors, including being Jewish, atheist, and socialist, and whether people would vote for such a candidate in the general election. And the wording is important here. Emphasis mine:
“If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be __________, would you vote for that person?”
So this is not about who you would vote for in the primaries, or whether you’d imagine a certain person (like a socialist, or atheist) to be in the other party. The thought experiment here is that the primary process is over, and we have party nominees. Normally you would then support *your *party’s nominee, but are any of these factors so strongly repellant that you’d make an exception?
Only 7 percent said being Jewish would be a dealbreaker, about the same number (and probably mostly the same bigoted people) who said the same about being a woman, Catholic, Black, or Hispanic. Being gay or lesbian was a nonstarter for 24 percent, and Muslim was no-go for 38%. The “worst” two were atheist (40% Do. Not. Want.) and socialist (50% “hell, no”). And if you scroll down, you’ll find that Democrats actually don’t differ by a huge degree on these questions from independents and Republicans.
So, sure: let’s combine the two biggest turnoffs in a candidate and roll the dice with them. Lovely idea. Maybe he can find a gay Muslim as a running mate. :smack: (“Not that there’s anything wrong with it”, as they say, but I would like to win, not giftwrap the election for the GOP. Kthx)
I agree that atheism is a much harder sell to the American people than Judaism, but I haven’t heard of anything Bernie has said that would convince anyone that he’s an atheist except for the people who are convinced Obama is a Muslim, and those people aren’t swing voters.
In a recent forum he said that his religious and spiritual beliefs are very important to him. Countercites?
Well, if we choose to take that particular poll as gospel, it’s clearly impossible for Sanders to win the nomination, so I don’t know why you’re spending so much energy arguing about it.
It’s a *very *transparent dodge, and anyone with a three-digit IQ will see through it immediately. (FWIW, I doubt President Obama is any more religious than Bernie is, but he’s smarter in the way he dodges, and in fact probably flat-out lies about his beliefs to an extent, which Bernie seems unwilling to do.)
If you follow the link in the update, you find another dodgy statement on the question:
Just like angels on the head of a pin, you can argue endlessly whether this makes him an atheist, agnostic, or something else. But what I would consider pretty inarguable is this:
And his brother (who is presumably not the fictitious talk show host, LOL) certainly isn’t buying into Bernie’s Godliness:
Whatever the label, that’s “not one of us” for most people.
Oh, and you know how Hillary’s a big liar? Yes, yes she is. And thank “god” for that:
I don’t buy any of that for a millisecond, but I’m sure glad she said it. Politics is serious business, and we cannot afford to be naive about it.
ETA:
How do you figure? It looks to me like the numbers line up perfectly, in theory, for him to squeak out the nomination but then be massacred in the general. Remember, most Democrats don’t vote in the primaries, and he’s got those enthusiastic kids behind him.
And that’s a nice, large poll, so I don’t understand why you wouldn’t buy it. Furthermore, add a little common sense: if people are dishonest in answering questions like these, do you really think they are going to claim to discriminate on these bases when they actually would not? No way: any reticence is going to go the other way, with people giving “PC” answers they don’t really believe. Which makes it even worse.
You know who else consorted with g-godless C-Communists? Franklin Roosevelt, the US President so beloved that he was re-elected until he dropped dead. You know who else extended a hand of friendship & reconciliation to the Russians in the depths of the Cold War? Ronald Reagan. Remember him?
This is going to be a tough year for you, I can tell.
I remember thinking Bill Clinton was too anti-military to win in 1992. I remember thinking George W. Bush was too ridiculous, trading on his father’s name. By 2007 I’d wised up. Weird wins, conventional wisdom is too conservative.
If you can’t win on the issues, insult your opponent’s associates. It’s just like talking about Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers eight years ago.
Except, you know:
[ul]
[li]Bernie was a Trotsyist turned Great Society liberal, not anymore in bed with Kremlin than Ronald Reagan was.[/li][li]The Sandanistas had a point; the “contras” were US-funded terrorists.[/li][li]Bernie was a competent mayor at one time, not just a “community organizer.”[/li][/ul]
The Democratic Party has already given up on trying to tar Bernie as a Communist, because they’d have to twist into pretzels. (And they need his base or they probably lose.)
The GOP can say whatever they want, but it’s a case of the boy who cried wolf.
That leaves independent concern trolls, who might have a point. There must be a non-zero overlap of swing voters and staunch anti-Communists, even a generation after the Berlin Wall fell. But non-zero does not mean determinant.
Atheist? Nah, Jewish.
Socialist? You mean like Communist? Nah, like Finland. Or Lyndon Johnson without the huge military buildup.
I find myself having to remember to counter my usual debate impulse, which is to wish for your hypothesis (Bernie wins the nomination), so I can prove without a doubt your conclusion (Bernie then wins the general election) is nuts. But no, that would be terrible. So I in fact don’t want us to ever find out what happens with Bernie Sanders as Democratic nominee; and if we do have to find out, I would hope against hope to be wrong in that case. I estimate that to be a nonzero possibility if the GOP standardbearer is Trump or Cruz; if it’s Rubio, the difference between the possibility and zero is negligible.
Also, I’ve started rolling my eyes at “baked in.” The first three times, it sounded almost clever. But after a hundred repetitions, it is clearly a most pathetic attempt at justifying a candidate with low popular approval. Not for being a Methodist, or a woman, or being pro-choice; people disapprove of her. And her ethics are part of that.
Here’s a secret that’s not really a secret: You can almost always go down. Bernie is, again, playing it smart by not going negative. But that doesn’t mean no one should.
Hillary has a record as Sec’y of State. Let’s look at it:
[ul]
[li]Undercut the Copenhagen climate talks[/li][li]Poked Russia over Georgia[/li][li]Turned Libya over to Daesh[/li][li]Established ties with the nat’l security “deep state”[/li][li]Kanye’d her way through as a celebrity figurehead, without doing much positive[/li][/ul]
There’s really not that much to her tenure at Foggy Bottom. Hillary is a Kardashian of politics, famous and appointed to high position for being famous and appointed to high position.
And there’s the Clinton Democrat attitude in a nutshell. “I think the politicians I support are lying, and really agree with me even though they deny it. But I’m glad they do, because most Americans just aren’t smart enough to know what’s really good for them and need to be manipulated by us sophisticated liberals…for their own good, of course”.
What evidence do you have that Obama or Clinton isn’t actually a sincere Christian, despite their consistent public statements to the contrary? That they seem smart, and everyone knows all religious people are dumb?
You can’t have it both ways. If most Americans won’t vote for an atheist, *and *most Democrats won’t vote for an atheist…then, remember, most Americans don’t vote in the general election, and he’s got those enthusiastic kids behind him. Unless there is some significant difference between the attitudes of Democrats and the general public, it has to either be an insurmountable obstacle in both contests or neither.
I can see that swing voters would be turned off by the sort of open contempt for religion that Sam Harris et al purvey, and that most people probably think of when they hear the term “atheist”. I can’t see them carefully parsing Sanders’ vaguely pro-spirituality statements to detect possible heresy. Assuming he doesn’t answer “yes” when directly asked if he’s an atheist, any voters not already in the GOP’s pocket are going to take his word for it and move on.
Yes. The socialist I know is not the same as an unnamed hypothetical socialist.
Your judgment, otoh, is suspect in my opinion.
You’ve said Trump and Cruz are not only less electable than Marco Rubio, but enough less electable that it’s worth voting for them in the primary to sabotage the GOP. I think that’s hilariously wrong, as if a Democrat crossed party lines to vote for “that loser Ronald Reagan” in the 1980 primary.
Cruz is using the Rick Perry/Dubya Bush playbook of oil money and outward piety, with some super-Reaganite promises of slashing government into the bone, and then slashing some more. I loathe him, but I expect him to be immensely successful with people I know. I’m not clear why he’s not the obvious right-wing favorite in your idea of America.
Trump is, as Qin says, TRUMP. He’s so big he doesn’t have to spend money, and if he did, he wouldn’t have to beg for even a dime. He’s a terrifying loose cannon, has cross-party appeal, and he’s also winning.
I expect Marco Rubio is too young, too foreign, too Spanish, too anti-birth-control, too super-Catholic; and too vapid to compensate. He’s a doomed little pretty head of hair. He would probably fit better in some other, more Vatican-besotted country.
(Kasich is also super-Catholic, but at least he’s not a Hispanic. He’s more credible than all of them from a certain point of view, but he has an actual executive record which can be used against him.)
Oh, and I’ve read, from someone who went to the same Methodist church in DC, that Hillary Clinton is a serious and apparently sincere Christian. Goes to church even in bad weather, all that. (Although that was from when Chelsea was still in school, so maybe it’s that her daughter was churchy.)
So, yeah, she might well believe that whatever evil she does, Jesus will wash her sins away! Face it, atheist, you’re better off with the secular Jew.
Right. On Planet Slacker, polls about hypothetical unnamed people about whom exactly one data point is known vs. hypothetical opponents about whom nothing at all is known are to be taken seriously, while polls about actual well-known people conducted more than a few months in advance of the election are to be completely disregarded.
Oh, SlackerInc, I’m sorry for implicitly calling posters like you “concern trolls.” That was over the line.
I just think you’re overreacting to the Democratic Socialist label. Young Democrats don’t seem to care, and older Democrats are going to be stuck with him to stop…probably Trump? It might not lose him any more votes than being really old, a sort of party outsider, or “the (second) man who cost Hillary her chance to be the first woman President.”
I have made jokes about his relationship to the party, but at the end of the day, I really do consider him a better candidate than Hillary. He has an agenda to sell while she mainly has a persona; and he’s distinguishable both from the Republicans and from a weathervane.
Cruz is not that well known, but his extremism is going to be an obvious problem for him in a general election. Tell me: which states that Obama carried twice are likely to back Cruz?
As for Trump, people get bedazzled by all this “winning” stuff and think he’s some kind of magician with “crossover appeal”, but the numbers are just not there. And he, unlike Cruz, is already very well known. Here’s Nate Silver (who, again, has a 99% accuracy track record in predicting states in presidential elections):
Yes, for once we agree. That is my attitude, and I own it.
It’s not that, because two of my three best friends are devout (liberal) Christians, and the other is into some woo-woo, hippy-dippy shit he calls…oh, what is it again? Shit, can’t remember, but it has to do with the universe being conscious, and how this is supposedly proven by quantum mechanics. :rolleyes:
Anyway, all three of them are extremely intelligent by any reasonable measure (one of them is even a university chemistry professor, although he strikes me as the most *verbally *intelligent person I know, even including myself). I chalk it up to a blind spot.
And no: I don’t have concrete evidence of Obama’s or Clinton’s secular orientation: if I did, that would negate my admiration for their cleverness. But I certainly don’t sense a lot of religiosity in either of them. In Hillary’s case, along with the era she came of age in, going to Wellesley, etc., I’ve just never seen or heard her do or say anything that comes across the slightest bit religious (except for dutifully describing herself as such in the thing I quoted). In fact, she could probably do well to turn that up a notch, but whatever: at least she has dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.
In Obama’s case, he does quote from the Bible from time to time, but I get the impression that is more in a philosophical way (and, of course, to provide cover). He has made no secret of the fact that the mother who raised him was a staunch atheist, and he is the only president who called out atheists (or “nonbelievers”, maybe) in his inaugural speech, in a positive way. Sure, it’s always possible that he was raised by an atheist, partly in a non-Christian country and partly in a U.S. state not known for its religiosity, and then he just “found Jesus” after graduating from Harvard Law. Or could it be that he started working toward being a black Chicago politician and soon realized he was dead in the water without a church congregation, and some good “preacher” lines in his stump speeches? Think what you like: I know where my hunch lies.
Nope. Okay, let’s just assume, to make the math simpler to explain, that the people voting in Democratic primaries are the same as Democrats writ large. This is a concession, because I believe they are likely to be more secular. Another concession is that I’ll play exclusively on your “atheist” turf even though his self-described socialism is a greater liability, according to the same poll. If you can’t win the argument when I put the thumb on the scale for him to this degree, that’s really trouble.
Per Pew, 39% of voters identify as independent, 32% Democratic, and 23% Republican. 64% of Democrats are willing to vote for an atheist, so that gives Bernie a base of 20.5% of the electorate to begin with. (If we can get him to even 48% by the time we’re done, I’ll call that good enough.) Since I’m giving him every single Democrat willing to vote for an atheist, regardless of other issues, I’m not going to give him any votes from the 23% of Republicans.
So Bernie is now behind 34.5-20.5 after Republicans and Democrats are accounted for. Independents will settle it. 49 percent of indies say they could conceivably imagine voting for an atheist. Now, they are independent, so some of them will likely vote against Bernie for some other reason. But let’s just continue to throw some magic pixie dust Bernie’s way and say “abracadabra, every independent who is not utterly opposed to voting for an atheist will vote for Bernie”. Uh oh, that’s only 19%. Bernie ultimately has failed to crack 40% in our exercise, so right about the same as McGovern–even after all the pixie dust I threw his way.
But okay: the other part of your argument was “if this is all true, then he can’t get nominated anyway”. Au contraire!
Again, for simplicity’s sake we’ll pretend as though all Democrats, but only Democrats, are voting in the Democratic presidential primaries. Well, hey: 64 percent of Democrats are willing to vote for an atheist. So if four out of every five of those Democrats vote for Bernie, he’s got over 51 percent of the vote in the primaries, and he’s good to go (until he runs into that general election buzzsaw, that is). This is exactly the kind of electoral math that gives us scenarios like Goldwater and McGovern. And I aim to keep it from happening again to our party, while trying to nudge the GOP into making just that mistake. And boy, do I get a lot of grief for this thankless job! Sheesh.
You guys love to wrap up wishful thinking and kind of massage it for a while and treat it as solid bedrock. Wow. He does not cover this by simply not answering “yes” to being an atheist. It’s the lack of answering “yes” to “Do you believe in God?” that is the problem. This isn’t some kind of logic puzzle or computer program, or sneaky fine print on a contract. He doesn’t get out of jail free as long as he doesn’t technically qualify as an atheist. The whole idea is whether he is the Other, “not one of us”. And being a nonreligious Jewish socialist is all that and a bag of chips, my friend.
BTW, the number of voters overall unwilling to vote for an atheist was 53% in 1978. It was still 53% in 2007. Since then, we’ve seen it go 48, 49, 46, 43, 40. So: progress! But we’ve still got a ways to go before it is not a huge liability.
Just apropos of nothing, something I noticed when looking at those crosstabs: it may not be significant, but the number for “would not vote for a black candidate” is higher right now than it has been since the 1980s. Sigh.
This looks clever at first, maybe even second, glance. But I’m fixin’ to shoot some holes in it. Better take cover!
First of all, Bernie Sanders is still not that well known. A lot of people have heard of him by now, but they still don’t know that much about him. One of the hardest things for people who are really into politics (like anyone reading this) to grok sometimes is how little the average voter pays attention until after Labor Day in the election year.
Secondly, there is a *huge *difference between polls that ask “If it’s Joe Smith vs. Jane Johnson, who do you pick? How about if it’s Jim Anderson vs. Jill Williams?” (etc.) and those that ask “what kind of characteristic is going to make voting for someone a total nonstarter, even if they are well-qualified?”
In the former case, you have to make a binary choice: A or B. You can pick “undecided” but they usually push you to pick one, and sure: why not?
But in the poll we are talking about, the path of least resistance is to just go along with every characteristic. Again: “sure, why not?” even if some of them might make you a little bit uncomfortable deep down. And you don’t want this pollster to think you’re a bigot! It’s perfectly possible to answer “yes, would vote for _____” on every single question, and I bet there are some who do just that (although the one about evangelical Christians reduces that number a bit, I expect: personally, that and the Muslim one would be the two I’d lean toward offering, although I’m not sure whether I would or not).
So, anyway: if you are willing to tell them “nope, that’s a dealbreaker, can’t do it” then you are unlikely to then change your mind a few months later. Sure, a few people might be so charmed by Bernie that they do in fact do that. But will it be significantly more than the people who say, in the abstract, that they’d vote for an atheist or a socialist, but then find themselves not feeling the Bern, regardless? I think not.
And you’re just not grappling with the insanity of pushing through the two toughest characteristics in one shot. (And this didn’t even ask about age, BTW.)
Those sorts of polls are always to be taken with the grain of salt. Good for trending but not much else. Think of them as alike the “generic Democrat” type polls. No one is generic; the specifics of the individual once known matter: “I hate Jews but you, you’re different.”
How many of that 40% do you think were swingable voters and how many already hard in the GOP-leaner camp?
Again, the specifics. His not Christian or even practicing a religion sense God concept could be spun as atheist if he was not being shoved into a different “religion” space in these people’s minds. But he is shoved into “Jewish” and while for him it is a cultural identity for them it is a religious one.
There’s just so much special pleading here. I mean, okay, maybe you could thread all these needles, but why try? Why start yourself off in the hole?
(1) Again, I think by their very nature, these polls are going to understate the antipathy people feel for these categories.
(2) What 40% do you mean? Did you go to the link? Gallup broke it down into various categories, including party ID and age–although to my minor irritation, when they got into the breakdowns, they only listed “would vote for” and not “wouldn’t vote for”. Still gives a pretty good idea though.
(3) Right, because Brooklyn Jews just warm the cockles of every Middle American’s heart. “Wait, that’s anti-Semitic!” No, no, simmer down: secular Jews are totally cool by me, in fact they are some of the best people you will find anywhere. I’m just pointing out how it doesn’t really serve as this amulet against a perception of Otherness by traditional, somewhat older but not rabidly conservative Americans, as it is being claimed to by you and several others for some reason.
As I’ve described in other threads, I can easily picture the type of person this stuff matters for: my current and former mothers-in-law. Both are suburbanites in their fifties, married to “independents” who are actually conservatives that always vote Republican. One is Catholic, and goes to Mass every Sunday although her husband goes only on holidays. The other is Lutheran, and both she and her husband are devout and attend regularly, have sappy religious tchotchkes around the house, etc.
These women are not on Twitter. They are not going to rallies. They are the furthest thing from hip, and in fact they are pretty corny (albeit sweethearts, both). But they vote like clockwork, and I just *know *their votes (and millions of others like them) are up for grabs. I’m pretty sure they voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, and Obama in 2008. They may or may not have voted for Obama again in 2012; if they did, it might have been partly because of a suspicion of Romney’s Mormonism (still up near 20% on that Gallup list). They will lean toward voting for Hillary, especially against Cruz or Trump. They will *not *vote for Bernie. Just not gonna happen.
Yeah, that’s a good point, actually. And I’ve thought about that many times. But I feel like it’s basically a “safe space” here at the SDMB (though not in the nauseating way that term has come to be used). Dopers are pretty secular, very smart, opinionated. They don’t need their hands held in the way I’m talking about. And I’m not an actual politician, or attached to any political campaign apparatus (though I wish!). If I were one of those things, I’d be a lot more careful about what I said except in more secure communications.
Of course, if any Democratic politician or campaign strategist were actually for some reason asked “Hey, what about all this stuff the SDMB’s **SlackerInc **says is the ‘true story’ behind the scenes? Any truth to any of it?” I would want them to lie through their teeth: “Nope, some people just have wild imaginations, I guess.”
Indeed. It’s this belief of his–that dishonesty in the service of a political aim is legitimate–that makes me hesitant to engage directly with him. I don’t think we agree on the rules of conversation.
