Apparently discussing the issues will depress primary turnout?
I mean the GOP just got an amazingly high caucus turnout in Iowa - we just need our own Trump blowhard… for turnout… right? 
These parts also are very … odd.
True, Trump and Sanders are both playing with cards from the populist deck, and both use the time-honored populist technique of creating cartoonish black hat villains and sell the idea that the system is rotten to the core and needs not repairs but pretty much replacing the whole thing. But those who find Mexicans and Muslims to be the appealing Black Hats and those who find Wall Street Fat Cats to be, those who find Trump’s contentless constantly shifting free form rants appealing and those who find Sanders unchanging over decades messaging appealing, are very different cohorts, separated generally by at least four years of higher education. Sanders’ Millennial “change” voters are not going to move to Trump, (albeit some of Trump’s might be poachable by Sanders).
And “let this be a fight”? “Let it”?
For now it is one whether Hillary supporters want to “let it” be one or not. And he is very likely to overwhelmingly crush her in NH. What? You want her to throw Nevada and SC and a few Super Tuesday states?
He’s not a seven year old playing one on one basketball against former college star Dad.
Yes. The OP seems to be very much a “Don’t attack my favored candidate, but we’re free to attack everyone else”. Kind of silly, IMO.
Maybe instead of telling all the Sanders supporters to shut up and vote Hillary, you might want to try that line of reasoning on the black voters. After all, if they’d stop blithering on about Hillary and start ensuring that Bernie wins, we’d be sure to keep the Republicans out of the White House.
Also, this is a shitty reason to support one candidate over another in a party primary. In the general election, there’s an argument to be made for not voting for 3rd party candidates. Whoever wins this primary gets the vote of democrats; suggesting that we stop talking about/pushing the issues that matter because of evil boogeyman Republicans is ridiculous, and it is one that guarantees that the candidate of choice will always be the one who . . . what? Is the most like the devil, so that the devil’s minions might just be swayed to vote for him/her?
Ultimately, whoever wins the nomination is going to be in some way vetted as the best candidate. That’s the whole point of this process. Should we skip it?
Meh. I’m pointing out that Sanders is not going to be the candidate. I don’t care if he’s your favorite. I don’t care if you don’t like Clinton. I’ve said before that I wish it weren’t her and all her baggage. Having Sanders in the race will do her some good to get her responses tuned against a mostly friendly opponent. But Sanders has no chance to get the nomination. (You think things are even after Iowa? Clinton leads in superdelegates 359 to 8.)
That’s where the blithering comes in. People keep talking as if Clinton is being mean to Sanders by standing in his way. Or that the party should bail on her and attack Wall Street with pitchforks. Or that no one should vote for Clinton if she somehow beats Sanders. Or stuff that’s so not rational that blithering is too polite for it.
When Sanders loses it will be because he never had a chance nationally. That’s all it will mean. No nefarious plots. No conspiracy theories. No dirty tricks by the Clintons. You had your fun. Now get serious and win. And that means voting in your local elections, too, and not just in presidential years. Hear that, Sanders millennials?
And you know, another thing that confuses me about the OP is this- Hillary supporters seem to be generally saying that they’d prefer Hillary, but have nothing against Bernie. I, for one, lean towards Sanders, but if he doesn’t get the nomination, I’ll happily vote for Clinton- because I believe that giving the Republicans the keys to the whole shebang would be catastrophic.
But Bernie supporters are very vocal in their “Bernie or nobody” stance. They don’t want to just vote for Bernie, they want to vote *against *Hillary. And they aren’t shy in letting everyone know about it, either.
So yeah, the OP confuses me greatly. If anyone is depressing turnout, it’s the Bernie gang.
Not picking on you specifically, but when you say that after saying:
. . . well, I just don’t see the difference.
How does that translate to Bernie depressing turnout? Sounds like he’s increasing turnout from the people are voting *against *Hillary. I think turnout would be very low if she was only running against Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee.
Not her, the Establishment, and that’s a legitimate beef.
I’ve heard very little of that. I’ve heard a fair amount of the opposite. It may be confirmation bias, but it’s kind of been going on for awhile now that I’ve noticed.
People are talking past one another. What does a vote mean? Several answers:
-People vote to express their goals for the nation.
-People vote to cast judgment.
-People vote to sway the national narrative.
-People vote to influence policy.
Clinton voters are largely in the last category. Sanders voters are more in the first three, though not entirely.
It’s legitimate to discuss the best use of a vote. But sneering at people who use their vote in a different way doesn’t move the discussion forward.
There’s a defense of Clinton’s shitty campaign tactics that goes something like this: “You think THIS is bad? This is NOTHING compared to what the Republicans are gonna do!” The problem with that defense is that a lot of us aren’t interested in voting for a Republican lite. We’re looking to vote for someone who doesn’t engage in that sort of shitty tactic. We think that kind of shittiness, whether it’s Clinton’s relatively mild brand or Rove’s relatively spicy brand, degrades public discourse.
I’ll vote for Clinton when it (most likely) comes down to it in November. But every time one of her campaign folks says something shitty, it makes it harder for me to cast that vote.
And I don’t think I’m alone in this. It’s not that “Clinton is being mean to Sanders by standing in his way”; that’s codswallop. It’s that her campaign has become increasingly ugly (Bill Clinton just chastised Sanders because Sanders is not honest–which may be true, depending on what the meaning of “is” is), and we’d like her to fight clean, however filthy the Republicans plan to get this summer.
I wish I had been on that committee. I would have immediately stood up and demanded, "Depends on what “is” is?! :mad: Mr. President! Will you please make it clear once and for all to this committee and to the American people: Is you is, or is you ain’t, my baby?!
“The way you actin’ lately makes me doubt.” 
You are wrong, Harpo. The problem with the Democrats lately has been assuming that the next Presidential election is the only thing worth fighting for–just like you’re doing here.
I keep hearing that the Republicans are “demographically doomed” so that will redound to the Democrat’s benefit. But the Democratic Party is dying. The consistent voters are geriatric. The older middle-aged crowd defected to the GOP in huge numbers. The poor don’t vote at all, and indeed see themselves as unrepresented by both parties. The younger vote (again, under 45) overlaps heavily with Occupy and the anti-war movement. The anti-war movement were pandered to for two years with “Impeach Bush” and then completely dismissed. Occupy got some sympathetic noises from Democrats, which meant exactly as much as the sympathetic noises from John Huntsman and the Ron Paul cult.
What most of us learned from that, from Democratic Party stalwarts insisting that they were “free market capitalists” (and who thought that’s what we wanted to hear!), was that we couldn’t use them to fight the power structure, and maybe we really couldn’t fight city hall.
You can’t get out the vote if there is no base to turn out.
The way things are going, if the Democrats don’t want the new young socialists, the best thing for the present Democratic Party’s electoral future might be for the Republicans to finally actually disenfranchise non-landowners. Eventually, the toffs would cut away their own support, and whatever passes for the old Democratic Party aristocracy would have a chance again. Remember when it was practically a family business in the 1960’s, and the Democrats would just tell their base, “This is the team”? You could do that again!
But if you want an actual party with a base in the populace, you have to actually give poor, young, progressive voters a party that means a damn thing to them.
Also, you are not entitled to black votes. You are not entitled to latino votes. You are not entitled to a thing.
Except for the constant implication that this should be a coronation, and not a contest. And that Bernie supporters should vote for someone they loathe as a hawk and an elitist. Or, yes, preferably, stay out of it and let Queen Hillary receive her crown.
And it would be a coronation of an old moderate Democrat: a woman who would have been a Republican if she hadn’t married a southern Democratic politician, a women whose fandom act as if the Democratic Party exists to be her and her husband’s cult of personality. Hillary apparently represents privileged white women born before 1970 with post-graduate degrees, and a penumbra out from there of people who tick some of those boxes.
Bernie represents the actual positions and constituencies that the Democrats pretend to represent every year. Except that he’s more liberal (or conservative, or, ugh, whatever) on gun rights.
Look, I would understand a White Flight label being attached to him if it came up, since he left Brooklyn for Vermont. But the fact that he moved to a heavily white state does not in itself make him a racist. And I haven’t heard a race-based criticism of his policies if there is one. Bill Clinton playing the saxophone doesn’t mean a thing.
I feel someone should let Sanders’ supporters know this, esp when they express such flabbergasted noises that African Americans and Latinos swing very heavily for Clinton.
Why do I feel your main critique is that it isn’t a coronation for Sanders? Why do you feel that moderate and moderately liberal voters should vote for someone they may not like as being too pro-big government or not pragmatic enough to get ideas through Congress? Clinton supporters are equally allowed to point out what they don’t like about Sanders as the other way. Sorry, you don’t get to dictate who gets to dish out criticism of candidates and which candidates they get to dish out criticism about.
The Democrats don’t run in my local elections. My state (Missouri) voted for Bubba Clinton twice in the 1990’s, and against Obama twice. I need young white people in a left-of-center party to take Jefferson City away from the anti-tax maniacs. If Bernie mobilizes young white voters, and Hillary mobilizes little old ladies, I’ll take Bernie.
Oh, and what black voters there are in my state are in revolt against the white Democrat establishment. I know this is selection bias, but when I see young* black* people talk about politics, they’re talking about Sandra Bland a lot more than about Hillary Clinton.
It’s confusing to you? If you support Hillary but would be OK with Bernie, and the next generation of voters like Bernie and consider Hillary the devil, who’s the better candidate?
How is this hard?
That’s fair. Hillary herself has been fair in her treatment of Bernie, because she’s not an idiot.
My beef is with anyone who’s trying to torpedo early the only remaining challenger to her in this primary season. I don’t think Bernie is a perfect candidate; who would be? I do believe an easy walk to the nomination for Hillary would be a disaster for the party, as it would fail to raise interest in the party.
Look, I’m not a single-issue anti-war voter, so I can excuse Hillary better than some. If Hillary gets the nomination, I probably can vote for her to beat the Republican, just this once. But I want leaders for the party who understand that voting for a President to beat the Republican, just this once, is not enough.
Wow, that was the exact same tone as used by\ my Bushie friends in 2000! “If any boy can grow up to be President, why can’t he just because he’s the son of one? 
”
[The answer, of course, is that he didn’t know what he was doing, and only got that far on Poppy’s reputation. We don’t pick the President at random out of a list of statewide officeholders, either.]
When a latino or an African American tells me that they can’t vote for a Jew and none of their friends can either, I can begin to take this seriously.
Even so, there’s a bigger risk to latinos from white voters turning to Trump, than from blacks staying home because we nominated an old white Jewish man over an old WASP lady.
To be honest, I don’t think the leaders of the party want simply to push Hillary Clinton just because they feel she can ‘beat the Republican’. I think a lot of them believe that pragmatic governance works best as when President Obama went to a more pragmatic governing style (his 2nd term) he got a lot more done. I think that definitely applies to the more liberal backers of Clinton like Sherrod Brown and John Lewis.
However, I also think that there are more moderate Democratic leaders or more moderate liberals (near left rather than far left? :D) who agree more with Clinton on the issues than Sanders (or who think Sanders goes just a slight bit too far). The Democratic Party is actually a decent sized tent and many of those who are closer to the center do exist in leadership in many places (and in the voting roles in many places as well).
This was more or less the core of my argument against HRC, and I not only buried it in the middle, I screwed it up in the final version of the post:
Let’s try expanding it to this:
Bill Clinton ran on “change.” Barack Obama ran on “Hope & Change.” **Hillary is inverting that, and telling someone with real plans for revolutionary change that, actually, conservatism wins elections. (Since when?)
**
This is very bad for the party–certainly over the next decade or two, and also likely this year. The “change” constituency can show up to vote for Bernie, or they can show up to vote for Trump. After that, they may keep voting for the same party in the general. Which party do you want to increase affinity for?