Or maybe they are isolating the proper variables.
You know what? I don’t think I should have been so confrontational. I agree there’s probably a bubble building. I don’t think a degree=ready for the workforce.
But a go-getter with a piece of paper has more opportunities than a go-getter without a piece of paper.
The ten most important qualities in a Democratic candidate for President are, in order:
[ul][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with the best chance to win the general election.[/li][li] Someone with broad centrist views who works well with others.[/li][/ul]
Considering that the Koch-Hannity Lie Machines will label Sanders as a card-carrying supporter of Lenin and Mao Tse-Tung, I’d say Bernie fails on all counts.
++
Cite? 
++
And in evaluating who has the best chance to win the election, should we place more weight on objective, scientific polling data, or on our personal hunches?
Yeah, guess who has a lower favorablty rating than Donald Trump at this very moment, & had a comparable one during the presidential campaign? And yet she was chosen to lead the party anyway. Maybe next time we can go with the popular, likable & trusted candidate, & if the Koch-fueled lie machine chips away at their popularity, so be it. At least they’d be starting off the GE campaign at a more favorable baseline. I’ll never understand why we were told that the candidate who already had decades of negative opinions “baked in,” instead of the one who consistently polled better, was the better choice.
2016 proved that regardless of who the parties nominate, they’re each going to get about 45% of the vote. They can nominate the vilest human being imaginable, as the Republicans arguably did, & they’ll still get that base in their pocket, at least. So if the Democrats in 2020 nominate someone well-liked by Independents & new voters like Millennials, they win the election. Bernie Sanders seems to fit that mold at this moment, but that can change.
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I owe you an apology, Banquet Bear. In fact, Trumpster Fire’s NAR did nose briefly above zero for a couple weeks around Inauguration Day, before beginning the steady downward trajectory it has maintained since. So I guess the gross ignorance in that point was mine. So, I will try again.
You ask me if I disagree that many Democrats hate Bernie and wouldn’t vote for him if he were nominated. Of course I don’t, that’s obviously true.
Many Democrats hated Hillary Clinton and didn’t vote for her when she was the nominee.
Many Democrats hated Barack Obama and didn’t vote for her when he was the nominee.
Many Democrats hated Franklin Roosevelt and didn’t vote for him when he was the nominee.
Someone just started a thread about John Anderson, who earned a footnote in history because many Republicans hated Ronald Reagan and wouldn’t vote for him when he was the nominee.
All those statements are true for certain values of “many”.
You apparently feel that Sanders’ diehard opponents are more numerous than Obama’s or Reagan’s, and would pose a serious threat to his electability. I would like a cite to that effect.
We know that 80% of Democrats look favorably on Bernie and would presumably be happy to vote for him, a higher figure than any other candidate can boast. If you can show quality polling data indicating that all * of the other 20% feel as strongly negative about Bernie as you and* dalej42** do, it would give me pause.
In the absence of such evidence, it seems simplest to assume that the whiny Clinton supporters who are pushing this argument today, like the whiny Clinton supporters who vowed to throw the 2008 election to McCain because Obama had been a big meanie during the primaries, aren’t a significant political force, but rather a handful of bitter cranks.
I think that ties into the idea that there’s too much of a pressure for young people to go to college because there is no decent alternative like a proper vocational training system.
The fault I see here is two-fold.
-
Using Germany as an example again, the percentage of people who go to college is quite a bit lower than it is in the US but there is a very robust vocational training system that works as a cooperation of state-run vocational schools and in-company training. That system creates a vast market of skilled workers which is the basis for Germany’s industry.
Those skilled workers earn quite a lot (often more than uni graduates) and the diversified quality production that’s so common in Germany (machine tools, cars…) isn’t as easily challenged by low-wage countries as simple mass production that sees a race-to-the-bottom when it comes to wages.
Western countries can’t really compete when it comes to wage costs, there will always be a country where wages are lower. By trying to compete like that you create a precariously poor working class with stagnating wages and little job security (see: US).
But if you want to compete in the high-quality sector you need to invest in your workforce and its training.
Which leads me to problem #2: -
“Labour” isn’t valued enough in the US. Whereas in Germany labour is seen as an important resource that companies invest in through training, re-training and further training, many US companies see it as rather expendable. You can see this in companies’ reactions to crises. The first reaction in the US is to lay off workers.
In Germany, management and worker representation try and find a compromise on how to get through the rough times. The work force is largely retained in a cooperative process that involves management, worker representation, unions and at times politics. And companies are obviously less likely to lay people off when they’ve invested into their training for years and are faced with losing all those valuable assets.
So when the economy starts looking up again, German companies can start ramping up production again. Whereas American companies that laid off their workers… need to try and hire again, by which time their workers may have moved to some other city or left the labour market.
Short of a major paradigm shift concerning the value of labour and vocational training, I see no fix for the problem you described.
The owner structure of companies is one of the problems here of course. When a company is owned by an “anonymous” body of shareholders who only care about next quarter’s figures, it’s hard to do any long-term planning. Laying people off is a much easier boost to the stock price than attempting to plan long-term and accepting some losses in the process.
It seems to work just fine for many European countries. Even without tuition fees, education is never truly “free”. You still need to live and obviously education takes effort. So it’s definitely something students value.
38% favorable
55 Un
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinton-favorable-rating
40% favorable, 55 un.
about the same.
We did. We, oddly that since it was a election- “picked” the candidate with 55.2% to 43.1% of the popular vote, 34 to 23 contests won, and 2,842 to 1,865 delegates. A clear and decisive majority.
See, this is why I find debating with you so frustrating. Of course, I’m “conceding” that Bernie didn’t win the support of most blacks. It’s a well established fact that I would never dream of denying. It’s like you’re saying “AHA! So you admit that the sky is not, in fact, orange with chartreuse polka dots!” and acting like you’ve scored some sort of point.
My belief is that Clinton’s win among blacks had more to do with Clinton than with Sanders. Ironically, the articles you linked, while they don’t at all say what you claimed they did (and nice job describing my pointing that out as a “handwave”, btw), support my position quite well. Clinton and her husband have always been quite popular among blacks, and had long-established connections with black Democratic leaders at all levels of the party. Bernie has a 73% approval rating among blacks. Most of them preferred Clinton, but I’m just not seeing any evidence that any significant bloc of black voters would have a serious problem with Bernie as the nominee.
And the article I linked in the first sentence of the OP demonstrates that, like any skilled politician, he is making efforts to address his relative weakness in this area.
Let me ask you this: In 2008, Clinton* lost* the majority of black votes during the Democratic primaries. Were you declaring at that time that Clinton’s career was over because she had “marginalized and ignored” black voters, who as a result “hated” her? If not, what do you see as the difference between her and Sanders?
…you actually haven’t really engaged in debate with me until now.
Thanks for making your concession clear.
[QUOTE=From the articles I linked to]
Those former staffers described a campaign that failed to give its black outreach teams the resources they needed, that never figured out how to connect to black audiences, and that marginalized black media.
…
Anyone who knows black voters—and Sanders clearly didn’t—knows that Clinton did not have them on lock. Black people started with a better relationship with her, but familiarity doesn’t equal votes.
Demoralized by police killings, left even further behind by economic inequality, held back for generations by structural racism, black people were primed for a political revolution.
…
But Sanders seldom trained that same impassioned rhetoric on the problems that so many black voters wanted addressed: police brutality, white supremacy, and the ways in which economic inequality is inextricable from race.
…
He appeared not to realize that you can’t simply deliver the same speech on economic inequality to a room full of black people in Atlanta that you would to a room full of white people in Iowa.
…
Glover said that stops were cut from Sanders’ tour of HBCUs after the South Carolina primary, in late February. He said he was told by superiors that there wasn’t enough money to continue them. The Sanders campaign raised $44 million in March, its best performance to date.
Glover also said that campaign money for the HBCU tour always came at the last minute, leaving him scrambling to pay vendors.
…
Glover told me, “This was an opportunity at one of the most prestigious African-American colleges and universities in the country to really build a relationship with their black business community. Who knows what kinds of stories of Bernie Sanders they could have gone out and told, but we chopped it off before it had a chance to materialize. We left a bad taste in their mouths.”
…
The problem for Oso was that Sanders failed to articulate what the “political revolution” he so often talked about would mean for black people.
“I don’t think what Bernie stands for is out of line with what a lot of black communities and black progressive movements prioritize,” she said. “It’s just that it comes from that dominant white male perspective on what’s really important. An over-emphasis on class struggle, absent racial analysis. And even if we’re talking about class struggle, why is his position on reparations that it’s unrealistic?”
[/QUOTE]
The article does not agree with you at all. Black voters aren’t stupid. They didn’t just blindly vote for Hillary. Clinton got their vote because Bernie didn’t understand and address the issues that were important to them. I think you are both mis-characterising the article and ignoring the bits that don’t agree with your beliefs. There were significant problems with black outreach by the Bernie campaign and nothing since that campaign has changed.
I wouldn’t have expected Matthew Yglesias to have written anything other than what he wrote.
No.
I haven’t declared that Sander’s “career is over.” I’ve stated that I don’t think Sanders is a good candidate, that he would struggle to get the support of a whole lot of people that he would need to get the nomination, that it is way too early to tell who the “front runner” will be for the 2020 nomination. Bernie and Trump are the only two people “running” at the moment. So it isn’t a surprise that Bernie’s name is “first on the list.”
Bill Clinton signed into law the crime bill that lead to a massive jump in prison populations. Hillary Clinton said " “They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators.” That Clinton got more support than Sanders despite the fact that her husband played a huge part in policies that have devastated black communities just shows how bad a candidate Bernie would be IMHO. Go spend some time on black twitter. Go listen to the people that were harassed by the Bernie Bros. The Bernie brand is toxic. Yes: plenty of people support him and millions would vote for him. But he burnt some serious bridges the last campaign, and he has made zero effort to rebuild those bridges. And unless both he and his campaign seriously commit to addressing what they did wrong the last time then he has very little chance of winning the nomination.
I did not say that black voters are stupid. I think the articles you linked offer decent insights into why many blacks preferred Clinton; she was well known to them and she and her husband have always been popular in that community.
And clearly there were problems with Sanders’ campaign outreach, but all the errors mentioned in your links seem pretty easily correctable (well, except for that guy who wants a Democratic Presidential candidate to demand reparations for slavery. He will likely remain disappointed).
Remember, most of the high-powered Democratic campaign consultants were committed to Clinton years before the voting began; Sanders was running a national campaign staffed by people who had little or no experience running a national campaign. Now things are entirely different; the talent is on the market, and he has the money to hire it.
There is no reason on policy grounds why blacks should object to Bernie Sanders. He has been a consistently reliable vote on civil rights issues his entire career in Congress. He was organizing and getting arrested at anti-segregation protests in the early 60s. He has called police brutality “one of the great civil rights issues of the early twenty-first century”. So why do blacks hate him so much? Oh, yeah, they don’t. Did I mention the 73% approval rating?
Thanks for making your concession clear.
This is the second time you’ve said this. It isn’t true. Bernie Sanders has not declared his candidacy for President any more than any of the people he is beating in the polls have.
I borrowed the title of the thread from the 538 chat that inspired it, and it is perhaps a bit overly provocative. I wanted to post this because most of the discussion about 2020 on this board, most recently** adaher’s**, “politicians with bright futures” thread, seem to entirely ignore the guy who got 42% of the vote last time. I agree that the chances of him getting the nomination aren’t clearly better than anyone else’s, and certainly much less than the chances of everyone else put together, but any discussion of the 2020 race (which it is not at all too early for) which doesn’t mention Bernie Sanders among the top contenders is IMO silly.
What the hell is your point here? Now you appear to be supporting an argument that blacks really didn’t like Hillary, but held their noses and voted for her anyway because Bernie was just sooo awful. Is that what you think happened? It’s the exact opposite of what the articles you linked say.
And here we arrive at the heart of the matter. I am looking at scientific polling of a representative sample of American voters, and you are looking at Twitter.
You keep saying that, although it has repeatedly been shown to be untrue. In fact, he is making a serious effort to reach out to blacks and to other constituencies where he was weak last election. These efforts may or may not succeed, but it’s simply not true to say that they aren’t being made.
Public Policy Polling releases new polling data.
It’s scary how much this makes me feel like Steve Martin in The Jerk – “The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!!”
**
2020 Hypotheticals Vs. Trump**
Biden 54-39
Sanders 52-39
Warren 49-42
Booker 45-40
Harris 41-40
Zuckerberg 40-40
Well, let’s not nominate Mark Zuckerberg, I guess.
Weirdly, they didn’t directly poll Hillary Clinton, but they asked voters if they wished Clinton were now President instead of Trump, and they did by 49-41. They would like Obama back by a margin of 53-40.
Thewhole summary, which measures public opinion on numerous other issues as well, is an interesting read, best summed up by the quote “Trump does a lot of losing in our poll”.
Comic relief: We now have scientific data confirming that, in fact, 45% of those who approve of Trump wouldn’t object to him shooting someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. An additional 26% were unsure.
Another Interesting New Poll
This NBC/WSJ poll’s sample was taken from 439 counties in 16 states — Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — that either flipped from Barack Obama to Trump, or where Trump greatly outpaced Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012. And as a result, these counties are whiter, older, more rural, and less educated than the national average.
Barack Obama: 50% positive, 37% negative (+13)
Bernie Sanders: 42% positive, 32% negative (+10)
Mike Pence: 38% positive, 32% negative (+6)
Donald Trump: 43% positive, 43% negative (even)
Hillary Clinton: 27% positive, 54% negative (-27)
…I never claimed you said black voters aren’t stupid.
But black voters aren’t stupid. And thats the point. They weren’t locked into Hillary.
At most the article spends about three paragraphs talking about why they prefered Clinton. It wasn’t the thrust of the article at all.
No they aren’t easily correctable. What makes you think that? You think a couple of speeches will be enough to turn things around?
Black voters aren’t stupid.
Campaign consultants aren’t going to change who Bernie is. This isn’t about marketing. Its about whether or not people believe that Bernie is actually going to fight for them.
This is why a “new coat of paint” won’t change things.
[QUOTE=Mediate]
“Obviously, [Trump] said things that created tremendous controversy, offense, in some cases, real genuine pain for some folks, Muslim-Americans in particular. But there’s a sense he was violating some set of manners that shouldn’t exist. What do you make of that?” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked Sanders during their townhall Monday night.
“I think he said he will not be politically correct,” Sanders replied. “I think he said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old politically correct rhetoric, and they believe that he was speaking from his heart and willing to take on everybody.”
[/QUOTE]
This is who Bernie is. And black voters and muslim voters and plenty of other minority voters who think and say “politically correct things” won’t forget it either. He isn’t appealing to the black vote here. He is clearly and unambiguously appealing to the white vote in the rust bucket and throwing the minority voter under the bus.
Its this sort of attitude that lost Bernie the vote the first time around and will be why he won’t get the nomination next time either. This is magical thinking. “Black people want free healthcare, why wouldn’t they vote for Bernie?” You don’t get their vote by default. You can’t take their vote for granted. You need to earn it.
Yes, he says and does the right things. And yes: he has vote for civil rights issues and he got arrested and yes he isn’t a bad person.
Mike Pence. Paul Ryan. Neil Gorsuch. Rex Tillerson. Mitch McConnell. Jared Fucking Kushner. The poll question asked " Now we will show you some names. Please indicate if you have a favorable or unfavorable view of that person - or if you’ve never heard of them." When Bernie is on the same list as Kellyanne Conway, is it any surprise he got 73% favorability (not approval) rating? It was a binary choice. Favourable or not. (And Hillary got 78% in case you were wondering.)
That wasn’t a concession. You attributed a false claim to me: I was correcting you.
Trump hasn’t declared his candidacy either. But that hasn’t stopped him holding rallies and raising money.
You can mention him all you like. But he isn’t going to win IMHO.
Yep. Thats what I’m saying. Plenty did hold their noses and vote Hillary. If you haven’t seen the documentary the 13th by Ava DuVernay then I would highly reccomend it. Its a devastating indictment of the Clintons and the damage that Bill Clinton’s policies wrecked on black communities.
The scientific polling you refer to don’t show what you think the numbers show. Polling can fool you. You need to understand what those numbers actually mean.
Black twitter is a real cultural phenomenon that will give you an insight into what people are saying and thinking. “Black twitter” is not “twitter.” Its like sitting in at a barbers shop and listening into the conversations. Of course it isn’t scientific and I never claimed it was.
Those of us who watched goobergate and their ilk run riot over the internet were not surprised nor blind-sided when the alt-right tactics that worked so well for them online made Trump the most powerful person on the planet. We watched the evolution of “fake news” before it even became a thing.
When? Where?
Where? Cite?
If Bernie actually isn’t running as you claim, then he is wasting a lot of effort into doing something that is pretty damn pointless.