Has he convinced a single one yet? I’ve seen stories about some of his *own *superdelegates getting disgusted and switching to Clinton, and that was before she clinched.
Re: Tammany Hall.
Now here’s another name: T-A-M-M-A-N-Y, what’s that?
Tammany!
WRONG! The answer’s Tyranny!
Tammany spells Tyranny like R-A-T spells Rat!
Now there’s a double M in Tammany, and a double L in gall,
Just like the double-dealing, double-crossing, double-talking, double-dyed DUPLICITY!
OF TAMMANY HALL!
No, she won’t. But she will hold the line without overreaching. Bernie will get in, make a lot of noise, not accomplish anything, and end up being a disappointing one term president who sets progressives back like Carter did. (Carter - great man - horrible for the Democratic party).
Clinton will get in, make some minor gains (Supreme Court nominations), hold the line on other things (ACA), and meet expectations - and set herself up for a second term. Whether she gets a second term or not, is anyone’s guess, but she is almost certain to be best positioned for one.
Trump would get in, and has the potential to hurt not just the Republican party, but the country as a whole for decades. It isn’t like Progressives could step in and fix all the harm done if we put a bunch of yahoos on the bench, or hurt our relationships with other countries, or harm our credit (financial or reputation).
Doubtful: everything Bernie stands for is utter anathema to the Republicans — therefore they must oppose him to an extent that would make their treatment of Obama look like a lovefest.
Hillary though is an insider, and willing to horse-trade: not only does she share many of their bases, but provided she can get her aggressive foreign policy and whatever specific issues she holds most dear, she’d negotiate on the things they hold most dear. Prolly money.
There’s a reason the stodgier Republicans are choosing her instead of Trump, their own supposed nomination.
Still, whether Hillary or Donald becomes POTUS, all the excitement and fear-mongering will die away in the cold light and everything will carry on exactly as normal. It generally does. These are not forces for change.
It’s important, though, to have really good relationships with the other Democrats in Congress, as we saw in the Iran nuclear deal. Lots of Dems were getting cold feet about the deal, hearing it not only from their GOP colleagues but sometimes from their own party faithful. Obama was able to call in favors and twist arms to get the votes he needed:
*Remember when I came to campaign for you in that tough race against that Tea Party candidate?
*Don’t forget I supported you against your primary opponent.
*I’ll do what I can to ensure that the DSCC makes your race one of its top priorities this fall…
Obama had a solid history of this sort of thing with senators and representatives, and so he could do that. Clinton would be able to do that too. Look at her endorsements, look at her superdelegate support. She works well with others in the party, helps and mentors those newly-elected, earns the trust and support of leaders. Sanders–not so much. I don’t think he’s roundly disliked, Ted Cruz-style, but didn’t do much before the campaign to establish close and helpful connections with Democrats in Congress. And of course his increasingly bitter condemnation of “the establishment” hasn’t brought him any closer to that goal. He lacks political capital, and that’s not a recipe for success with things like the Iran deal. In a case like that, it does matter.
That’s not true actually, that is “one way” to promote viable third parties, but not “the one” way. Britain and Canada both have had or currently have viable to semi-viable third parties, and have for years. They both use first past the post voting. The reason parties outside of the two dominant ones (and both of those countries generally do have two dominant parties and then a collection of smaller ones) is because the control of government is based on control of Parliament. So a small party (like the Lib Dems or the NDP) can win a small number of legislative seats and this actually allows them a seat at the table in determining who controls the government. At times this is waxes and wanes. At one point Canada’s non-Liberal parties were immensely fractured, with the conservatives being split into like three parties, and the NDP and Bloc were both more powerful at that time as well. The previous British government was able to have power because the Lib Dems agreed to caucus with the Tories (after their most recent election the Tories won an absolute majority without the Lib Dems, so abandoned their coalition partners–also the Lib Dems now have virtually no seats in Parliament.)
In the United States the election of the legislature and the election of the chief executive are entirely disconnected. Because of this, a minority party in the legislature has much less power, and thus the incentive to work in coalition with a minority party just isn’t there. Although to be frank, I do wonder why don’t see more of it. Yes, in our system it wouldn’t determine the Presidency, so “control of the House” or Senate is less important, but it’s still quite important. If say in 2016 the Democrats came up 5 seats short of winning the House, and some third party (let’s say the Greens) won 15 seats, then no single party would have a majority. The Greens could offer to caucus with the Democrats and vote for the Dem candidate for Speaker. Assuming the Dems win the White House, the Greens would be well positioned. They could get things like say, maybe a Green party cabinet secretary, certainly the leader of the Green caucus in the House would get a very high ranking position in the House leadership etc.
However at the end of the day I actually speculate the reason this doesn’t happen is because doing that as a group of ‘Green Party’ members is functionally very little different from just being a group of lefty Democrats who care about environmental issues and who vote together in the House and use that as leverage. Look at the Tea Party caucus in the House for the Republicans. Sure, they could’ve formed their own party, but realistically anything they would be able to get as their own party, they’re getting being part of the Republican party.
And probably most importantly–the “democratic” primary process is actually far friendlier if you’re in one of the established parties. The fact that party leadership doesn’t just “pick” nominees but instead we have, mostly state-run primaries, I think enshrines the two current parties quite a bit (and I’m generally very against any voting on political nominees.)
I find that highly doubtful. President Obama has practically handed the Republican Congress their own policies and they still refuse to do anything. They’ll find excuses to continue their obstructionism until they’re unable. In fact, they’ll probably be even more resistant to her than Obama.
The (sadly) small minority of Republicans who choose her will do so because they can’t stomach him and because he’ll seriously damage the GOP’s future. You’re also vastly underestimating the damage Trump can and will do to the country, the office, and the world. He doesn’t care about maintaining the status quo and is dangerously ignorant of the entire system. The President can act unilaterally on a variety of things well before Congress can do anything about it, and he will.
Bernie apparently has no intention of conceding defeat. The campaign sent out this email this morning:
Lifted word for word from his nonconcession speech last night, except for the last line.
Eh, boilerplate. “Taking it to the convention” could simply mean he’s planning to wrangle himself a plum speaking spot, plus maybe get a few rules changes passed.
Sanders is meeting with Obama tomorrow. I expect the president will make it clear it’s time to start uniting the Democrats if Sanders hopes to have any kind of Senate career to come back to. Scuttlebutt has it that Clinton’s supporters in Congress and elsewhere have been going easy on Sanders at Clinton’s behest, but that amnesty period is officially over. Sanders’ institutional support will dry up precipitously, and once the DC primary is over, he has nothing for his supporters to do. There will be no more barnburner Sanders rallies.
Sanders will ostensibly still “campaign” through the DC primary, which he will lose. Only then, I think, will he start talking about “the next phase” of his movement, i.e., one not based around him as the Democratic nominee.
Except other countries like Britain and Canada which use first past the post do not have the two party duopoly that is unique to the US.
Personally, I think the laws restricting ballot access are a much more plausible explanation, as well as the fact that electoral boundaries are drawn by partisan Legislatures. Those two features of US politics are highly unusual compared to other countries.
Why should the Republicans and Democrats get grandfathered access to ballots, but other parties have to slog through the process of collecting thousands of signatures to get on the ballot? Should be the same rule for all.
Don’t those other countries have more than two parties on multiple levels of government? Even here in Texas, the Greens & Libertarians have qualified to get their candidates on the Presidential ballot without petitions. Their candidates also show up in the running for most other offices–they just never get elected.
The mechanism is there for minor parties to get votes. They just need to convince more people to vote for them.
Ballot access laws don’t seem that onerous to me, and in fact considering we have multiple minor parties that have perpetually been on the ballots for decades I don’t really think that is the real explanation. You can see a summary of ballot access requirements here, on a state by state basis. I am not familiar at all with how this compares to Canadian or British systems for getting on the ballot, but I will say in essentially every State listed the threshold for getting on the ballot is essentially “effortless” versus the threshold required to win a first past the post election.
Historically the U.S. has had “co-balloting” situations as well, and there have been situations where this has been somewhat relevant. For years Minnesota’s primary left of center party was not an affiliated of the Dems, it was the “Farmer-Labor” party. Hubert Humphrey however worked to merge the State D and st ate FL parties, and even to this day the state party in Minnesota is called the “Democratic Farmer-Labor” party.
For years the Conservative Party of New York was politically relevant, and worked in a strange way. Typically it didn’t nominate its own candidates, instead it would “endorse” Republicans who ran for Statewide and local offices, if that Republican was conservative enough and met their criteria (lots of New York Republicans were considered too liberal.) At one point in time a decent number of state legislators who had received the CP endorsement served in the State Assembly, but over time the party has lost most of its political relevancy (no candidate for statewide office has been elected with a CP endorsement since 2002, and they only have one legislator in the assembly.)
In at least one of his elections William Jennings Bryan ran both as the Democratic Party candidate, the Populist Party candidate, and the Silver Republican Party candidate–appearing on the ballot three times.
I think the biggest problem goes back to my original comment–the legislature and the Presidency are selected entirely independently. I think minor parties are seen as more influential in a Westminster system because the PM can be beholden to them for support–and not just at one point in time, if he were to lose support of his coalition partners at any point in his (or her) premiership he could lose a no confidence vote.
In theory of course controlling the House and Senate is really important, so there is some leverage minor parties could exert. And historically, they did, sometimes. It wasn’t totally unheard of for members of minor parties to hold 4-5 seats at times, and sometimes they would even be part of a coalition that determined a majority. The last time this happened was in 1916–Wilson won reelection but his Democrats lost their majority in the House, but the Republicans only won a plurality. The Democrats were able to form a coalition with two very minor parties, and thus maintain control of the House despite not being the largest party in the chamber.
Why this never happens now, I’m not entirely sure. But it was pretty rare even historically. I think if you want to look outside the lack of a Westminster style system, the campaign finance situation is also pretty important. Television represented a huge increase in (even inflation-adjusted) campaign spending, and also was for about 75 years the single most important form of political advertising. It probably still is with generations above age 40 (I’d argue with TV’s declining viewership, the rise of streaming, time shifting and etc–younger people are much less exposed to political advertisement.)
Most other Democracies have taken various steps to limit the degree to which TV makes or breaks a candidate. For one, rules about political advertising are pretty direct in Britain–you get a certain slot of time, a very small slot of time, equally for each candidate. Other than that, British TV viewers are essentially spared being exposed to political advertisements on TV. This fundamentally reduces the importance of money, because the big spending is absolutely on television. When you factor in production costs of the commercials, consultant fees, and finally the actually media buy to the network affiliates and cable channels, spending on TV was like 60% of the 2012 expenditure. In a typical British campaign while there are a few political advertisements, they are highly regulated. For one, to my knowledge there’s no paid advertisements for politics, and you cannot get more time with more money. Instead, the major broadcasters under the PEB system offer to select major parties (and a few minor ones) time slots to show a 3-5 minute political advertisement. These slots are a small number of total airtime, and they aren’t sold. So again, there would be equal access to these slots for all the parties, and they represent a very small part of total airtime.
A U.S. cable station or network affiliate sells its advertising slots on a first come first server, highest bidder basis. So at peak election season you might literally see nothing but campaign ads for an entire commercial break. This creates an arms race atmosphere–an atmosphere the Brits have deliberately worked to prevent with their regulations. The British system also culturally emphasizes a much more local-level, low key approach. There are no major political rallies (which are expensive to run and conduct) in British politics, just like broadcast TV broadcast radio only allows a small number of advertisements (equally and unpaid to parties.)
I think the extreme expense of running an American election, even state level elections now, makes it very hard for minority parties. It’s one thing for a minority party to organize people in a ground game, enough to become relevant. But when they also need to raise huge sums of money, it’s always going to be very, very difficult. The more you split up spectrums of the political ideology, the less efficiently the spend is. For example if the Green Party were more popular, it’d be taking dollars out of the Democratic party, or the Libertarian for the Republicans. When the cost of elections are so high, the benefits of being minority party versus pooling resources seems to me to be pretty decisive.
I should mention–part of why coalescing into two major parties is so important money wise is even at the State and local level, a lot of the money for these races comes from outside the district where the election is being held. A huge portion of political donations come from wealthy individuals who disproportionately live in a few major cities on the coasts, and large corporations [I’m also talking both direct party and campaign money as well as soft money, as both are relevant–other countries have largely always prohibited soft money.] It’s not just that you’re splitting up ideological bases in your district if you run for a small party, you also lose access to the large national donor base.