Well put, ХАРПО — thanks for that summary.
Agreed. Hillary was a polarizing candidate but she still won 66 million votes.
Hopefully Biden does better in Midwestern states.
Hey, who knows more about the election than us Russian bots?
Exapno, I like your summary but I’m actually holding out hope that Bernie goes even further by doing a little kabuki dance with Biden at the debate where he gets Biden to make some “concessions”, and then Bernie suspends his campaign before the voting next Tuesday (which would be likely to be humiliating for him as those are not his states, to put it mildly).
Insh’allah.
I don’t like many of AOC’s positions but I like her, I think she’s good at her job, and I think she represents a big chunk of Dems who aren’t represented very well by the party establishment. A chunk they need to listen to if they want to keep people engaged.
Biden has already signaled the eagerness to play it this way in his speech Tuesday night, phrasing his goals in some of Sanders’ verbiage in his unity appeal.
Progressives did not win at taking over the driver’s seat but they are consistently getting the car to move more to direction they want it to go. Now it’s getting the country to go along.
Considering recommendations to avoid public gatherings, maybe they can figure this out before a number of folks have to congregate at polling places next Tuesday?
Biden has now pulled ahead of Sanders in the SoW. While it could shift back — at this point there are over 300,000 ballots to be counted — the trend doesn’t look good for Bernie since these ballots were more likely cast after Biden’s Super Tuesday surge and the subsequent dropouts/endorsements.
Two things that surprise me: Biden’s lead in King County (presumably a Sanders stronghold), and the number of Dryside counties going for Sanders. Although the latter may be due to Trump voters trying to upset Biden’s bandwagon.
Stay buckled up, and remember not to fall out of the tram without coming to a full and complete stop.
I think yours is a very astute conclusion. Does Washington have open primaries, then? I Googled it, but the results say that Washington is a “semi-open” primary state, whatever that is.
If ever there were a part of the country where crossover voting would be a thing, it’s eastern Washington. It would be a thing in eastern Oregon, too, but our primaries are closed which of course makes it a little harder to do.
Washington ballots, which are sent by mail, contained both the Democratic slate and Republican slate. You had to pick one candidate from one of them (the Republican slate had only one candidate.) Separately, you had to indicate a party affiliation on the outside of the envelope itself (by checking a box.) There’s no way to correlate that you selected a candidate from the party slate that you indicated on the exterior on the envelope. It wouldn’t surprise me if dyed-in-the-wool Republicans selected from the Democratic slate, though whether they did so in earnest belief about the best candidate for president or in an attempt to wreak havoc, I can’t be sure.
It does look like Biden will win WA and that definitely shows the difference between a primary and a caucus. Sanders would have won a landslide in a caucus, it have helped him a bit with delegates but also helped his narrative that he still ‘has a chance’
Interesting. Thanks for the explanation, and allow me please to say that what I perceive to be your understatement is charming. 
By the way, short follow up on the logistics. You put your ballot itself inside a security sleeve. Then you take that whole sleeve, and place it inside the envelope. You sign and date the envelope (for all elections), plus for this one, indicate a party. When it’s received, they verify the signature and the date (and postmark). If everything checks out, your ballot is removed, in its security sleeve, and thrown in with everyone else’s ballots from your precinct. Then, separately, all the ballots are removed from their sleeves, so the ballot can no longer be matched to the voter.
I’m skeptical that they actually do anything to verify the signature. (but what do I know?)
I’ve been called about a signature mismatch!
If you were the person who lives in Adams County and voted for Michael Bennet I bet it would be kind of a strange feeling. “Look! There I am! Right there, on the Secretary of State’s website!”
“Hey, Mike, it’s Cousin Bob, calling from up here in Ritzville! Check out the election results website! There I am! See, I told you I’d…Well, yes, I suppose so. Yeah, sorry about that. Well, uh, better luck next time.”
In my 20s, I remember writing myself in for some college trustee position so I could see my name in the returns when they were listed in the paper. That’s when I learned it doesn’t work that way.
I had that happen to me one time, but it was in person. For some reason, they had my high school signature on file from when I first registered. My signature has changed drastically since they, I still see my high school signature when I look at my social security card, I still have one that I got around age 18.