That’s not true, because they’ve already analyzed the margin shifts he needs to actually win, and he’s off target now. He’s 10 delegates down in the first three primaries from where he would need to be, mathematically, to win the nomination. That doesn’t mean stuff couldn’t shift, but at least based on current data he’s already off-track.
I don’t remember where I got that 10 delegates down comment, so don’t put any weight into that, but this New York Times article kind of explains how Bernie is already getting into a delegate hole, and how he would have to win monstrous majorities in states where he’s very likely to not do that to recover from a big loss on Super Tuesday.
I mean even Sanders campaign is espousing a strategy that likely won’t work, conceded Hillary will get an early delegate lead but they will “surge” from momentum in the end. That was a theory one candidate in this race seemed to be operating under in 2008, and there’s a reason she’s running in the primaries again now and not ending her second term in the White House.
The reality is huge crushing wins are not going to be common for Bernie outside of New Hampshire (which has already happened) and Vermont, whereas Hillary is likely to win 15ish states by 15-20 pts, but even if she just wins them by say, 10 pts, Bernie would need to win some big margins somewhere to make up for that. Instead it’s more likely outside of Vermont the next place he beats Hillary will be less than by 10 pts. There’s just reason to assume Bernie is going to be able to magically swing every state in the country by 15-20 points like adaher thinks. I don’t even think Obama was ever able to do that, and he ran a much stronger campaign–but he also was never looking at losing Super Tuesday (in fact he won Super Tuesday by delegates.)
Actually I know now where I got the 10 delegates behind target from, this Qz.com article contains this important passage:
As lily white states, Sanders actually needed to do 10 delegates better in IA and NH than he did, and he’s now underperformed in Nevada (which hadn’t voted at the time of this article) so his delegate hole now is bigger than 10. As Clinton found out in 2008 100-150 delegates behind can end up being an insurmountable deficit, throughout 2008 it kept seeming like all she needed was one big win in a big state and she’d close it, but it just never happened. The bigger states are ones where it’s even harder to get those big wins, and winning by 5% in them just isn’t enough to close those gaps.
It would be different if Democrats started having winner take all states as the Republicans will soon. But they stay proportional all the way.
The thing that got me was the whole “Hillary is losing the women vote” story. Yes Hillary lost by 10% among women in NH than Hillary. But given that she lost the state by 20% what did you expect? As it was, there was Clinton still got many more women to vote for her than she did men. In order to have a 20% loss and win the woman vote, the gender divide would have to have been so massive as to be unbelievable.
Now on to Nevada a state that she wins by 5% what do you know suddenly her gap with women has reversed and she is now winning women by 15%.
If she destroys Sanders in South Caroline by 20%, do you think they will make a big deal about how Sanders loss the Male vote by 10% or will the story be that Clinton won the female vote by 30%?
@SlackerInc: Yes. This is the key distinction.
I recall conversations (not here at SDMB) about how proportional distribution may be more “honest” or “fair” or representative, but it delays crystalizing to a decision. Meantime doing WTA from end to end quickly settles the field to one.
Which matches the traditional caricatures of the Democrats as navel-gazers prone to paralysis because of concern for the losers and Republicans as people who unsentimentally only care about the winner.
I forget now which election we were discussing then, but the effect of the rules difference was that the Rs chose a champion pretty quickly while the Ds dithered to the eve of the convention. And the Ds duly lost the general. Perhaps it was Bush I vs. Dukakis.
I think that a drawn out race is better. It tests the candidates before the general. At least if the fight is similar to the one they’ll be having in the general. I think the GOP has an advantage there. They are holding nothing back. Hillary and Bernie are getting sharper, but it’s still nothing compared to what’s coming for them in the general. Bernie should go after Hillary hard on her ethical issues and Hillary should be going after him hard on socialism. It may piss of fans of either candidate, but don’t you want to know that they can respond when it really counts? Do you really want the first time they get tested to be in September?
Sanders knows all about being attacked as a socialist and Hillary knows all about being attacked on ethics. Making a big display of it in the primaries for extra practice isn’t remotely a good idea, as I suspect you know.
It’s just not the same. Sanders knows all about being attacked as a socialist… In Vermont elections. Clinton is in total denial about her ethical issues and always sounds surprised and unprepared when asked to address them in unscripted situations. It’s clear her staff doesn’t prepare her for these types of questions. It’s more accurate to say that the Clintons survive their ethical lapses. Bill, because he’s the awesomest politician of our time, and Hillary in New York. But she’s never been tested in a general national election, or even so much as a swing state. Neither has Bernie. The GOP field on the other hand still contains two candidates who have won in a swing state.
I suppose adaher’s point makes some sense. In a world where there’s a large undecided middle who decide who to vote for based on attack ads and based on debate zingers.
IMO (and reasonable minds may differ) we are not in that world.
We are in a world where the middle is small and a large fraction of it is apathetic bordering on disgusted. Meantime everybody else is already wearing their team T-shirt. The only thing we (D or R) have to do is get them to show up. IOW turning out the base is the key to victory in Nov.
IMO attack ads on Hillary don’t cause centrists to vote for Trump/Rubio. They cause centrists to stay home, and D voters to spit & fume in anger at the evil R smear campaign. And resolve to go vote D for sure to spite those evildoers.
The same thing applies to the R side’s response to D negative advertising.
The hard part of predicting all this is the primaries & caucuses are lousy samples of the later behavior.
There isn’t a large and undecided middle, but it’s still big enough to decide elections. The Bush/Obama campaign strategy of maximising base turnout is a strategy that stems from weakness. Strong candidates will still try to appeal to a broad section of the electorate.
In a world with traditional bell-curved shaped parties with a bunch of overlap in the middle between them, then yes you’re absolutely correct. Firing up the base is a cowardly way to not engage with the whole electorate.
In a world of two parties that look like reverse bookends with the largest number of adherents at the most extreme fringe and a decreasing tail towards the center, and most importantly, a large no-man’s land between the parties with substantially no voters in it, then the optimal game-theoretic tactic changes.
It changes to this: Do all you can to get your base to vote while trying insofar as tactically possible to avoid inflaming the other side’s base to vote in retaliation. Ideally you’d do everything clandestinely so all your efforts to rouse your side are invisible to the opposition.
It’s certainly arguable how much we’re in either of the extreme caricatures I gave versus some hybrid intermediate case.
And as we’ve seen in several recent thread hijacks, both parties have apologists who argue their party is staying in one consistent place over time while the other is zooming off into loonie-extremist land. The reality is more subtle than the various apologists would make it.
IMO the reality is that we’re pretty bimodal now. To the degree there *is *a middle, its main attitude is “A pox on both your houses. Just go away. I don’t care! You all suck!!”
In an ideal world we wouldn’t have a polity with this f***edup bimodal distribution and each side being herded ever farther out to the fringe by forces they don’t understand. Nor is a detached middle a good thing. It certainly isn’t healthy for the country or the people long term.
But right now there’s an election to win. Winners play the game as it is, not as they wish it was.
How we all walk the country back to the middle is a topic for another thread. Maybe another forum.
Smart parties use a strategy that wins multiple cycles, whatever that strategy is.
Odd that you labelled Bush and Obama as maximizing the base campaigns as neither really went that route. Bush was the most successful at reaching to non-base demographics of any recent GOP nominee. Obama won because he attracted new voters, not just the base ones.
But the “base” of the Democratic party is a growing entity while the “base” of the GOP is shrinking. Meanwhile the GOP doubles down on the maximizing the base (not young less educated White males as its core).
I agree on that demographic point, and the election strategies of Bush/Obama. The GOP was at a crossroads after Bush left office and Obama won, Obama won because he brought new voters out and also because W. Bush really hurt the Republican brand. People were very tired of expensive and endless wars, and John McCain represented very much a continuation of Bush overseas adventurism when it came to the two wars we were fighting.
He also selected a crazy imbecile as his running mate, which had to scare some people given McCain’s age.
The response to losing in 2008 for the Republicans was to develop a movement to pander to the far right at the expense of everything else. You’d have thought the rational response would’ve been broad moderating of views in several areas, and an attempt to build on the Bush democratic coalition (which saw him break 40% of the Hispanic vote and at least hold the traditional ~10-13% of the black vote for the Republicans.)
I think the GOP took the “quick option” that was likely to win them the House back (and they’ve kept it ever since), but cost them the White House probably for another 8 years after this, and has set us on a structural path to oblivion in the legislature probably by the midterm election of the second term of Hillary’s presidency.
FWIW I agree overall.
Ref the snip above, ISTM that really increases the likelihood of the R Congressional delegation panicking between now and 2022 & conducting what amounts to a “smash & grab” raid; stuffing the most extreme legislation possible onto the books while there’s still time and they still have decent numbers.
If they do get Rubio or Cruz in the White House the temptation will be doubly strong because they won’t need a veto-proof majority to do it. Plus of course the expected coat-tails benefit vice a HRC win.
A related corollary is that this prediction will also play out in miniature in 50 statehouses, each on it’s own timeline. What will the aging angry white men do as they watch statehouse after statehouse change against them? When they become a minor regional party we’ll be a very different country.
I’m not so naïve as to say the R party itself is doomed. What’s doomed is its present strategy. And to some degree the target market supporters for that strategy and the generation of politicians who’ve serviced it & them.
That depends on what they want to accomplish. If they don’t care about accomplishing anything other than to maintain the status quo, that’s easy and they’ll have the numbers to do it for as long as any of us are alive. That also discourages Democratic voters, who realize that it won’t matter who they elect, it doesn’t make a difference. We’ve already succeeded somewhat with Obama. He was supposed to be this big change agent and it just hasn’t happened the way people hoped. A lot of those people didn’t vote in 2012 and I expect even more will be discouraged in 2016.
As long as any of us are alive? Hyperbole.
You only need 41 Senate seats to stop everything. Demographic change isn’t happening everywhere equally. The Republicans will be able to rely on a core of 20 red states for as far as we can see.
And as was mentioned in another thread, one more good election and Republicans will have the ability to change the Constitution.
Not everything. Reconciliation and the nuclear option are, well, options.
Yeah, I’ve made the argument elsewhere that I don’t believe a Democratic Senate majority with a Democratic President will allow the Republican filibuster to hold up anything meaningful ever again. I think the only reason the “full nuclear option” (it’s already been used on non-SCOTUS executive branch appointment votes) hasn’t been used yet is obviously the Democrats have been out of the Senate majority since 2014; frankly I think Reid probably wishes he’d used it ages ago and regrets being more temperate on that topic.