I think folks were surprised that she lost women by 11%. Not young women, all women.
538 now has Sanders and Clinton both at 50% likelihood. It appears to be based on a single poll, though.
Predictit says Clinton 59%. TEll ya what though, if Sanders wins, he has a path to the nomination. It means he can win any state as long as it isn’t overwhelmingly minority. He no longer needs lily white states, just mostly white states(as far as Democratic voters go). Which is most of them.
I think it’s hard to say, caucuses are a stone cold bitch to poll, especially because some “likely caucusgoers” are people who have never participated in a caucus before and when they find out it might be a little more complicated than just going in and ticking a box they no show. Rumors upthread suggest the Nevada caucuses may be simpler than that this year though, so who knows.
Target Point shows Hillary and Bernie tied, the internet says this is a right-leaning pollsters and some conspiracy theorists are saying it’s a larger part of a grand GOP scheme to try and help Bernie to the nomination–as they view him as much more beatable in a general election than Hillary.
It’d be nice to get another poll, maybe two, and one from a polling organization I’ve heard of before, but I’m not sure that will happen before 2/20.
I don’t think the NV caucuses are “make or beak” for Bernie, I think if Hillary loses it hurts her, but if Bernie loses it’s not a big deal. I looked at exit polling data for the 2008 Nevada caucuses and it broke down like this:
65% white
15% black
15% latino
3% asian
3% other
Gender break down was 58% female, 41% male (assuming some rounding happened.)
So demographically it would lean toward HRC. If Bernie can tie or win here and he does so by pulling a a larger share of the black and Hispanic vote than he’s polling nationally, it could be a bellwether that he’s starting to build momentum with minorities. If he wins because he wins huge majorities among whites it will make South Carolina all the more important, I suspect.
As a Republican I certainly hope this doesn’t happen, I plan to vote HRC in protest against the long simmering stupidity of my party, and the unacceptable nature of any of the men likely to win the nomination. But if Sanders is the Democratic nominee I will vote Republican–even if the nominee is Trump.
Martin Hyde, surely you wouldn’t vote Cruz over Sanders. Sanders has been a perfectly good representive of his electorate for decades. In Cruz’s short time in office he’s helped shut down the government and actively hindered moderate GOP nominations.
Anyway RealPolitics puts an ® next to TargetPoint which I assume means they consider it a Republican poll. I am suspicious.
I’d vote for any Republican over Sanders–I’m willing to vote Hillary because there is some overlap (especially on foreign policy) with my positions and hers, and I think even on some economic policy questions I’m closer to Hillary than the ultra-Austrian school, ultra-crazy form of economic policy the far right has adopted, but I deeply believe Sanders to be unfit for the Presidency and consider his policy positions unacceptable.
I’ll take four years of Cruz blowing up the budget with stupid tax cuts over Sanders, basically. If Sanders is nominated I view it as an election in which I have no safe harbor option and all choices are bad, with Hillary nominated I have someone I trust in the Oval Office on the table, even if she isn’t in the party I’ve been a member of since I was 18.
I’ve not lived in NV for 20+ years now, but that demographic breakdown is real close to the population at large as I recall it. As such the caucus goers were a decent representation of the electorate as a whole. At least along those two dimensions.
A quick check of wiki Nevada - Wikipedia indicates the caucuses overrepresented blacks. Color me surprised.
Well, while I endorse your view that the Republican Party has become stupid, I do find some candidates supportable, such as Kasich, and in a pinch I’ll vote for Rubio.
But if you’re contemplating voting Democrat, vote for Sanders. His ideology may be unacceptable, but he’s proven that he’s a capable executive, albeit on a smaller scale. But what that time as an executive shows is that he cares about the details of governance, which has been a problem the last two administrations. Sanders’ pothole-fixing methods are probably the best thing for our government.
Clinton’s fine too, of course, but I see no reason to fear Bernie Sanders as President except for one thing: I want to hear him say explicitly that he will honor the NATO Treaty if any member invokes Article 5. And with ground troops, not air power only.
Wait, is that where they kill the Jedi?
I’m actually shocked that you would prefer Cruz to Sanders, Martin Hyde. I can see both being unacceptable, but Cruz has shown a blatant uncaring over the basics of running a country or party. He could easily get up to a lot more mischief than vetoing a tax increase.
Frankly, a part of me wants a Cruz nomination followed by a Goldwater-like admonishing by the electorate to give the Republican party the spanking it clearly needs. Which I think YOU think it needs.
That probably won’t happen. Goldwater was principled and didn’t really care if he lost. Cruz just wants to win and will pull out all the stops. And in our extremely partisan climate, that will make for an enthusiastic GOP base. They want a fighter and Cruz will fight.
Scalia’s death will push the “Hillary is doomed!” and “Everyone’s Feeling The Bern!” stories off the news. Works in Clinton’s favor
Of course the base would support him but you don’t win an election when only your base votes for the nutjob you put up.
True, but in the current scene your base can at least get you 150 electoral votes.
Nevada uses the same method Iowa uses for its Democratic Caucuses (in fact, all Democratic caucuses have to use the same rules, except that there can be a Congressional District level caucus between the County and State levels):
- Precinct caucuses (2/20) - everybody breaks up into “preference groups” based on the candidate they support (or an “uncommitted” group); any group that does not have at least 15% of that caucus’s voters (after having a chance to get others to join them, including others from another group without the 15% minimum) has to break up, and its members can choose to go home or join a “viable” group; once that is done, the precinct divides up its predetermined number of County caucus delegates among the viable groups (and if there are an odd number of delegates and a tie between Sanders and Clinton, then yes, they toss a coin to see who gets the extra County delegate)
Because of the number of shift workers in Las Vegas who can’t attend a normal precinct caucus, there are special “at-large precinct caucuses” that elect delegates to the Clark County convention.
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County conventions (4/2) - this works just like the precinct caucuses, including the 15% rule (so any Iowa count of O’Malley “state delegate equivalents” is misleading as he didn’t get 15% in any county, so it is highly unlikely that he would get any higher-level delegates out of the Iowa county conventions); these elect delegates to the Nevada State Convention.
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State convention (6/2) - in effect, there are two different rounds of voting; one at Congressional district level, to determine that district’s 5 National Convention delegates, and then one by the entire convention, to determine the state’s remaining 11 pledged delegates. Once again, the 15% rule applies, but it is not clear if the district level delegates can vote for anyone who does not have at least 15% support at the statewide level.
If I read the Democratic rules correctly, Nevada’s 8 superdelegates have an additional 10 days to make their final candidate choices.
I give him no credit for running a small town, he’s been a Congresscritter since H.W. Bush was in office, Hillary has much more recent executive experience.
Nevada’s got to be tough to call. In the 2008 general election about 534K voters pulled for Obama. They had had record turnout in the Democratic caucus earlier that year: just over 10K voted.
So that’s something like 2% turnout.
Getting out your vote just a small hair’s breadth is of ginormous impact.
This year apparently there is a spike in people registering, both sides, double usual numbers.
Is that Bernie’s grassroots excitement?
Hillary’s ground game?
Both?
Hillary’s team has been working the ground there a long time, with Mook, who knows how to work the ground well. But I dunno. And if anyone else does then they aint talking.
Probably both, for my money. I think caucuses in general are so hard to poll because of the insanely low turnout, caucusing is very weird/alien to people that haven’t done it before, and I think keep a lot of people who normally vote in every election away, not to mention casual voters.
Unlike in 2008 where Hillary largely lost due to mismanagement of caucus states (and because she was running against probably the best campaigner since Reagan) in 2016 she won’t lose a single caucus because of lack of ground game and lack of work to get her people out. The caucuses she will lose will be because Bernie is able to get more of his deeply passionate voters out than Hillary can through her ground organization.
Not particularly successful though. She complains about her own department’s classification procedures but did nothing to change them when she had the power. Plus while a Cabinet Department is executive experience, it’s not quite the same. SHe worked for the President. Bernie Sanders worked for the voters.