This is both insulting and ignorant. Do you have any data to back up this claim, or is this just more of the sniping that is so distasteful whether it’s coming from Sanders supporters or Clinton supporters?
It’s perfectly possible to support a candidate without disparaging those who support your preferred candidate’s opponent. I recommend it.
Edit:
Oh, for Christ’s sake.
Why on earth would young voters possibly be disillusioned with the party establishments?
@Martin Hyde Good points all.
I note you took exception to my thought that the lack of Sanders’ groupies would matter to the Ds enough to affect the general election outcome; you think it/they won’t be big enough to matter enough.
That may well be correct. As you rightly say, we’re dealing with very small samples of a very poorly understood but volatile material.
I note you did not comment on my contention that Sanders’ post-nomination support for HRC will be especially tepid.
It’s hardly news that most nomination losers aren’t happy & don’t campaign in the general that hard directly for the winner. It’s almost all party-building & down-ticket rah-rah with some anodyne words about their nominee being a died in the wool genuine Peoples Choice R/D. Some failed nominees (usually the senators) are true team players. The others not so much.
Comments on this aspect of my prediction?
You wrote a lot about the '08 election, though I’m not sure what relevance it had to Hillary’s hemorrhaging support in both cycles. The difference is here she’ll still win. I wonder if that would be true if the campaign were a couple months longer.
It’s funny more than anything. They’re the generation who called bloggers losers in their pajamas. At one point Obama was the candidate of hippies, NEETs, and layabouts smokin’ weed er’day (just like Occupy). It’s important to remember liberals aren’t mature leaders ready to helm the ship of state. Adults opt for more sober policy, like endless wars, cutting benefits, destroying labor, and bailouts to private industry.
So Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez lieutenant and labor activist and Hillary activist, is claiming that Bernie supporters shouted her down, yelling “English only!” when she attempted to translate at a caucus in Lake Tahoe. Nobody can confirm it. In fact, other people who were there, including Susan Sarandon, are claiming that Huerta volunteered to translate and Sanders people didn’t want her doing it, because she was a Hillary worker and not neutral, not because she was speaking Spanish. There is zero evidence to support Huerta’s claims.
And at another caucus, Nurses’ Union members, who are Bernie supporters, are claiming that Hillary activists were wearing shirts that looked like theirs, in order to make people think that they were union workers who were supporting Hillary.
She was up 58/32 in a Tennessee poll last week…
A friend of mine went to the at-large caucus at the MGM Grand here in Las Vegas. He says that after they were done and people had left, they started calling people back in to the room to re-count people.
I’ve also heard that apparently there were some shenanigans with Clinton supporters moving from one side of the room to the other during the counting at several caucus locations.
Haven’t read the entire thread, is Sanders regarded to have over performed compared to expectations?
There is a good reason that party establishments don’t give two shits about young voters… they tend to not actually come out and cast ballots. Which, btw, is a pretty imbecilic thing for young voters to do (or not do as the case may be).
That is incredibly bad logic. “There are all these voters out there who are currently not voting for anybody. We want to win elections. What to do, what to do…ooh, I have an idea, let’s ignore those potential voters!”
I’m not saying you’re wrong that they do that. I’m saying you’re wrong that it’s a good reason.
That sounds good in theory. But in practice by catering to the young voters, you may end up losing the older voters… and guess which group of voters consistently come out to vote in large numbers? It ain’t the younger voters.
Basically, it tends to turn into a zero sum gain and the parties have made their choices based on which of those groups actually are consistent.
I wouldn’t worry about President Trump. With Rubio coming in second and Bush dropping out, Rubio’s going to finally have the title of the establishment candidate and get the support he needs to win. Particularly since I can’t imagine Kasich stays in too much longer. If he hasn’t completely run out of money, he has to be close to it, but he’s got no path to victory. Trump needs all the anti-Trumps to stay in the race because I don’t see him winning more than 35% of the Republican vote in any of the primaries.
As for the rest, I do agree I’m leery about Hillary Clinton. I think the email scandal is going to turn out to be much ado about nothing, but you’re right it could blow up into something like the Berger situation.
I’m really worried we may wind up having a repeat of 2000 with a fundamentally unlikeable, flawed Democratic candidate who winds up blowing what should have been an easy continuation from a successful two term Democratic President.
I don’t agree with calling them “imbeciles”. But nor do I believe young voters (or even, to a slightly lesser extent, most voters of any age) understand the ins and outs of the “party establishment” well enough for me to credit them with an informed opinion. It’s just, by default, uncool to be pro-establishment. (Which is why I tried to argue that my defiantly pro-establishment position, despite not being *part *of that establishment in any official way, is radical in its own way.)
This is all pretty well observed. In another post, though, you said you think Hillary would have won in 2008 but with a smaller margin. I think you’re overlooking the number of racists who voted for Kerry in 2004 but then McCain in 2008. I saw an analysis from some political scientists that I found pretty persuasive finding that Hillary would have actually done a couple points better (and someone like Edwards, if he got through the race without his “love child” scandal being uncovered, a couple points better yet). And I say this as someone who voted for Obama in the 2008 primary.
If you recall, I posted that at the Iowa caucus, it was all very loosey-goosey. My son and I (visiting from across the border in Missouri) just wandered in, a half hour after the start time, weren’t asked for ID, and were almost counted as Bernie supporters–and would have been had I not objected.
Man my local caucus is at a high school, but it seems that from this thread it must’ve been on some people’s lawns.
I’m over forty, and I’m offended.
But then, this is Martin Hyde we’re talking about, not the actual Clinton camp itself. If I’m remembering his politics right, he’d love to divide the Democrats, depress turnout on the Left, and leave the party weakened without a vital populist base. Don’t quite take him seriously.
But you seem to think you’re “young at heart” or something. 
Remember how you (pretty sure that was you) thought I was some old grandpa, when we’re actually the same age?
You seem to have completely missed my point there. You & I are old enough to have baby grandchildren now. That’s middle-aged, technically. Yet it’s on the “young” side of the Clinton/Sanders split, which is very real. Do the gerontocracy think I’m a “young’un” because I’m not a decrepit old retiree? Maybe. But the “young” generation supporting Bernie isn’t really* just* a bunch of Tumblr teens.
But hey, sure, call his supporters names. Considering the rest of your weirdly authoritarian political opinions, I’m flattered you despise us.
Who did I call names, and what were they? When did I say I despise you? And what is authoritarian about my politics? You must have never played any sports if you think a little good-natured ribbing and trash talk translates into any of that.
This shows that Trump’s support level at around a third has been relatively stable, other than a brief dip (that possibly was the result of just the WSJ poll which may in fact have been flawed) for some time now.
Okay. I never said those things about Obama because I am not an idiot and was watching actual results. Obama’s campaign was pretty strong from Iowa on, it was never clearly weaker than Hillary’s, and to be honest Hillary was always one step behind. Maybe in the halls of internet debate forums where people scream stupidities at each other the Obama campaign looked differently, but I always judge campaigns off of results and aggregate polling data–that’s why I never once said I think Romney was going to beat Obama (despite my wanting it to be true.)
The one criticism I levied at Obama supporters is he did have a large contingent of young supporters who believed he was going to radically change Washington. I sagely predicted they were ignorant and naive, and he wouldn’t. And he hasn’t. Sanders in the White House won’t either. It’s not due to a “lack of ideological purity” it’s due to a lack of power for the Presidency to be transformative in that way.
With Sanders supports I make fun of the fact many of them, when interviewed by press, don’t seem to be very knowledgeable on any of the issues. In that way they aren’t dissimilar from the “low information voters” who would only tell you that Barack Obama was going to CHANGE WASHINGTON. If you look Trump is attracting a lot of supporters like this on the other side of the spectrum (both in terms of politics and somewhat in terms of age–I’ve never said young people are uniquely stupid, only that many of Bernie’s supporters are young imbeciles.)
But I never confused the Obama campaign for the “low information” wing of his supporters, his campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 were ran to nigh-perfection. Barry is a tremendous campaigner, far stronger than either of the two Demcorats running today.
I still disagree–Bernie has been caucusing and working with the Democrats in the Senate and House for his entire legislative career. He’s a Democrat, he’s left of the party and was officially an independent but Bernie will not stand by and do nothing when he has the ability to influence, even in a small way from the sidelines, the chance of Donald Trump becoming President. Bernie may privately continue to believe the party needs to go further left to lead the country in that direction, but he will when he concedes make a full and vigorous endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
Will he be more visible than that? Probably not, he’ll probably make one speech, some of his higher level campaign staff may try to contact some of the more prominent volunteers and etc and try to remind them of how important it is to keep the White House. But Clinton will be running a campaign in the general with a lot more centrists and conservatives (many conservatives vote Democrat every Presidential election) and to be frank making Bernie too front and center in her campaign isn’t good for her and I doubt it’s something Bernie is deeply interested in. But he will endorse her and I think he’ll do so in a typical “yelling Bernie speech” then he’ll ride off into the sunset and continue to advocate for his issues the way he has for decades.
There weren’t really “expectations” in the sense that nobody claimed to have reliable polling. My impression was that most people expected Hillary to win by more than she did.
Nate Silver would say that Sanders’ performance suggests he has a realistic chance of being the nominee. He lost by about 5 points, when, given Nevada’s demographics and the assumption that Sanders’ support among Democrats nationally is exactly 50%, he should have lost by only 3.