What that the Republicans are picking a candidate that was against the Iraq War?
That should be a wake-up call to the national party. Bernie is far more popular among independents who will show up to a primary, who are probably the sort of people you need to mobilize to get out a big vote. If he’s near even among registered Democrats, then it’s not even a case of Democrats versus independents. He can credibly hold on in closed primaries.
Sanders is still in it, and him winning is not out of the question. This is fun!
Not that that is a surprise at this point. If he really were a no-hoper, he’d have been ignored by the very people who spent the last few weeks arguing against him.
The wide Missouri?
I think he meant momentum, but I was confused by that usage.
Sanders did better than Obama almost everywhere in NH:
Clinton might not admit it publicly but she should be worried.
Big momentum, yes. It’s going to be very interesting to see how Bernie whips up the masses in the upcoming state primaries. Run, Bernie, run!
There’s like 14 voters in Coos County.
It was the lighting. Just look at the folks to his left and right, and they were all orange-y, too.
Obama wasn’t a New England Senator–and as 538 has mentioned that proximity actually does matter.
Here’s the real thing–Obama won because of a coalition of the more educated, wealthier whites in the party, and the blacks. Clinton had blue collar whites, an edge (albeit only like 5%) among women, and while Latinos (while they didn’t do exit polling on race/ethnicity on all the 2008 primary states, the ones they did most of them Clinton won a majority of the Latino vote.)
Something Nate Silver and a lot of other pretty smart analysts have been pointing out is the simple demographic reality of the Democratic election, particularly the 15-20 states that hold elections in early March. Many of them are in the South and have conservative leaning white Democrats and minorities–two groups with which Sanders does terribly. Conservative/moderate Democrats are going to always be a hard sell for Sanders–and he’s got terrible polling gaps versus Hillary with minorities.
I don’t know how Bernie loses 15 of 20 elections in a month’s span and is still left standing, to be frank.
To break it down:
2/20 Nevada: The most recent polling is for the end of December, in which Clinton held a large lead, a lead she has held for months. It’s highly likely that the visibility of essentially “tying” Clinton and winning New Hampshire has brought Bernie will improve his odds here. But I’m going to predict Hillary wins in Nevada. The prediction markets still think so, and until new polling comes out the polls still think so as well.
2/27/2016 South Carolina: As has been repeated many times, without a significant increase in support among black voters, Bernie cannot win here. No polling has shown any significant movement among black voters away from Hillary and toward Bernie. Part of the issue is Bernie doesn’t know how to use the right rhetoric–and he isn’t willing to say things he doesn’t “feel.” Clinton talks about minority disempowerment in her speeches, Sanders largely doesn’t because he feels that fixing class based economic disadvantages will be a “rising tide that raises all ships.” He needs to frankly, pander more, so far he has shown himself to be unwilling to do that. That may get him points among the younger white liberals who love him, but he already has their votes. Plus, to be frank social justice issues for minorities should feature in any Democratic candidates campaign speeches, they shouldn’t just be an afterthought.
The problems Bernie will have throughout “SEC Country” and the “Bible Belt” are two fold. One is the lack of minority support, in “SEC County” (which overlaps some of the Bible Belt), blacks make up a large percentage of the State populations and an even larger percentage of the Democratic electorate. Throughout the entire Bible Belt people are more conservative, now while the most conservative white voters will probably be voting in Republican primaries, there are still “more conservative” white Democrats throughout the South. Many of them are the blue collar whites Sanders desperately wants to attract with his socialist rhetoric, but many of them are just very culturally “not okay” with Sanders message. With these two things working against him he has no shot, even just fixing one, he probably doesn’t have a shot. So that being said:
3/1/2016 Alabama - Hillary, Arkansas - Hillary, Georgia - Hillary, Oklahoma - Hillary, Tennessee - Hillary, Texas - Hillary
Just to make it exciting, I’m going to “give” Sanders Colorado, Massachusetts and Minnesota, and he will of course win Vermont which also holds election on 3/1.
3/5/2016 Louisiana - Hillary, Nebraska - Hillary, Kansas - Hillary
Also on 3/1 American Samoa votes but I have no idea how they vote, but the territories award few delegates and crucially receive little attention (the primaries are largely a perception game even in to March, where it’s more important how you’re perceived to be doing versus actual delegate counts.) Also on 3/1 like a week’s period begins where “Democrats Abroad” vote, I have no idea how they will vote, but like American Samoa the results will not be super important attention/perception wise.
So that roughly leaves Hillary 12, Sanders 4. One of those 4 is Sanders home state. I don’t think Sanders survives a month like that.
Additionally, I think I might be too generous. Let’s start with Colorado, it’s one state where there’s been some conflicting polling showing Bernie “has a chance” there, but Hillary has consistently polled strongly there as well. Colorado is 20% Hispanic, and that hurts Bernie because Hispanics were the ethnic group Clinton won versus Obama, and she hasn’t lost them since then.
Massachusetts is in New England, but also has a decent sized minority population–17% of the population is non-white. In November Clinton was up 25 points there in November, again–too long ago to put much value in, but it suggests that Bernie doesn’t have the sort of baked in home court advantage there that he has in Vermont and New Hampshire. Massachusetts is too big and too diverse for him to win just because he’s from Vermont, he may win here, but it’s not a slam dunk.
Minnesota is quite white, like 90%, and not part of the bible belt so it doesn’t have those more centrist or sometimes right leaning white Democrats. Additionally it’s been polled recently–Sanders is doing well here, he’s up by 9%. Minnesota is probably the strongest state for him in t he next month, he will likely win here.
And then Vermont obviously, Sanders wins in a walk.
If we want to go out a few more days, 3/6 Maine votes, without looking at polling I suspect that Clinton probably loses there. They do have some zany conservatives in Maine but also a lot of New England liberals who will likely go for Bernie, it’s also very white.
Mississippi votes on March 8th, and without looking it up I believe either it or South Carolina are the blackest state, either way Bernie will not win in Mississippi.
Michigan votes on the same day, and it’s the heart of the blue collar whites that Bernie’s campaign managers and the candidate claim he can win over, and thus win the nomination. But he’s down 29% there, in a poll done this week. That’s brutal, and I think Michigan could be where the Sanders candidacy ends, possibly officially, but if he only wins the four States I mentioned between New Hampshire and 3/8, and then loses Michigan, in the press and the court of public opinion people will no longer be “feeling the Bern.”
People may appreciate it when the axeman shows the weakness in another candidate, but that doesn’t mean they like the axeman.
Sure, but that one loss netted him a single delegate less than Cruz (7 vs 8). As opposed to tonight which is currently showing ten delegates for Trump versus two for Cruz. Not all losses are created equal.
:dubious: I’m not sure how coming second across the South is supposed to destroy Bernie, unless it’s a lot of blowouts.
First, delegates are not winner-take-all.
Second, we’re talking about states where the state Democratic Parties are not exactly going to add Electoral College votes. Isn’t that weighted into the results? I probably knew that once, back in 2008.
Either way, if Bernie gets more support from northern Democrats in states where Democrats actually win elections, he can “lose” a swath from Virginia to Texas, still win in the end, and more, still be the better candidate.
I think it’s very satisfying to predict the end at the beginning, and tempting to try. But these are not static bases of support, and Hillary is going to face the problem of being the “pro-corruption” candidate while relying on low-information voters. And I don’t think that’s the best place to be in a Presidential primary.
Bernie should have a path to possible victory by now. The question is whether he’s on it, or can even see it. He’s going to look pretty silly if he sank everything into Iowa and NH, and it ends here.
I still think Trump has the “Pat Buchanan” problem. He can win early primaries in a crowded field, but I believe that his support reaches 35% as a high water mark. Once the voters choose the anti-Trump (which after tonight will only be either Cruz, Rubio, and back from the dead Jeb!) that person will start to pull ahead of Trump.
Brit Hume was talking about the amount of money each candidate spent in New Hampshire. Apparently Cruz spent around $500k and Jeb! spent $59 million. Can that possibly be correct? That is an insane amount of money for New Hampshire.
Qualification: If your primary goal isn’t winning, pandering is pointless. Hammering his broad issue about economic inequality and a political system fixed by plutocrats is sufficient. Not sure what the gameplan for 2017 is though.
He’s down by 25-30% in some of these states, that is a blow out–some like Georgia were not polled that long ago. Bernie’s “path to victory” that HuffPo wrote up awhile back basically concedes all these same losses, but speculates on them being “close losses.” If that happens, and he wins other states then it’s a different ball game–but I don’t see that happening based on the spotty polling data we have right now. If I see new data, I’ll change my opinion.
I think so to, but its certainly taking a long time for the “anti-Trump” to emerge. And I suspect the longer it takes, the more seriously the media will take Trump and more plausible he’ll seem to non-Trump GOP voters, and the higher his “ceiling” will get.
Yea, I kinda wonder if Bernie isn’t freaking out right now. I don’t think actually winning the Presidency was in his original plan.
Plus the average of national polls still is +13 Clinton. That suggests he’s probably not going to sweep every non-Southern State, in fact it suggests Clinton probably has leads in lots of places after the next month (a stretch of time in which a disproportionate number of conservative States vote.) Again–working from the data we have. Results on the field can change results nationally in a primary. And the most important part of the early states is perception more than delegate counts.
Remember that Obama split Super Tuesday with Hillary, essentially. And he had a good long game for grinding out delegate advantages over Hillary (who among many of her problems one was a focus too much on getting Ws in big States because she thought the election was still a perception game and that if she got a few big Ws Obama would juts fade away.)
Super Tuesday as it looks now is very likely not to split, and Sanders is likely to lose about 75% of the Super Tuesday contests, and possibly the two primaries in between then as well. Plus, Hillary is better prepared now. I think she’d love to rack up 15-17 wins to 3-4 for Sanders, creating a situation in which a lot of people will begin to question his candidacy–delegate counts will still be important at that point but only if the perception of Sanders as a loser doesn’t cause his candidacy to wither and die. But even if that doesn’t happen and it turns into a long delegate slog (this is not how primaries typically work by the way, 2008 was a rare exception), Hillary has been saying since like June of 2015 that her staff were getting ready for just that kind of election, I find no reason to doubt her–she’s the only person in the primary who has seen the ugly end of that kind of election and I doubt she’s oblivious to the possibility it could occur again.
We’ll know a lot more in a week when more polling is done that incorporates the tie in Iowa (essentially) and the win for Bernie in New Hampshire. Nevada has not been polled much at all, and as a caucus state you can only tell so much from the polling. But anyway, if Bernie doesn’t get a big bump in the national polls or Nevada or South Carolina that’ll be concerning. South Carolina is a “window” into a lot of the high-minority states (including non-Southern ones like Michigan that do vote for Democrats in the EC and where, in a poll done this week, Sanders is down 29%), if Sanders can get that margin of defeat down to 4-5%, then he’ll be positioned to fight out a long delegate battle. But he cannot lose every State with more than 10% non-whites by 25% and win the nomination, not in a long delegate fight–and to be honest, he probably won’t even have the gas to participate in a long delegate fight if he’s losing like that in those states. Money will dry up, press attention will disappear, which further erodes money, volunteers will go home, etc. The more recent polling in Georgia in Michigan is what really leads me to believe Sanders is facing a tough path, because those polls were done recently and thus incorporate his increased national attention from the “tie” in Iowa, and the run up to New Hampshire which everyone in the press was reporting how far ahead he was there. So these aren’t polls from back in October when a lot of people didn’t know who Sanders was.
As has been said they’re not winner takes all. Two things you’re forgetting:
- Sanders has no superpac backers to pull the plugin on him. As long as his supporters are still making small donations why should he drop out? He’ll take it all the way to the convention if at all possible, if only just for the continued media attention for his platform.
- Sanders base is making a huge and successful effort to energise and register first time voters, and they’re doing it cleverly via social media, and custom apps on mobile. Meanwhile Clinton makes gaff after gaff on social media trying to look like she’s in touch with younger voters. A high enough turn out of first time younger votes could close that gap in the southern states meaning he’s still got enough delegates to stay in the race even if Clinton wins them all.
Okay thanks guys–this isn’t my first primary, I’ve been voting since Nixon was President, I’m aware they are not winner take all. But you’re all assuming this year will be like 2008–a delegate fight. What I’m saying is if Bernie loses 17 out of the next 21 state contests he likely will not have the momentum to seriously threaten Hillary anywhere. Also keep in mind it isn’t “strict proportional”, there is a bigger advantage to winning than just the % of victory in terms of delegates.
Obama didn’t lose most of the states by thin margins then win in a few key ones to get a delegate lead–he actually won more state (29) contests than Hillary (21) did.
I will say in the modern primary era I don’t believe any candidate has lost some 80% of the first ~25 state contests and gone on to win the nomination. No, it’s not because they are necessarily “mathematically eliminated” in terms of delegate counts, but it’s because losing t hat many contests has a disastrous effect on a campaign across the board. You also will not win enough delegates if you are polling down 13% nationally–national polls do work themselves into the state level contests–as Nate Silver has explained people have a tendency to think the national polls don’t matter in elections because of things like the Electoral College, but that’s only on the margins. Generally even in a general a 5% lead nationally means you’re going to win the EC, because it tends to be reflected in enough states. Electoral/popular mismatches in which you win the popular and lose the electoral generally involve very close elections with a small margin either way for the popular vote.
I love the smell of a Hillary loss in the morning. It’s smells like… victory!
Am I crazy or do I not recall that as late as this morning it was generally understood that Sanders would win NH by a wide margin?