While simultaneously remaining silent about caucus states and states where the delegate roll-up process favor Sanders.
The nominee, and others on the ticket, will need the votes of some of those people in the general election. I think it can only hurt to shut them out.
Yes, yes. You would have been much more forgiving if his complaints hadn’t come so suddenly. :rolleyes:
Look, we’re not talking about some West Bumfuck state or territory with 12 delegates, here. We’re talking about New York; one of the biggest delegate prizes in the entire presidential preference process.
WAY back before he declared, Bernie and his team should have sat down and said, “We need X number of delegates. How are we going to get them?” That’s what professional campaigns DO. “We need so many votes. Where are they coming from?” is the very sine qua non of electioneering.
To not have someone at that meeting throw a flag on the New York process is simply amateurish and smacks of not really having a plan to win an election. If that meeting didn’t happen then it’s even worse.
They could? In what election?
Maybe someone did throw a flag, doesn’t mean they were in any position to do anything about it and every reason to think complaining about/trying to fix it then would have been a waste of scarce resources/air time. Frankly, your contention that an underdog campaign should have spent all this time and resources from the beginning on every meaningful state is rather naive. He had far bigger problems to work on.
And complaining about it now is simply part of the message he’s crafting. He’s the outsider. The NY primary system is quite clearly set up to keep out the outsiders. Why shouldn’t he shout that out? You think it would be smarter or more moral to simply say “Whelp, thems the rules. Oh shucks”.
CarnalK, have you ever been involved in a political campaign?
I have been involved in many over the years, in a number of different capacities.
Seriously, this is what campaigns do. They gather expertise from folks who know about technology, fundraising, state government, delegate selection, social media, logistics, you name it.
They figure out what the rules are, everywhere. (How do you think Sanders got on the ballot in all the states? The rules for each state are very, very different, and often extremely arcane. Do you think Sanders himself was an expert on Louisiana ballot access?)
They figure out when the deadlines are and how they can best meet them. (Do you think Sanders knew when you had to file by in order to appear on the Oregon ballot in its primary?)
They don;t leave it all to the candidate, because that way madness lies, and they should have every aspect of the campaign covered. And that includes making sure that Sanders has the best possible shot in the state that holds the 34th primary (or whatever it is)–especially when that state has the second largest number of delegates.
Now, you may very well be right that doing a re-registration drive was not the best use of Sanders’s time and money back in Sept and Oct. I’d argue that --especially if he coordinated with other organizations–it wouldn’t have cost *that *much time, money, or personnel, but whatever. Getting that message out, building those huge crowds–that’s what got him on the map, and that might have been the most important thing to focus on back then. But no one to my knowledge has said that, and the most likely scenario, as I see it, is that it just didn’t occur to Sanders and his team, until it was too late, that re-registering would’ve made sense.
Which is, just so we’re clear, very far from damning, a hell of a long way from unforgivable, and in the long run not likely to cost him all that many delegates. But it doesn’t speak well for his organization, and it makes the complaints seem petty. (Or, as the teenager said to his mother, “I overslept. Why did you let me oversleep?”)
ETA: I agree that the they’re-keeping-my-supporters-out-of-the-primary focus fits in with Sanders’s overall message. (I suspect he’d rather have the delegates.) The message loses some of its punch if you believe, as I do, that it wasn’t simply the fault of big bad New York State, but instead that Sanders COULD have done something about it and didn’t.
If he entered the race with no intention to win it, and wanted only to make waves, I would agree with this. His supporters largely don’t seem to think that’s the case though.
If, as he claimed, he really intended to win from the outset (which I personally don’t believe), then Jonathan Chance is right. Plotting out a delegate path to victory should have been on the agenda at the very first meeting.
And my reply to Jonathon Chance still stands. He had a lot more to worry about at the beginning of his campaign. If he had wasted a shitload of his money and airtime on a New York primary before Iowa he probably wouldn’t have made it to New York. It’s ridiculous.
The interesting about the closed NY primary that I see (and I’ll admit, it may not be representative) is that a lot of people who seem to be upset at NY’s super-closed primary on the Democratic side, because it will hurt Sanders, seem to snicker at Trump’s problems regarding the same issue. Trump is also complaining about this since he does pretty well with independents as opposed to registered Republicans. The difference in the reaction seems somewhat striking to me.
Probably has a lot to do with the particular message boards you hang out on. I am sure it’s reversed on the more Trump/Republican friendly boards.
Where do you get a"shitload of his money and airtime "? I mean, he could have simply sent a protest letter. To be surprised about it now seems rather ignorant or disingenuous.
Yes, he should have sent a protest letter. What a disastrous misstep by the Sanders campaign. If he had done that, all the Clintonistas would have totally been on board with his current complaints.
One difference I have noticed is that Trump is pointing outthe treatment Bernie is getting as unfair when he talks about the system being rigged in favor of the party bosses. I haven’t seen the same thing coming from Bernie regarding the efforts to block the Trump nomination.
This is probably because Trump is looking forward to the general and hopes to court votes from former Bernie supporters and sympathizers.
Well, at least a letter would have demonstrated his campaign knows what it’s doing and can see a problem coming before it hits. Not that I care much either way, Clintonista that I am.
His campaign has shown it knows what it’s doing by making this race even remotely close. To pretend that they are a bunch of idiots or disingenuous liars because they didn’t complain about this last year is what’s hard to believe.
Bernie’s team knew how the process worked in New York from the beginning, and knew they couldn’t do much about it. It’s a closed primary, to vote for Bernie today you needed to be registered as a Democrat back in October. Nothing was going to change that and there’s no way Bernie could have known then it would be worth the effort to get independents and members of other parties to register as Democrats, nor did he have the resources at the time.
What you hear now is part of the game, lowering expectations, blaming the system, giving his people incentive to vote, and tomorrow like every sports team that ever lost a playoff or championship game they need an excuse to say “If only things were a little different we would have won”.
Hillary will win tonight, but there’s going to be a question of whether she should have won by more in her home state where she claims to have been such an effective senator. Compared to the way Trump is trouncing his opposition in his home state she doesn’t look like she’s finishing strong. So the Hillary camp should stop their condescending attitude toward Bernie Sanders because they’ll need those voters in November.
Agree. As long as Clinton wins in NY, no matter what the margin, the time has come to dial down the vitriol. She needs to start making it conceivable for Bernie’s supporters to embrace her candidacy as the summer wears on, even if they don’t truly want to. But they have to start seeing it as a possibility.
Clinton needs to dial it down? No, Sanders needs to. His ridiculous fundraising email with the phony election fraud was way over the top and is a despicable way to cover for the ass kicking he will receive tonight.
I was surprised to see an exit poll on MSNBC that showed a higher percentage of D. primary voters said they wouldn’t vote for Sanders (18%, I think) than for Clinton (13%, I think).
Madness, especially from pragmatic Clinton voters.