I tend to agree, but who is that someone? Buttigieg and Klobuchar may be closest among those still on the stage, but many swing voters won’t vote for a gay; and Klobuchar lacks Hillary’s charisma.
Is it possible that the best “someone similar to Hillary” is … Hillary!? I don’t take prediction markets on blind faith, but do try to understand what they might teach. Hillary is still shown with almost 3% chance to be the nominee! :smack:
The field has become depleted. Booker and Castro — who seemed OK to me — are both gone. NOBODY left on the stage seems “electable” anymore. I think delegates and other top Ds will understand this, and avoid a boondoggled convention by just supporting Bernie if he’s 40% or so.
I think this opinion is valid, even though I disagree - my disagreement is based on feelings, just like all beliefs about who can or will win the election at this point.
Except for not being black, not being young, not being charismatic, is a lot more specific in his policy goals than “hope and change”, and is running against an incumbent when the economy is doing well.
Of course Sanders also buddies up with terrorists, so he’s got that going for him.
Historical events are actual data. The outcomes of past presidential elections are relevant to predicting the outcome of the upcoming presidential election.
None of that data tells us whether or not Bernie can/will win in the general. If it doesn’t go into Nate Silver’s election model, it’s not the kind of data that helps predict election results.
Funny, I remember Obama running on some very specific things. He ran on instituting what became Obamacare. Said he’d get us out of Iraq, but try to win Afghanistan; he did both. Cap-and-trade was also one of his campaign planks; it passed the House but got killed by the filibuster in the Senate.
Yup. When I saw him speak in my hometown in 2008, it was among the wonkiest speeches I’ve ever heard, full of details about how doctors could digitize records and such.
WOW!! I’ve certainly noticed Nate Silver being peculiarly placed on a pedestal at SDMB, but this is the first I’ve seen his apparent elevation to divinity! Was Nate born in Bethlehem? When the Baby Lord Nate was a toddler, did a lotus flower bloom everywhere he stepped?
I recall a study where simple regressions from historical data, e.g. weighting incumbency advantage, outperformed other predictors. (That was, admittedly, before Lord Silver nailed his 95 theses to the church wall in Wittenberg.)
The DNC has already blown their opportunity. When Bernie registered they should have told him this was a primary for Democrats only then tell him to get lost.
Requiring me to present cites from events that haven’t happened yet is an impossible standard. I can tell you what happened in past elections but I can’t tell you what the results of the next election will be.
I agree! There is no standard right now with which a serious and informative prediction on the 2020 general election could be made. It’s a guess no matter what, this early on.
Looks like, just like with the GOP in 2016, all the moderate Democratic candidates agree that One of Them, not Bernie, ought to be the eventual nominee. But Biden, Klobuchar, Pete, Bloomberg, are all just nudging and looking at each other - “Hey - you - you - why don’t ***you ***drop out, and let ME be the standard bearer?”
Predictably, this will lead to an easy Bernie win, just like how Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, etc. all jostling each other “Better one of us than Trump” did absolutely nothing to stop Trump.
With this sort of glib hand-waving attitude, we might as well squelch about 80% of the discussion in this forum.
Nobody can predict the future with clear certainty, of course, but it is perfectly possible to use political history, stats, a pattern of known human behavior, etc. to generate a reasonable assessment of how the future is going to unfold. Entire industries are based off of this - analytical projection. Insurance actuaries do it for a living. Otherwise we might as well as well say “whether an incumbent faces an economic boom or recession is meaningless since there’s always a chance he/she could buck the trend.”
I like all the discussion, and I enjoy taking part in it. I just think certainty is absolutely ridiculous, and even having confidence in various general election outcomes is silly. I’m not criticizing discussion – I’m criticizing certainty (and, to a lesser extent, confidence) in how the general election is going to turn out.
I agree. There are two elections that have a very vague similarity to this one. First is McGovern’s, in 1972, the last time Democrats tried with a truly progressive candidate. It’s possible that something’s changed in the last 50 years in American politics, however. The other is Trump’s, in 2016, the last time a major party nominated someone who’s an outsider to the party establishment. It’s possible that something’s changed in the last four years in American politics, however.
I’m not convinced that looking at Obama’s race against McCain is going to be super helpful as a precedent for how to run against Trump. Certainly we can talk about what factors are involved, but in any case, we need to acknowledge that we live in the weirdest timeline, and it’s very difficult to apply pre-Trump political lessons to a post-Trump world.
The one thing I know is that if Democrats don’t fully coalesce behind a single opponent, Trump will smugtweet his way into a second term.
There is still, at least in my mind, a modicum of doubt as to whether W genuinely won that election. The chairman of Diebold, the company that held the contract for Ohio’s voting systems, declared in '03 that he would deliver Ohio to the President. Which he did. By a rather narrow margin. Which was the state that mode the difference in the election. So, the numbers, yes, clearly show that W won. But, the validity of the numbers remains a salient question.
Which is certainly the most sensible approach to establishing/refining socioeconomic policy. Your team lost on a late FG as the clock ran out, so go sit down and STFU while we run things, and you can grumble about whether that really was an interception on that one play where it looked like the defender had stepped out of bounds before he had the ball. Far superior to, say, rolling dice, or making arcane rules about which child inherits the throne based on, whatever. Maybe.