Obama's got 9 days to show some guts and save the republic

[CarnalK]

@iiandyiiii

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.

Nate Silver, afaik, uses historical precedent in his model. Incumbents get an advantage. Whoever wins Iowa gets an advantage. So I think you’re quite wrong to tell us past elections are not the sort of thing that goes into his model.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

I disagree with this OP. If you want to beat Sanders, you need a candidate who offers what voters want to a greater degree than Bernie, not some back room deal or bigwig machinations. If the voters want Bernie, then let them have him. That simple- win a fair primary, you’re the nominee. Sorry if some traditional Dem corporate donors don’t like it, but they are part of the problem- too often government represents them and not the people.

So. If Sanders wins the nomination, IMHO your options are 1. Support Sanders. 2. STFU or 3. Order your “I hate facts, evidence, witnesses and brown people” t-shirt from Amazon and vote for the orange guy.

[iiandyiiii]

@CarnalK

Nate Silver, afaik, uses historical precedent in his model. Incumbents get an advantage. Whoever wins Iowa gets an advantage. So I think you’re quite wrong to tell us past elections are not the sort of thing that goes into his model.

If so, fair enough – Trump is the incumbent, and incumbents get a bit of an advantage. But I don’t think this tells us anything about whether Bernie, or Biden, or anyone else, is a stronger opponent in the general.

[Little_Nemo]

@iiandyiiii

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.

I disagree! There is a standard right now with which a serious and informative prediction on the 2020 general election can be made. I’m looking at past elections and using them to predict the next election.

I do agree, however, that you’re just guessing.

[Little_Nemo]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

If Sanders wins the nomination, IMHO your options are 1. Support Sanders. 2. STFU or 3. Order your “I hate facts, evidence, witnesses and brown people” t-shirt from Amazon and vote for the orange guy.

I agree. If Sanders wins the nomination I will support him and I will vote for him in November.

[Little_Nemo]

@eschereal

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.

Yes, there are good reasons to question the outcome of the 2004 election. Exit polls are never 100% accurate but they usually give a pretty strong indication of how the actual vote count. In 2004, exit polls in Ohio showed that a higher percentage of people were voting for Kerry than the results that Diebold reported.

[iiandyiiii]

@Little_Nemo

I disagree! There is a standard right now with which a serious and informative prediction on the 2020 general election can be made. I’m looking at past elections and using them to predict the next election.

I do agree, however, that you’re just guessing.

I’ll go with Nate Silver, who has no general election model at this time for a reason. If you want to pretend your guess is something extra special and more than just a guess, than feel free, but I’m not going to join you in this fantasy.

[Saintly_Loser]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

I disagree with this OP. If you want to beat Sanders, you need a candidate who offers what voters want to a greater degree than Bernie, not some back room deal or bigwig machinations. If the voters want Bernie, then let them have him. That simple- win a fair primary, you’re the nominee. Sorry if some traditional Dem corporate donors don’t like it, but they are part of the problem- too often government represents them and not the people.

So. If Sanders wins the nomination, IMHO your options are 1. Support Sanders. 2. STFU or 3. Order your “I hate facts, evidence, witnesses and brown people” t-shirt from Amazon and vote for the orange guy.

Absolutely.

https://politics.theonion.com/dnc-mulls-asking-donald-trump-to-run-as-democrat-in-eff-1841432132

[PhillyGuy]

@iiandyiiii

If so, fair enough – Trump is the incumbent, and incumbents get a bit of an advantage. But I don’t think this tells us anything about whether Bernie, or Biden, or anyone else, is a stronger opponent in the general.

I admit that the evidence in favor of my Bernie-weak-candidate mantra is low to moderate. Kindda like how the Cochrane Collaberation characterizes the evidence for the benefits of flossing your teeth. I still do it daily.

If you quantify the advantage of Incumbency, it’s more than a bit, but I’ll put off links on that for another day.

COVID-19 is an unpredictability factor. If I was to go paranoid, I’d suggest Trump will use it to re-schedule election day for his benefit. Looking at it more calmly, DJT could exceed the low expectations which median voters have concerning his performance in a crisis.

If virus-related supply chain disruptions tank the economy, that slightly favors the Democrats.

[SlackerInc]

@Little_Nemo

That said, I disagree with the OP. I would not want to see Obama or anyone else stepping in at the last minute and changing the rules in order to pick a nominee.

How would this be changing the rules? It would still be up to Democratic primary voters. Bernie can hold a rally where AOC enthusiastically endorses him, but Biden (as bad as he is, he’s the only chance to stop Bernie) can’t have a rally where the entire mainstream gathers together and says we can’t be nominating a Castro-praiser? (BTW, Andy: if you’re reading this, you’re going to have to update your verbiage regarding Bernie “saying dumb things about communist dictators in the 1980s” to “…but that was over a DAY ago!”

[Smapti]

Frankly, I couldn’t give a flip what Sanders thinks about Castro. It’s not like he’s going to rise from the grave and start stockpiling Soviet ICBMs again, and it’s far past time we normalized relations with Cuba anyway.

The fact that this nothingberder is getting so much coverage just shows how desperate the establishment is to throw the election to Trump.

[CarnalK]

Funny. It shows me that Bernie is a horrible general election candidate. Why in the holy fuck would he poke that bear?

[digs]

I just want to admit that I saw the thread title and immediately thought:
“Wait, there’s a way that Obama could run? A loophole that closes in 9 days?”

And my second thought was that I’d get excited about either Obama.

[SlackerInc]

@iiandyiiii

Face it – Bernie might be the nominee. And he might win the general. Any predictions about being unelectable are wild, wild guesses, not based on any data at all.

If Democrats Aren’t Terrified of Bernie, They’re Not Paying Attention

At the heart of Sanders’s campaign is a hard-core socialist vanguard which is indifferent to the Democratic Party except as a potential vessel for the Bernie revolution. Their calculation is perfectly rational. Even if Sanders is likely to lose, the small chance of success is worth the risk to a party they don’t care for to begin with. What is odd is watching rationalizations take hold among a much larger group of progressives who very much do care about denying Trump a second term, and who have explained away the risks of a Sanders nomination with a series of fallacies.

The first of those is a confusion over what it means to predict an outcome. “The truth is we are all clueless about what voters want or will accept,” argues conventional-wisdom-monger Jim VandeHei, in a signal of how deeply the anti-probabilistic fallacy has spread. It is true that there is uncertainty attached to every outcome. The talking heads who guarantee Sanders will lose are wrong — any nominee might win, and in a polarized electorate, both parties have a floor of support that gives even the most toxic candidate a fighting chance. In 2016, Trump was the most unpopular candidate in the history of polling, but he squeaked into office because everything broke just right for him. It could happen for Bernie, too.

But to concede that we cannot be certain about the future does not mean we know nothing. An imperfect comparison might be to predicting the outcome of sporting events. You don’t know the outcome in advance, but it is usually possible to make probabilistic predictions. Those predictions are wrong all the time. But it would be silly to conclude that, just because upsets happen, every game should be treated as a coin flip. A huge amount of pro-Sanders commentary is based on simplistically conflating the correct claim that we lack perfect clarity with the incorrect claim that we have no clarity at all.

A close relative to the notion that outcomes are completely unknowable is the notion that the entire electability calculation is a kind of hoary pseudoscience. After all, if we have no way of predicting what voters will want in November, why compromise in advance in pursuit of a mythical swing voter whose preferences are mysterious?

The grain of truth in this argument is that, historically, it is difficult to predict candidate performance in advance. The gigantic flaw in the logic, however, is that the backlash against electability has a behavior-shaping component that undermines itself as soon as it is put into practice. Historically, major candidates try pretty hard to avoid taking extremely unpopular positions. If candidates stop following this principle, on the grounds that electability is a myth, then the risk they’re dismissing will grow. It’s a bit like emphasizing the fact that animal attacks at zoos are rare. If people decide this means they can start flinging themselves into lion dens, then the zoo-safety stats will go south pretty fast.[…]

What makes Bernie’s profile uniquely toxic is the way his liabilities all reinforce each other. He combines discrete, deeply unpopular policy positions with an unpopular socialist label, which in turn reinforce the fact that his campaign is premised on radically changing the economy, the one thing most voters believe Trump has done well. His historic statements praising various leftist dictators reinforce the impression of kookery.

Calling them “historic” suggests Chait had not yet seen the “60 Minutes” comments.

One of the things Democrats have been telling each other is that it doesn’t matter what attacks Trump uses, because he’s going to make hyperbolic charges against them no matter what. And yes, Trump would call any Democrat an open-borders socialist who will throw everybody off their private insurance and drastically change the economy. But accusations work better when the target agrees with them.[…]

He has functionally reverse-engineered Trump’s preferred attacks into a series of campaign promises.

Just how damaging these positions will ultimately prove in the general election is impossible to measure. The effect is probably not zero. As a general rule, politicians for every position from dog catcher on up understand that advocating unpopular things makes winning elections harder. Not impossible, but harder. All things being equal, a candidate for dog catcher who promises to round up and cook stray pets at random has less chance of winning.

As bereft as I am about all of this, that last line literally made me LOL.

@iiandyiiii

James Clyburn with some praise for Bernie, even if it’s far from unreserved: Rep. Jim Clyburn says Sanders 'brings a lot to the table'

On the same day:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2020/02/23/its-sanders-party-488389

WALLOP! … CLYBURN to GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOUS on BERNIE SANDERS: “I do believe it will be an extra burden for us to have to carry. This is South Carolina, and South Carolinians are pretty leery about that title socialist. And so I think that that would be a real burden for us in these states or congressional districts that we have to do well in.
“If you look at how well we did the last time, and look at the congressional districts, these were not liberal or what you might call progressive districts. These were basically moderate and conservative districts that we did well in. And in those districts, it’s going to be tough to hold onto these jobs if you have to make the case for accepting a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist.”

@iiandyiiii

I predict that the Democratic “establishment” is slowly getting comfortable with the likelihood that Bernie could be the nominee, and we’ll see more and more appearances and statements like this from prominent long-time Democrats. And if Bernie becomes the nominee, Obama will lead the charge with an enthusiastic endorsement.

I think if Bernie gets the nomination, Democrats in competitive districts will be in a tough spot but their best move will probably be to run hard against him. (And of course if he then loses the general, Sandernistas will have a scapegoat to blame, but oh well.)

[Sam_Stone]

There is another big risk to a Bernie candidacy: If having him as the nominee forces down-ticket Democrats to support him in the general it could cost them dearly in House and Senate races.

With any other candidate I’d say that even though the Senate might be in play in the next election, the House will remain safely controlled by Democrats. But with Bernie at the top of the ticket, there’s a real risk that more moderate voters will stay home or even flip to the Republicans, and the Dems will lose the House, the Senate, AND the Presidency.

I do not like Trump. I think he’s very likely to win the next election, and almost certain to win it if Bernie is the nominee. But a Trump who has a House and possibly a Senate opposing him is MUCH better than a Trump with a Republican Senate and House.

Don’t lose sight of the need to control the other two branches of government. Bernie makes that much less likely, in my opinion.

[SlackerInc]

@PhillyGuy

Re the OP idea, where Obama and friends gang up on Sanders after he got a plurality of the Democratic votes in multiple states, that would violate democratic norms and could backfire.

How would this violate democratic norms? What he is proposing is NO different from Sanders having a rally where AOC vigorously endorses him. NO different from op-eds in friendly left-wing publications that endorse him and tear down his rivals. Why is he allowed to do that but mainstream Democrats are not?

@Smapti

I’ll never understand the Democratic establishment’s obsession with trying to win “swing voters” and suburban whites when the candidates who get nominated on those grounds consistently lose.

That’s how Pelosi got the gavel last year! Every seat they flipped was by aiming at those kinds of candidates. Bernie endorsed lots of House candidates, gave them money, held rallies for them, and none of them flipped a seat. Not a single ONE. :smack:

@Smapti

Sanders is the most Obama-like candidate in the field.

The cost of Sanders’ agenda – possibly $60 trillion – would set a peacetime...

Sanders’ plan, though all of its costs cannot be precisely quantified, would increase government spending as a share of the economy far more than the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson or the agenda proposed by any recent Democratic presidential nominee, including liberal George McGovern in 1972[…]

Of the past three Democratic presidential nominees, John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 proposed spending increases equal to around half a percentage point of the economy, while Obama in 2008 proposed spending an amount something over 1 percentage point, Summers calculated.

This year, he broadly estimates, former Vice President Joe Biden is proposing spending increases probably equivalent to roughly 1.5% of the economy, Pete Buttigieg roughly 2% and Sen. Elizabeth Warren an amount equal to about 12%.
Sanders laps all of them, as well as the New Deal precedent: Even a very conservative $50 trillion 10-year cost for Sanders’ plan would translate into a roughly 20 percentage point increase in federal spending relative to the economy, according to the calculations by Summers, who also once served as chief economist at the World Bank.

And if you look at the whole article, you’ll see why those are indeed very conservative estimates. It could easily be twice as much, if we could take seriously any of this Christmas tree Candyland pipe dream nonsense.

It’s also notable that Warren’s proposals are absurdly expensive, but Bernie definitely pulled a “hold my beer” on her.

@CarnalK

Funny. It shows me that Bernie is a horrible general election candidate. Why in the holy fuck would he poke that bear?

Right? I was on the one hand actually glad that he is willing to be so reckless, right at this incredibly crucial inflection point in the campaign. It gives us more of a chance to stop him. But it also shows that he just does not have any instinct for caution whatsoever. Something his ardent fans admire about him, but a perfect illustration of how kamikaze-foolish he is likely to be in the fall.

@Corry_El

Ok publicly Obama like any Democrat would agree Trump is terrible, but as a sober thinking person doesn’t necessarily believe ‘the Republic is at risk’ etc. to the degree breathless social media/internet type activist progressives do (or say anyway).

It’s not because of Trump’s policies that he is a threat to the Republic. Conservatives like those at the Bulwark believe he is such a threat every bit as much as progressives do (perhaps more, as many on the left seem to treat him as mainly a problem because his policies are not progressive). It’s the sacking of the “disloyal”, the suppression of intelligence about Russian interference in our elections, the hardball horsetrading with foreign leaders for political dirt, the interference in federal prosecutions, the selling of pardons, the emoluments.

Mitt Romney, the most recent GOP nominee before Trump, voted to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors and remove him from office. The first senator in history to vote that way against a member of his own party. Is *he *a “breathless social media/internet type activist progressive”?

[foolsguinea]

I leave for a while, come back, & Slacker’s talking about stopping Bernie again.

No. You’re going to fail. Let me explain why:

Right now you have one experienced campaign team (Bernie) that is outperforming the rest because they learned from the 2015-2016 experience, & patched holes in their strategy.

There is also a handful of pols with dramatically less competent teams, who can’t compete effectively this cycle.

Each of the other campaigns will see some large number of their base go to Bernie if that particular pol drops out. The Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Warren, Biden, & Steyer campaigns aren’t purely drawing on NeverBerners.

I haven’t seen polling, but I can guess that Biden’s base would break 60% or more to Bernie. Some of the others might see 30% or so go to Bernie. I would guess that 30% is about the mode, and that may be low.

So Bernie stays under 50% & looks “beatable” so long as he has five opponents, each of whom draws a large number of voters for whom Bernie is a second choice. None of them can get to 50%, they all look weak, & if they consolidated behind one anti-Bernie, they’d lose enough voters to Bernie to put him over 50%.

It’s over.

Biden is only competitive in some states. Buttigieg worked super-hard on Iowa & is likely to slide to nothing over the course of March. Both of them will shed votes to Bernie, who is competitive-to-dominant everywhere.

People are already writing off Warren, the one candidate ideological Berners tended to name as their own second choice. If she drops out, there is no other candidate to unify enough Democrats to win.

It’s over. You’re done. Enjoy these runner-up prizes: A toaster oven & a 2.5-day vacation in St. Croix.

[SlackerInc]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

I disagree with this OP. If you want to beat Sanders, you need a candidate who offers what voters want to a greater degree than Bernie, not some back room deal or bigwig machinations. If the voters want Bernie, then let them have him. That simple- win a fair primary, you’re the nominee.

What part of the OP involved “machinations” or not giving the nomination to the candidate the majority of Democratic voters want? Again, why is Bernie allowed to bring out AOC to persuade voters to support him, but more moderate candidates are not allowed to do the same? No one is talking about taking Bernie’s name off the primary ballots, at least not anyone in that OP.

Are people actually reading the link in the OP, or just making wild assumptions about what it says?

[foolsguinea]

Seriously, Sanders’s intoxicating populism aside, he’s winning because of horse-race realities.

His team ran in every state in 2016. They built alliances, they learned the lay of the land. The other candidates didn’t. They can rely on Hillary consultants if they’ve hired them, but their candidates are new babes in the woods.

Also, Bernie seems to have better Hispanic outreach, while many Dems barely try to mobilize Hispanics, esp. outside the Southwest. He’s beaten the field strategically, messaging aside.

He actually has pretty good messaging, too.

[SlackerInc]

I’m not denying that he has run a good primary race. You know who had a big hand in inventing the modern primary nomination system? George McGovern. And he went on a couple years later to do a great job navigating it to the nomination, then lost 49 states. Bernie won’t lose anywhere near that many states, because that’s just not possible now (I don’t think). But being good at navigating the primaries (as Mondale and Dukakis also were) is apples and oranges from being a good general election nominee. Democrats more often get this wrong than right (even Obama was an unnecessarily risky nominee, but got away with it due to an incredible tailwind).