Interesting, thanks!
Back to the OP, hell no. Hillary has already bought all the supers out with her party connections. She scratched their backs and now they will scratch hers. Oh, maybe a couple will switch over but the donkeys will cover their own ass.
In other words, you’re going to hear “Bernie’s going to win!” all the way through the New Jersey primary, unless he drops out. Yeah, that snowball’s already melted in Hell.
Sour grapes don’t become you.
Given the profile of this, I expect that - assuming she didn’t break the law - the FBI will release a statement saying they have investigated and did not discover laws were broken.
I’ll pick that nit. Later states have more delegates per capita than early states - winning or not winning doesn’t do a darn thing since the Democrats have all their primaries/caucuses award delegates in some version of proportional.
Winning tends to get you more ordinary delegates - but as Wyoming shows, being able to work the electoral map in the state can turn a loss into a delegate tie.
I guess I am on ignore since my original post on the subject had the links!
That’s not so much working the map as much a consequence of rounding small numbers.
The state delegate results were 156 to 124 and the delegates are divided upas 8 in the “CD” group, 4 “at large”, and 2 “PLEO.” So dividing up the 8 in comes to 4.457 for Sanders and 3.543 for Clinton and they round to the nearest whole. Likewise for the other smaller number divisions.
:smack:
Perhaps we’re talking past one another.
Yes, the rules are proportional, not statewide plurality takes all. Yes, “winning” in the sense of most total popular votes may deliver different net delegates depending on how those votes are distributed geographically. etc. etc.
But if we imagine two otherwise perfectly identical states with early and late primaries respectively, then turning in the identical same performance in the later primary allocated across the various precincts exactly the same way as it was in the earlier primary will *net *more delegates for the winner of the late primary than would have been netted in the earlier primary.
In simpler terms: whatever the late primary’s outcome, the impact on total delegates is proportionally larger. By design.
No, I get it, I was picking a nit. The nit being that winning states matters. It doesn’t. The delegate count matters. Delegates are weighted towards later states (which is cool, I didn’t realize that and it makes sense), but they are allocated proportionally, so barely winning California - even with more delegates at the very end of the season, is unlikely to be strategically useful.
If you are playing the game strategically, you want blowouts in large states and you don’t care if you lose the small states - and New Hampshire and Iowa - small states early in the cycle - there biggest values are narrative and fundraising.
In winner take all GOP states, winning the state matters - a lot.
For the record, I’m not supporting Sanders, but I’m pointing out that Hillary supporters and the democratic party seem to be oblivious to the potential danger that faces them at the convention.
See, I disagree that Hillary has been a ‘steamroller’ – she just hasn’t steamrolled Bernie. She’s beaten him up in the South and in a few other states, but Sanders has fought back pretty impressively.
If you want to see what a ‘steamroller’ looks like, take a look at the 2004 democratic primaries and take note of John Kerry’s winning 51 - 2 in terms of the number of contests and winning 60 percent of the vote. Or Al Gore winning 50 contests to 0 over Bill Bradley and winning 75 percent of the vote. Or Bill Clinton winning 35 states to a combined 15 states for Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas and others.
Or if you want to know what republican steamrolling looks like, then look at Mitt Romney winning by 7 million votes over his nearest challenger and winning 42 states. Or John McCain doubling the vote total of Mitt Romney and winning 37 states.
This race is nothing at all like those past races in which there was a decisive winner. This is a LOT more like the Obama - Hillary race in which Hillary was presented as the inevitable candidate, but started to lose steam. The main difference in this race is that it took longer for Bernie’s campaign to get off the ground.
I admit, there’s no way to know yet whether the Sanders insurgency will continue or not. I’m assuming she’s safe in New York and Maryland, so that will definitely be of help. But Sanders can survive as long as he doesn’t get absolutely embarrassed. Clinton really needs PA to put Sanders away. If she can’t close him out in PA, then the Sanders momentum starts anew.
@Dangerosa: Ahh. I get it. Agree completely.
I’m not one of the people supporting the ideas that winning states matters as such.
What is happening though is that one wing of the Sanders supporters are arguing that it does, and so ought to be worth extra delegates.
This is simply not true. It was true at the beginning of the campaign, but it isn’t any more. A 55-45 win, for instance, would be far from embarrassing. Heck, a 45-55 loss wouldn’t even be embarrassing. But Sanders doesn’t need 55-45 wins, he needs more like 60-40.
He’ll survive; he has (and will have) the ducats to fight all the way to the convention. But he won’t win.
Nope. You don’t get it. You are assuming that the super delegates will automatically support Hillary Clinton without factoring in the dynamics of the election.
You don’t get it now. But if Sanders wins PA, CA, and other states, believe me, you will understand what I mean.
Exactly, which is why I bothered to pick the nit
Honestly we get what you are saying. We just think it is not grounded in any reality.
From the debate last night but more relevant to this thread … any reactions to his diminishment of getting “murdered” in the South as “the most conservative part of this great country”?
Yes Clinton reminded everyone that she has won “Florida, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina, Missouri” some by very large margins, but also it was not conservatives in the South that voted against him. Not sure that his being so dismissive of those Democratic voters who … do not look like his core support … who did vote against him is a good idea. Plus the implicit attitude is diametrically opposed to any 50 state all districts strategy. The best spin to put on the statement is that we should not care about or count complete states if they are mostly red. (Although he does also I think discount Virginia, a critical swing state, not so red, as it is also South.)
While I agree that discounting Democratic voters in the South was weak, the whole “She only won red/southern states” argument is stupid and inaccurate anyway – as Clinton easily pointed out (and I gave a Bush-esque ‘You forgot Virginia!’ at her list). It’s funnier when you consider that his vaunted “seven of eight” wins include Alaska, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming; solid Democratic bulwarks indeed!
So, yeah, blowing off Southern Democrats is lame but it’s the least of the problems with his argument about the map.