I’d also argue that the death of neoliberalism as defined is greatly exaggerated. You’d need a French Revolution-style event, targeting both the government and the wealthy. And that’s just here in the US.
I think the Sandernistas know Sanders is going to get clobbered in NY, are are thus setting up for a “We wuz robbed!” counterploy.
Sanders is getting robbed on each way its cut.
He’s getting robbed by Superdelegates, who are usually Party insiders.
He’s getting robbed in the popular vote, where he is still down 2M votes.
He’s getting robbed not understanding the delegate math - which means even though he won Wyoming by ten points, he split delegates evenly with Clinton.
He’s getting robbed by minorities and older women, who are voting for Clinton against their (apparent) best interests - because we woman and minorities are such tools of The Man.
Obviously there has to be a massive conspiracy.
Sanders will lose in New York, owing to the closed nature of the primaries there and the fact that Hillary has long had the support of her adopted home state. He will almost surely lose; the question is by how much.
That said, Sanders doesn’t really have to win in NY; he just needs to avoid getting embarrassed. The same is true for Cruz in the republican party. I think Sanders is less likely to get embarrassed than Cruz, but I don’t think Cruz really cares. It’s a mutual hate fest there.
I don’t know about that. Sanders needs delegates and he needs them fast.
As would I, most likely, but I think it’s a non-issue at this point. The purity-testers are losing: Sanders is getting fewer popular votes and fewer pledged delegates. All the noise about superdelegates and momentum and whatnot is simply an attempt to distract from that fact. When the nomination is finished, they’ll have to decide if they actually want to participate in democracy, which means not getting everything you want, or simply fetishize it from the sidelines.
ETA: I should clarify: the left-wing purity testers are losing. I think they’ve pretty much won on the right.
It’s really hard to win 56 to 57% of the remaining delegates starting off with losing the second biggest prize remaining on the calendar. It is not like he can reasonably expect to come off even a very modest loss there with momentum to drive him up from behind in PA to the very large margin that he would then need. Even tying in PA would be a stretch.
Why should have have any love for these moderate, “respectable” Republicans? Most of them had no trouble supporting the New Right in their successive electoral victories and much of their “moderation” was more style than substance-remember that Rockefeller implemented draconian drug legislation in New York state and Chafee wanted to privatize Social Security (while virtue signalling to the progs by refusing to call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree, a “moderate” Republican my ass).
This really depends. The example of both Hillary Clinton and to a lesser extent even Barack Obama (who was open to a “Grand Bargain” that would have gutted the New Deal/Great Society legacy) show that proper progressive pressure that is not marked by Tea Party-esque overreaction can move Establishment politicians to the left. The same can be seen with FDR, where pressure from the CIO and other labour/popular forces moved him beyond the fairly modest measures of the First New Deal to the much more transformative Second New Deal and eventually his Second Bill of Rights. That said, were the neoliberals to go out in a huff and form their own new party, I would welcome it since that would open the possibility for a complete political realignment which might (for example) allow populist Democrats to ally with disaffected Republicans to form a genuine popular front.
I disagree completely. Sanders absolutely has to win in New York, and he has to do so by at least 10 points. He’s behind by over 200 pledged delegates, and he needs to start picking up marked amounts of pledged delegates. He absolutely has to win in the remaining big states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California, and he has to win by large margins.
I have first hand knowledge of what goes on in NYC Dem politics. I know of dead people who are still registered and still cast a vote via absentee ballot. I know of nursing home residents who vote regularly the same way, even though they have no idea they are doing so. I’ve seen various “human errors” in action, and not all of them were corrected.
What informs your opinion?
This is a crime. Have you reported it?
Common sense.
If we’re to take “zero Obama vote” precincts as evidence that foul play was going on, what of the “zero Clinton vote” precincts that the NYT found? Who was trying to steal the election there? Obama, I guess?
If Clinton was trying to steal votes, why would her people do it in the most ridiculously obvious fashion? Again, the idea here is that they are sophisticated enough to tamper with the counts but so incredibly stupid that the best idea they can come up with is “Let’s cancel out ALL of the Obama ballots in these primarily black precincts! No one will think that’s odd”?
The count changes were far, far too small to affect the vote total. So not only are people risking felonies for tampering and fraud (and doing so in the stupidest way possible) but they’re also not even doing so in a way that would make any difference. It’s like robbing a bank at gunpoint for a roll of dimes.
No one – not the Obama campaign, not the Clinton campaign, not the voting officials really had a reaction to it. Which makes sense since it again was (a) so minor as to not make a difference and (b) were issues with the preliminary counts which by their very nature are prone to errors. Hence why they are the preliminary counts and not the final tallies.
But hey, I hear that innuendo and insinuation works great as well. It’s too bad that innuendo and insinuation can’t cast ballots because apparently they’re everywhere among a certain segment of Democratic primary voters.
That makes no sense. Sanders is losing among pledged delegates. He’s trailing. The only way he closes the gap is by winning delegates.
What’s worse is that there’s a ton of delegates up for grabs in New York. Win a state with 20 delegates 70%-30% and the delegate split is 14-6 (+8). Win New York (247 delegates) by 53%-47% and the count is 131-116 (+15). Not only does not winning New York waste an opportunity to gain delegates Sanders desperately needs but even a slim loss wipes out the delegates he got from one of his caucus “blow outs”.
Well “have to” and “needs” are overstatements. He can modestly lose NY and still have a path only a bit steeper than his current one. Instead of needing 56% of the remaining pledged delegates he goes up to 58%. He would need just a bit more sizable of wins than before in PA and NJ and a blow-out win in CA. There are 714 delegates still in play on June 7 and 14 so unless he is 715 behind before then he is not mathematically eliminated … win 100% those days and he takes the lead! Heck even a little less, as the momentum of doing that would force the superdelegates to switch to his side en masse, so even just 95% of the delegates on June 7 and 14 and he can do it. He’d still have a path.
See below, I don’t want to speak to this more than once.
This isn’t about Clinton specifically, which I said in the other thread. But it seems you’re incapable of taking off your partisan glasses to view anything outside of that context. That could be affecting your “common sense”. Did you even read the Times article you cited?
Mr. Koenig said he seriously doubted that anything underhanded was at work because local politicians care more about elections that matter specifically to them.
“They steal votes for elections like Assembly District leader, where people have a personal stake,” he said.
My emphasis. Notice the excuse was not a denial that fraud could have occurred at all, and in fact stated as a matter of course that “they steal votes” in other elections.
Try this:
Here is the NYC DOI Report (pdf)
A local article about it:
What the investigation found was hardly surprising.
Among other things, the election rolls are rife with deceased or ineligible voters. DOI probers who used some of those names were permitted to vote in 61 cases with no challenge or question from a poll worker.
On Staten Island, five votes were OK’d when investigators posed as dead people and three when they pretended to be felons who are not eligible to cast ballots.
It echoed the controversy that emerged when the late State Sen. John Marchi of Staten Island was found to be listed in 2011 as eligible to vote. He died in 2009.
At one point during voting in 2013, the DOI reported, a poll worker on Staten Island walked outside with an undercover investigator who was turned away. There the “voter” was advised to go to the poll near where he used to live and “play dumb” in order to cast a ballot.
One local example from 2015:
Bronx politician Hector Ramirez busted on voter fraud charges
Had we but world enough, and time, this momentum, maiden, were no crime.
If Sanders does a little bit better than expected in the next primary, and a little bit better than that in the next one, and so on, he would eventually get to a point where he was winning the whole race. But the problem is that that “eventually” might take a very long time, and we have only a finite and all too small number of states left. For him to actually win at this point, he doesn’t need “better than expected” or “steady progress” or “momentum”: He needs huge blowout victories, everywhere he can get them, starting as soon as possible. And it looks extraordinarily unlikely that he’s going to get them.
That said, even though I’m a Sanders supporter, I’m not terribly upset by this state of affairs. Actually winning the nomination was always a stretch goal. The primary purpose of his run was always to shift the Overton window to the left, and get certain topics talked about, and at that, he’s succeeding very well. He could be succeeding even more at it, of course, but I don’t think that the success he’s had already is anything to be scorned.
What does that have to do with precincts showing zero ballots for a candidate? In fact, if it’s so easy to “undetectably” commit vote fraud in NYC then why are you implying that Clinton’s campaign had anything to do with ridiculously easy to detect fraud by zeroing out results?
Who knows? He could play nice and Hillary might even offer him the Veepdom, which from his POV would have to be a win…and talk about a landslide…
Yeah, yeah, I know, fantasyland…
Forget it. You are determined to misunderstand me, and I have no interest in wasting more time with you.
Sure thing. Have fun with the elections.