A true populist Party may seem to be America’s best hope at this point, but if by “disaffected Republicans” you mean Trump supporters, I don’t see it. Trump’s message is all about Hate Hate Hate — explicit hatred for immigrants and foreign competitors, and implicit hatred against non-white Americans and even women. Raising minimum wage or improving Obamacare are not on the table for these haters. Progressive populists, OTOH, have a very opposite agenda which springs from Love.
I don’t see these two brands of “populism” allying any time soon.
I don’t have a problem with something like superdelegates in principle; though instead of party higher ups I’d have it be a number of people who are incredibly knowledgeable about important current topics. So you’d have several people well versed in African-American issues, several people well versed in middle eastern foreign policy, several economists, etc.
The problem, of course, is that there’s no way to impartially select “true experts” to be swing voters. By its very nature anybody the party trusts with this power are going to have to be people who have done a lot for the party, and befriended the right people and said the right things. It’s kind of the same problem as trying to solve Gerrymandering by by hiring an “impartial third party” to draw the lines. No matter how hard you try, that selection of people to draw the lines ain’t impartial.
That’s not me saying Bernie is getting robbed because he’s an outsider, just an observation that I don’t think in a perfect world the idea of having a small-ish number of swing voters whose voices count for more than the average voter is a horrible idea.
That’s the point I’ve been arguing. If Hillary falls short of the required pledged delegates, then it’s a matter of who the party itself decides to be their candidate. I expect them to support Hillary, as they’ve largely already pledged to do. But if there are signs of a fractured electorate – and I think we’re possibly seeing that now – then the Democrats would have a mess on their hands, just as the republicans would. As I’ve been saying, this would be far less messy if Hillary would just win the pledged delegates contest outright. That would be much easier for everyone to accept. The Sanders crew may not like Hillary but probably most could at least accept that she won the race according to the rules that everyone agreed to from the start. However, even with a New York win, it’s not clear that she can achieve that.
He’s losing, yes, but as long as Hillary doesn’t crush him in NY and a few other states, he can still claim victory if he can prevent Hillary from winning the race outright with pledged delegates and continue winning in other races. He would argue that New York was a speed bump. He could argue this if he somehow wins in PA and CA and a lot of other states in between. It’s an uphill climb for sure, but if he can pull it off, he’d arrive at the convention having closed in on Hillary’s once commanding lead and shattered her aura of inevitability. It would be a long 6-8 weeks between the end of the California race and the convention. It would be in the media for weeks on end. This isn’t what Hillary wants. She wants it over and done with, as dictated by voters. She doesn’t want to rely on the political version of the BCS.
and you know why…because he’s 74 years old and if he dies in office, the House has to approve an appointment. If during the period they don’t bother (gee, ya think they might?), they manage to impeach Clinton, they get the Presidency (assuming that the GOP keeps the House, which they will)
That would be the stupidest thing Clinton could do - she’s going to be the constant target of hearings, she’s red meat for the GOP. Add in the not unlikely possibility that her VP dies, and it spells disaster for the Democrats.
Winning on pledged delegates alone requires winning with over 59% of the pledged delegates (and given her current popular vote lead is currently 58%, by 2.4 million votes, closing in an two thirds of the popular vote). Yes one can say that winning by that much would be very easy for everyone to accept. It of course also easy to accept if one wins with 100% of the vote!
It’s not impossible for her to get there. She has 54.4% of the delegates now (he 45.6%). Her moving up 4.5% more is no more impossible than Sanders moving up about the same percent (which would get him to the pledged delegate tie but of course still leave him with a very significant popular vote loss). And much more likely than Sanders getting the nomination without at least a pledged delegate win.
It would not make sense at all for her to have Bernie as the Veep. My guess is someone like Cory Booker gets a serious look. He would bring some of the Obama-type energy to her campaign. She might also have an obvious role laid out for both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. That would reassure progressives bummed out about Bernie’s loss that there will be more than just lip service paid to progressive ideals.
So you are arguing that Hillary needs to beat an impossibly high bar to be the Democratic candidate for President and to avoid a Republican-like mess? The coming Republican mess is due to there being no clear winner of the majority of delegates.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t even need to win in 80% of the remaining contests to get a majority of the delegates. There will be a clear winner in the delegate count barring some huge, unpredictable event. The winner will be Hillary Clinton.
It seems bizarre to me that its being required of Hillary Clinton to have some clear inarguable achievement to be the fully legitimate Democratic candidate for President. The fact that she will have the majority of the delegates and that she would have enough to get the nomination with a proportional distribution of the superdelegates will be enough for “everyone to accept”.
I see the conflict that you are seeing right now within the Democratic party, but it’s nothing like the Republican party and it will pass. You’re extrapolating from the typical friction you would expect in this kind of election to the earthquake going on in the Republican party. There is no reason to do so.
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy will be even easier to accept once the nightmare of a candidate emerges from the Republican convention. Sanders will be forgotten in a week after this event.
Hillary’s significantly farther ahead right now than Obama was at this point in '08. Without a huge change or some hugely significant event (possible but unlikely, IMO), she’ll end the process with significantly more pledged delegates (and possibly an outright majority of all delegates just by pledged delegates) and significantly more raw votes than Sanders. In such a scenario it would be incredibly unlikely for the superdelegates to reverse themselves.
So far, in my view, this primary has been significantly less harsh than the '08 primary, and Obama and Hillary made nice with very few holdouts. I see no reason to believe that, considering that Hillary has led in most national polls, by raw vote, and by pledged delegates, pretty much throughout the primary, that the '16 primary will be more likely to damage the eventual nominee than the '08 primary did.
By the time we get to the convention, there’s no such thing as an “aura of inevitability”. The tenses change at that point: It’s no longer “Hillary will win”; it’s “Hillary has won”.
I agree, with the caveat that we’re only just starting to get really testy as Clinton loses her cool and Sanders is starting to take the gloves off. Clinton and Obama got on each other’s nerves a lot sooner in the process, whereas Clinton and Sanders were holding back due to her belief that he wasn’t too much of a threat and his desire to stay positive. Now he’s won 7 of 8 contests, looks like he’s in it until the end, and he’s getting pissed off too at the way Clinton has gone after him.
Agree with iiandyiiii and adaher. Subject to one additional caveat.
The ideological gap between Clinton and Obama was smaller than that between Clinton and Sanders. IMO there’s a lot more chance that a decent chunk of Sanders’ insurgent supporters will go away angry and neglect to vote in Nov vs. the situation in 2008.
The sooner the Clinton nomination becomes mathematically inevitable the more opportunity there is for the convention to be a healing hootenanny of swaying kumbaya singers and for Sanders to work to persuade his hotter headed supporters that supporting the D candidate in Nov is better than abstaining in a snit of ideological purity.
OTOH, if this thing goes to the supers and/or multiple ballots, the Sanders hotheads won’t just be angry. They’ll be livid and, like Trumpers, be wanting to burn the place down and/or start an ideologically pure party of their own. Which will be unhelpful to say the least come Nov.
Neither Ds nor Rs want to become hostage to their hothead fringe. But each knows that turnout is the key to winning in Nov. Said another way, the side which better turns out its hotheads is probably the winner in Nov.
Clinton needs a plan for making that happen. One that Sanders can and will sign onto as well. That is a tough order today and the longer it takes to get a decision the tougher it will be.
Bottom line: It’s gonna get nastier before it gets nicer.
There are no multiple ballots. There’s only two candidates left (and O’Malley only had one super and no pledged) so one of them is going to break the 50% threshold and be the nominee right off the bat. That will almost certainly be Clinton who may be pushed over the top by super delegates but who will also have a clear lead in pledged delegates and cast votes. And who will be doing well in the closing contests of the race leaving Sander’s March blitz a distant memory.
The problem that Hillary Clinton has is that there’s a very good chance that she will have won fewer contests than Bernie Sanders by the end of the primary season. Moreover, if that happens, it would be thanks to a major win streak in which Bernie would have won a decisive majority of the races from March 15 through June. Some of these are races that Sanders has won have been embarrassingly lopsided defeats. If Sanders finishes on a win streak that includes Pennsylvania, that would mean that Sanders would have taken some battleground states. He’s also doing better than Hillary in the polls. It’s not just one factor that would be at play; there would be several arguments the Sanders crowd would make.
Obama actually had fewer votes than Clinton in 2008. But he won more contests (33 to 23), and he went on a major win streak that caused party super delegates to switch allegiances. No candidate who has won the majority of individual contests has lost the primary race in modern history.
Well, I daresay pretty soon the whispers will be out about Bernie’s 12 illegitimate children all by different mothers; alongside his plans to create a citizen Stasi; and the 120% tax regime.
I said it just above but just to be clear: I’m not suggesting all Sanders supporters are hotheads. Many are earnest sober long time D voters. But there is a hothead element within his support and that element is more in play than are the more ordinary voters.
One thing that you do need to realize asahi is that the pledged delegates count is already weighted to reward late momentum.
Excruciating detail here, but the net impact here - both from The Green Papers. The base value for each state (“half of a jurisdiction’s base vote is determined by the number of Presidential Electors assigned to that state and half are computed by the number of people who voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate in the last three elections”) is multiplied by a bonus factor depending on how late they go and if they have their race in a “geographic cluster”.
Net result? All states through the 3/15 race are worth their base. The 3/22 and 3/26 clusters are worth 15% more delegates than their base value. After that, some are worth 10% more than their base, some 20% more, some 25% more, and on 6/7 some up to 35% more.
A later surge already has an amplified impact built in to the system: voters in later voting states are already substantially “more equal” than voters in earlier states. (Of course the trade off is that the race is often over before they get to exercise that option.)
In the hypothetical relatively close pledged delegate loss scenario Team Sanders will not be likely to publically acknowledge that fact, but the superdelegates will all know that the hypothetical value added of later momentum is already factored in.
Superdelegates have never gone against the majority of pledged delegates result.
The problem with that is that a substantial number of those people have never voted before, so the effect will be quite a bit less than you think.
Then we’ll have two other blocs of voters countering that: Repubs voting for Hillary instead of Trump (granted, a small faction, but somewhat significant) and all the other Dems who might not otherwise have voted coming out against Trump.
Really, Hillary won’t need the lunatic fringe who refuse to vote for her. I doubt even they will vote for Trump.
Cruz as nominee makes things a little bit different; there probably won’t be as large a turnout specifically to vote against him, but it still isn’t enough to tip the scales in his favor.
People seem to be way overstating Bernie’s momentum. This has all been gone over before. All but one of those contests in his string of victories were caucus states, and the one primary state (WI) was one he was favored to win anyway.
He hasn’t got a chance in hell of winning NY unless Hillary makes a major misstep, and all of a sudden the picture will change. And there will be 15 contests left, the majority of which favor Hillary by their very nature. Bernie gets one more caucus and might have some minor gains…against a 229-delegate lead without the supers.
Let’s posit a scenario where Sanders wins 80% of the remaining primaries but still falls short on pledged delegates. Clinton is not indicted, but is wounded by a rather scathing FBI report on how awful her judgment was and how close she skated the legal line. Her poll numbers look like crap, and now we’re in June and Sanders is still doing MUCH better against GOP opposition than Clinton, whose approval with voters is as bad as Trump’s.
At that point, I think Sanders has a serious case to make. I think also at that point, you could see a brokered convention. What happens if the superdelegates realize that Clinton is fatally damaged, and Sanders is just too extreme and not even one of them? The superdelegates could just abstain the first round and no one wins a majority. 2nd ballot nominate Joe Biden, everyone goes home happy.