And you really think the FBI is going to release that report in the middle of the primary season? Good luck with that.
When do you think it’s coming out? Some reports I’ve heard say after the convention, some before. I would think Democrats would rather get any bad news before they vote. Replacing Clinton on the ballot in will be a herculean task if she’s mortally wounded after she’s nominated. Not that it would matter at that point anyway whether she was replaced or not, given how bad it would make the party look to voters.
Cite please. Where are you getting this from? Of the states 538 can make predictions on, Clinton has all of them. Please do not include American territories in this analysis. It’s cute that they vote and all but they don’t matter.
Sure lopsided defeats in caucus solidly red states like Utah and Alaska. Who cares? Defeats in solidly blue states. Who cares? Sanders beat Clinton in Colorado but not in Virginia, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. Clinton beats Sanders where it matters.
Yes they make arguments because they are blessed with human imagination and the ability to communicate. It doesn’t mean anyone really takes them seriously.
Clinton will have a majority in every way you slice it except for the white youth vote.
I can be convinced that I am overconfident of Clinton’s chances. Just provide the cites predicting the things you are predicting.
It’s long been FBI policy that they want to avoid affecting elections if at all possible…aside from the fact that it’s highly unlikely they’re going to find against her anyway, and regardless of the bullshit Rudy Giulani is selling.
This really is not a “problem” in the minds of any but the most fevered Sanders supporters. So Clinton supporters like you can rest easy.
First, the chance of this happening isn’t really all that good. To date Clinton’s won 20 contests to Sanders’s 17. She has solid leads in the polls, says fivethirtyeight, in NY, CA, NJ, PA, and MD.
(Now–Maybe these polls aren’t accurate, but I don’t know of any particular reason to think they aren’t. And if they are in error, it’s not necessarily in understating Sanders’s support. In the last month, for instance, both Arizona and Ohio looked very close in the polling and went decisively for Clinton.)
Anyway, in addition to these five states, she seems pretty certain to win Puerto Rico and DC as well. To win a majority of contests she’ll just need one from within DE, NM, RI, and CT, which seems more than plausible, though I admit I haven’t seen any polling from these states. Calling Sanders’s chances of winning the majority of contests “good” seems a little unwarranted.
And even if he does win the majority of races, I’m really not sure what this is supposed to prove. The states Sanders has won and the states that have gone to Clinton are not at all comparable. Fun fact 1: of the states that have already voted, the **six most populous ** all went for Clinton, mostly by very large margins. Fun fact 2: Of the states that have voted, the nine least populous all went for Sanders. He is winning little states. She is winning big states. Even if Sanders were somehow to win CA and PA, he would only have three of the ten most populous. It’s possible he could win all fifteen of the smallest states–which together have a population of less than Florida. Think about that for a minute.
So it is ludicrous to count states, under these circumstances, as if they made any difference: ludicrous to argue that winning Vermont, Wyoming, and Idaho, however big the margins, is somehow worth more than winning (big) in both TX and FL. (And as has been noted, here and elsewhere, kind of offensive because it seems to argue that the votes of African Americans and Hispanics aren’t as important or valuable as votes of white people.)
Which is not to say that some of Sanders’s more enthusiastic supporters won’t try to make that argument. To which I say two things.
–First, it would be an amusing position for them to defend, given that Sanders keeps talking about restoring democracy to America. To argue that it is states, not people, who should decide a nomination is a 180 degree turn from what Sanders says he believes.
–Second, the people who will make and believe that claim are those who are already furious and angry and convinced that the fix is in. They believe that Hillary Clinton somehow carried out massive voter fraud in Arizona, that Bill Clinton kept 17,000 Sanders supporters from voting in Massachusetts by standing near the entrances of four polling places, that the media is in Clinton’s pocket and never gives the time of day to Sanders, that Clinton only wins because she appeals to “low information voters.” You know what? They say whatever they want to say; if it isn’t “We won more states!” it’ll be something else.
All of which means that it doesn’t really matter. Sane Sanders supporters–and I think there are a lot of them–will realize that this is a silly argument. The rest of them won’t be convinced under any circumstances. The superdelegates, the party leaders, know this. Unless Sanders can somehow catch up to Clinton in the pledged delegate department, whoever wins the majority of the states just isn’t going to signify.
Maybe someone already mentioned this but if Bernie Sanders wins more states and surpasses Clinton in over delegates, his best bet would be to court the hundreds of undecided delegates and not put all his hope on making those pledged delegates flip from Hillary to him.
As others say, this is real unlikely.
But I agree that if, in some unlikely scenario it did happen then the supers would find themselves in the same place the R Establishment does find itself in todays real world: Two unpalatable choices and no obvious winning path forwards.
Where the game theory gets really interesting is if this comes to pass not too far before the conventions. Now the Rs will nominate first, but they’ll already know the Ds have joined them in being trapped with unpalatable choices.
Will they therefore put up a Ryan, Romney, Kasich, etc. hoping to capture the relative “center /good citizen” vote while the Ds nominate either a crook or a crazy? Or will they decide the Ds are fatally wounded no matter who they pick and now’s the time to go for the jugular and nominate Cruz / Trump for the win?
And which way do the Ds counter once the Rs have played their hand?
Fun to think about.
IT’s FBI policy to not take the campaign into account at all, but just to do the investigation right.
If Sanders somehow went on a winning streak of actual large states and started surpassing Clinton in pledged delegates, he wouldn’t need to worry about the super delegates because they’d start moving to him naturally.
But polling in NY, MD, Penn & California suggests that we won’t be seeing that happening. Haven’t seen any new NJ polling but I assume it’s not far different from New York and Maryland.
That’s a nice theory, but as I said in another thread (on a different issue), it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. They don’t want to get involved in electoral politics if at all possible.
OK, so there’s three ways of deciding who is winning (and only one counts).
Delegate count: Clinton is solidly ahead, even without superdelegates. (this is the only one that counts).
Number of states won: Clinton is still ahead. Closer, tho
Popular vote: Clinton is waaaaay ahead. * By over two million votes. *
One key difference between the Hillary voters of 2008 and the Sanders voters of 2016 is that so many of the latter are the young idealists who’ve never voted before and I could see members of that group being more likely than seasoned adults who’ve voted in multiple elections to stay home rather than vote.
I doubt this will happen though.
If I counted the remaining delegates right, Clinton needs to get 60% of the remaining pledged delegates to be able to clinch the nomination without the superdelegates’ help.
As for Sanders turning the supers, the Facebook (and, presumably, Twitter) memes have already begun; “I am voting against my Representative and Senators the next time they are up for election if they vote for Clinton at the convention.” Never mind that there’s a very good chance that the only possible way of knowing just how a superdelegate voted is if all of them from a state vote the same way. (Now watch the Sanders supporters demand that a list of delegates and how they voted become public, even if it requires having an open roll call of delegates - that is, when each state casts its votes, somebody yells out, “ROLL CALL!”, and they go through the list of delegates for that state, having each one vote (although I think this is all done electronically now) - and when that’s denied, blame the mysterious Hillary/Media Cabal.)
Are you including Michigan, where, IIRC, Obama wasn’t even on the ballot (because the DNC had said that, since Michigan’s primary wasn’t before all of the “first four”, it wouldn’t count), in that count?
Exactly my point. Which is why Clinton needs a plan to give the young and easily disaffected contingent of Sanders voters a reason to not become disaffected. Instead they need to stay engaged (and voting!) all the way to Nov & beyond.
One of the things that kneecapped Obama in office was that once having voted for him, a lot of fresh voters went back to ignoring politics for the next 4 years.
That’s not good enough.
If you want Change (with or without a side of Hope 
) it takes pushing on Congress & on local politics pretty much all the time. Not as a full-time job, but at least as a regular hobby. Doing the *Vote then ignore for 4 years * trick is a recipe for irrelevance.
That also means they aren’t going to issue the statement *clearing *her until after the election. They’re going to keep quiet and let it not be an issue. But it’s fun to dream about either way, isn’t it?
What do you mean, “the statement clearing her”? The way they clear someone is by not saying anything at all. You know, just like they’re doing right now.
Normally, yes. This situation is not normal.
Clinton is ahead in the popular vote – for now. But as I pointed out, she actually won more votes than Obama in 2008. Yes, Michigan didn’t vote, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still have won the popular vote. The party supers switched sides once it became clear that minorities and white youth were more enthusiastic to vote for Obama than Hillary. That happened much sooner than in this election. My point is, that switch could still happen. It might be possible to see this now, but we’re still 2 months from the end of the race and there’s a lot of voting left. NY and MD seem to be locks for Hillary. Everything else, though, is up for grabs.
The supers switched in 2008 because Obama had won a majority of pledged delegates, and because his wins in low-turnout caucus states suggested that his victories represented more voters, despite receiving fewer votes. It’s possible a similar trend will occur this year, but it’s doubtful based on any currently available data (votes already cast + polls of upcoming states.)
And she might even get there. The odds are no worse for her to overperform current polling than to underperform it. Solidly up double digits in NY and PA. MD even more. And if momentum is an actual thing from there it could snowball … or not.
The Sanders saved by the supers play is a hypothetical one that is less probable that even Clinton hitting the 59 to 60% needed to win with all superdelegates voting against her. It is interesting that initially some Sanders supporters felt the interpretation that such was what Sanders was delusional frothing on my part, accusing him of want to overturn democracy and of being unethical … but now that that contingency plan has been explicitly confirmed by Devine the idea of superdelegates voting other than according to the majority vote seems peachy keen to many. Again, MHO remains that superdelegates are certainly able to tip the scale some, but that going against both the pledged delegate and popular vote results is something that should only be done in a very extreme circumstance.
Not. But nearly. Without MI and with estimates for the caucuses the popular vote ended up Obama +0.4%. With MI it was Clinton +0.5%.