A huge issue I’ve noticed amongst my friends is the left’s incredible ability to eat their own. Bernie was at the March on Washington, lead sit-ins to protest segregated housing, worked with CORE and SNCC, and more recently has been vocally supporting prison reform/education reform/police reform/voting rights reform/whatever reform for things that have disproportionally affected minority communities. He’s done this for decades. Like, after Ferguson, before running for president, he introduced legislation to help lower unemployment for young people in black communities, and called for the demilitarization of local police forces.
And… he’s being protested by the Black Lives Matter movement. He’s not talking about race enough, or in the right way. Or he’s treating race as an economic issue, when it’s really a cultural one (how the fuck does a presidential candidate even campaign to make people less racist?!)
On and on and on. He’s probably the best presidential candidate we’ve had in the modern era for ideas on how to end systematic racism. But he frames them as class issues – which they are – and even if they, by design or incident, would benefit minority communities (black, yes, but hell, latino, Asian, Native American… there’s a lot of shitted upon minority communities in America). But because he’s not wrapping it all into soundbites about racism, he’s not good enough, and we can’t support him.
Do we vote for the candidate that gets us 80% of the way there, or do we tear him down, and make sure we get 0%?
Depends on how you look at it. Under Clinton, less African-Americans died because of street crime and the great economy lifted more African-Americans out of poverty than ever before.
Because we have low crime now, there are some regrets about mass incarceration, and we should do something about that problem now. But in the context of the early 90s, the reforms made were necessary and it’s dumb for Democrats to regret them now. Especially when they took credit for them back then. They were right the first time. There’s nothing to apologize for.
Is that something actual black residents of majority black neighborhoods would say? I doubt it, but I’d be interested to hear such a cite.
The dot-com boom made billionaires out of techie nerds, but how much trickled down? Ending AFDC hurt and hurts poor people. Mass incarceration led to overcrowded and overtaxed prison systems. Clinton didn’t stop the drug war. He never even tried single-payer. He treated ethnic minorities as useful idiots and substantially governed from and for the Wall Street billionaire faction.
Bill Clinton got elected the same way Barack Obama did: by manipulating the media into seeing him as the avatar of a younger, hipper generation of pol, and lots of banker money.
People are offended that Bernie Sanders basically became his own party in Vermont, while mocking the Democrats as a bunch of useless insurance salesmen? What good did the Clintons or Obama ever do the Democrats? Oh, yeah, permanent Republican majorities. With friends like that, you kind of don’t have friends.
Both the progressive movement and the Democratic Party require better.
I think you’re partly right, but if we’re talking about what African-Americans want, they want Clinton more than they want Sanders. The Clintons are extremely popular among the African-American community.
yes, Silver believes that Clinton can lose IA and NH and still win. I agree that she can still win. It’ll just get a lot harder because without the mantle of inevitability she tends to lose.
Silver is relying on the assumption that Sanders’ support will remain strictly among white voters, something which is possible, but which I’ll bet Sanders fans would dispute vehemently.
It looks like his support is levelling off - he’s gotten all the gains he’s going to get from increased name recognition, and now he’ll have to win over not only the rest of the “anti-Clinton left” but start convincing the Clintonistas that he’s the guy.
That is his assumption, that Sanders has inherent advantages in Iowa and New Hampshire because they are two of the whitest states.
Silver’s good, but you have to look at where he’s using data and where he’s not. Sanders could win outside of IA and NH if he increases his minority support. Maybe that won’t happen. The Clinton brand is popular among African-Americans, and Sanders’ immigration views won’t win him any friends among Latinos. But to predict that the momentum from IA and NH wins wouldn’t translate to at least SOME increase in support among minorities is unrealistic.
I don’t think Silver is saying that – just that it’s extremely unlikely that Sanders would get the high level of minority support that would be necessary for him to win the nomination. Even if he wins Iowa and NH, it would be by slim margins and the delegate split would be almost even. In that case, Hillary’s war chest and popularity in other states would probably still ensure she would win more delegates (in addition to her huge lead in superdelegates) than Bernie.
Depends on if Clinton has figured out how to win caucuses. That’s how Obama beat her. Clinton was dead even with him in actual votes, but the caucuses were the difference maker. If Sanders wins IA an NH, stays competitive everywhere else plus wins caucuses, we have a race.
Given the nature of caucuses, I’m surprised that Silver didn’t mention that Sanders could take them the way Obama did if he’s organized enough.
I think Silver is assuming that Hillary is not so dumb that she doesn’t realize that her strategy of ignoring caucus states was a big part of her failure in '08. That’s a reasonable assumption – she didn’t hire Mark Penn this time.
It couldn’t be worse, so you’re almost certainly right. But ideological candidates have natural advantages in caucuses anyway, since only the most motivated show up. So Clinton will actually have to do better than average to beat Sanders in caucus states. Assuming Sanders is properly organized, a problem which felled Howard Dean in Iowa.
One thing Sanders has to watch out for, in light of the BLM situation, is avoiding what happened to George McGovern at the 1972 convention. That was the all time greatest cockup ever. He let everyone have their say so that he didn’t go on until 3am Eastern! And the platform ended up being a hodgepodge of lefty ideas from various sources that was sure to sink the party in the general election.
While I think Sanders was right to cooperate with BLM, he can’t give the impression that everyone with a beef is welcome to hijack his candidacy. BLM and Sanders are a decent fit. La Raza, Sierra Club, the Brady Campaign, and NARAL not so much. Not because Sanders doesn’t agree with all the various lefty groups, but simply because he’s focused like a laser beam on economic inequality. If his candidacy becomes about everything, it becomes about nothing.