I feel like I am not the best person to opine on this, but from my vantage point, it seemed like without the super delegates always being counted for Clinton and the DNC pulling strings, Bernie could have been a contender. Water under the bridge now I suppose.
I think “almost beat her” is a bit of red herring. Sanders accomplished a remarkable feat, no matter how you measure it, starting with almost no name recognition and about a 2% support level against The Anointed One. That probably wouldn’t have happened to a strong candidate running instead of Clinton.
Small donors. That’s the brightest little star in constellation Bernie.
One of the most important motivations for the Clintonista takeover of Dem leadership was the Republican Party beating their brains out for campaign funding. And the big money was corporate. Sure, the corporadoes would hedge their bets some, but more and more, their money went to their favorite. So, the Dems became Republican Lite at the top. And our politics were Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber.
Remember when Jeb(!) was a shoo-in for the nomination? Because he had gathered all the big cash donations, just like how his brother went from George Who? to the Candidate in a matter of days.
Remember how they poured some forty million dollars into New Hampshire primary, hoping to nudge the needle just a bit in his direction? Anyone here remember when forty million dollars wouldn’t do that? Whaddaya mean, money doesn’t work! Money always worked before!
Obama explored and exploited the “small donor” option some, but Bernie brought it into the spotlight. Five, ten, twenty dollars apiece from actual people. What a concept! Power to the people. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
And without caucus states Sanders wouldn’t have come close at all. The system was rigged in Sanders favor, not against him.
I have been critical of the Clinton campaign but I do think there is a danger of hindsight bias and making it seem worse than it was. As always in such matters it’s useful to go back to one’s assessment on election night before one knew the result. At the time my sense was that the campaign was average. They didn’t have a clear message and hadn’t chosen the best lines of attack on Trump but they had done some big things right: raise money, build a ground game, run a good convention and prepared well for the debates. With some luck they could have won the election. Also a big part of the problem wasn’t the campaign per se but the candidate, her lack of charisma and personal appeal and mistakes she made before the campaign: e-mail servers, Clinton Foundation, Goldman Sachs etc.
Ultimately they did blow an election which they should have won but it was also a trickier contest than it looked with a limited candidate, an unorthodox opponent and the Comey announcement. My current verdict would be mediocre rather than awful.
I haven’t read the book though, only some of the reviews and excerpts, and possibly it would persuade me to lower my rating.
Oh, please. There are so few caucus states left that to assert this rigged it FOR him (as opposed to the percentage of delegates Clinton was awarded by the Party through the Super-delegate mechanism!) is laughable.
I recall vividly one day in the summer(?) of 2015 driving through Chattanooga, dodging rainshowers on I-75/I-26, listening to NPR’s “All Things Considered”, where they did a piece on Bernie Sanders and the amazing crowds he was getting, which made him and others think he might be a viable candidate for the 2016 nomination. Young people were getting all excited about him was the gist of the piece. And even at that time I thought to myself, “yeah, yeah, but wait until he runs up against the Democratic Party’s establishment that wants HRC as nominee.”
The game was completely rigged against Sanders. Clinton had at least a 500 vote lead going into the start of the primaries/caucuses because of the super-delegates. That meant that she didn’t need to get more than 44% of the available delegates from the primaries and caucuses. That’s an essentially insurmountable lead. Everyone who was paying attention knew this. Under the circumstances, Sanders’ quest was Quixotic at best. Who knows what he would have accomplished had the playing field been level from the start (in delegates, at least)?
Sanders got a higher percentage of delegates that he got of votes, that means the system worked in his favor.
And the candidate with the most popular support won the nomination anyway - in spite of the loser’s personality-driven supporters’ whining that continues to this day.
Thanks for helping elect Trump, guys. :rolleyes:
How do you figure that? Sanders got 43% of the popular vote and 39% of the delegates.
If you don’t count the Superdelegates, Bernie got 43% of the popular vote and 44% of the delegates. But why would you not count the superdelegates? Are they not part of the “the system”?
But we were just talking about her campaigning ability.
What I personally rejected before election night was this nonsense of “They [Trump and Clinton] are just as bad as each other”! Or any suggestion of her dishonesty being within the same order of magnitude as Trump’s.
But of course she’s a terrible campaigner, with anti-charisma. And that’s why I had a bad feeling from day 1 when it looked like no-one credible was standing against her (Bernie, at that time, did not look like a credible alternative).
And the election itself played out exactly like the Kingsmoot on GOT; the capable, diligent candidate lost to the more charismatic swinging dick. Not for the first time, and not for the last.
A Kingsmoot for President would be pretty entertaining.
I think it’s unknowable really. The amount of variables over time make me believe that there were plausible changes in the mechanics of how things played out sufficient the outcome could have been changed.
That is what happened.
The only difference is we didn’t get to drown Trump.
I hope you’re not holding your breath waiting for a coherent response.
“So few”. Last I checked 11 of the 23 states Sanders won were Caucuses.
That is roughly half of his victories, several of which had vanity mail in primaries afterwards which actually which had larger turnouts and those voters went for Clinton. There’s little reason to assume that he’d have won them had they been primaries.
Really? The Super-delegates didn’t need to vote. They don’t vote until the convention and aren’t bound to anyone.
Had Sanders actually won more pledged delegates prior to the Convention there’s no reason to think the Super Delegates would decide to throw the election to Sanders. They didn’t do so in 2008 when Obama won more pledged delegates than Clinton did and that would have caused a rebellion in the Party that they’d know Trump would capitalize on.
That’s a good point. Superdelegates like Bill Clinton and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz were totally up for grabs!
The whole point of Superdelegates is to provide a check on the popular vote. I’m OK with that, and I was a Sanders supporter. As many of us note, the Republicans could have done with more Superdelegates specifically for that reason. The purpose of the national party is to pick electable candidates. Sometimes the party faithful (the majority of folks who vote in primaries) aren’t best at deciding who should run in the general. Picking a party’s candidate needn’t be fully democratic, and that’s a good thing.
Way back when, early in the cycle before we were forced to bear the unbearable and accept the unthinkable, one of my worries for her was that we would arrive into the summer of 2016 with whoever had survived on the GOP side having behind them a whole year of good practice and competition and hard give and take, plus a base that had been properly stirred and whipped up and of whom he had taken the measure, while she would be rusty and flabby from a coronation tour with a large segment of the base going, " we’re with her, I guess – who-*&^%-pee".
Well, at least Bernie forced her to get off her backside and look like she was working for it, but a lot of the Dem based was still unstirred while across the aisle the Insane Clown Melee ended up *really *getting the measure of what was it that got people all het up and rarin’ ta go in 2016.
Exactly.
The only response I expected to my question was to not hear such an absurd claim repeated. I mean, of course they won’t answer it, for rather obvious reasons.
I have to agree with DSYoung’s point #2
I think in a conventional campaign, Clinton would have probably done fine and probably won. But her opponent was Trump, who seemed to throw everyone off and seemed to have nothing stick to him with his supporters. Clinton seemed to get it early on that she had to be careful with Trump, but then seemed flat-footed when trying to respond to the craziness with Trump. It’s also possible that pointing out Trump’s flaws was the wrong move in hindsight when it seemed like the obvious move at the time. Whenever he seemed to wobble and start to fall with a controversy, he somehow got back up, so it seems Clinton could never manage to deal a death blow to him. She had her own problems she had to fight with, including the server investigation, including Comey popping up at the exact wrong time to say he was investigating some more possible emails, plus the various hacked emails and other Russian shenanigans.
I’ve read opinions that perhaps Clinton should have ignored Trump’s crazy outbursts and controversies and just focused on refining her message into easy soundbites. Some thought she came across too much like a strict schoolteacher while Trump was being everybody’s best friend (who it turns out was totally lying and making it up as he went along). She was too conventional for someone like Trump. But the Republican challengers couldn’t figure out Trump either, so it wasn’t just Clinton.
They only had two choices.
Like Mijin I had a really bad feeling about this election from the get go. Both candidates had huge weaknesses and were probably the only potential opponents Trump could beat. Had his opponent been Joe Biden, Tim Kaine, Elizabeth Warren or a ton of other potential candidates they’d have run over Trump.
However this was a unique Presidential election where we had two historically unpopular candidates, both of whom had upside down favorability ratings. Those who found both unfit apparently broke for Trump.
Its getting to be, kinda like, its the Dem’s fault that Trump is President because they offered Hillary. Being unable to bear the heartbreak of psoriasis, America chose skin cancer.