That’s not what **adaher **said.
They can lose independents and win, they can’t lose by double digits.
Obama lost them by 5:
Kerry actually won the independent vote by 1 point:
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
Clinton won independents by 6 points in 1992:
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how-groups-voted-1992/
Democrats losing independents by double digits would be like Republicans losing both Ohio and Florida. There’s just no path to victory with only Democratic voters.
538 gives Johnson a 4.4% chance of carrying at least one State, but I’m not sure how they figure that or which States they think he might have a chance in. In explaining the model, he uses New Mexico as an example, presumably one of Johnson’s best States, but it looks like he gives him only about a 0.1% chance of getting 30% of the vote there, which seems like it would be about the bare minimum possible to squeak by with a plurality.
They also estimate that Clinton’s lead over Trump would be about 1% larger if there were no third party candidates. Interestingly, it appears that Johnson is actually taking more voters from Clinton than from Trump.
Wow. What do you think about the people who actually plan to, you know, vote for Trump? Would they bear any responsibility for his election? How about the people who voted for Clinton in the primaries, despite all the polling data showing that Sanders would have been a much stronger candidate in the general election? How much blame would they come in for?
I certainly agree with you that everyone should vote for Clinton, but it’s silly to suggest that any particular faction of non-Clinton voters will be solely to blame if she loses. And I’m not sure how calling people jerkoffs and idiots is supposed to encourage them to come over to your side.
It’s important to remember that, in a typical election, about 10% of each party’s primary voters wind up not voting for their party’s candidate in the general election. In each of Obama’s elections, he got fewer Republican votes than his opponent got Democratic votes. So, if 25% of Bernie’s voters don’t support Hillary…I won’t say it’s not a problem, but it’s a problem of the sort that every successful candidate manages to overcome.
Current polls show about 70% of Bern victims are supporting HRC, but only about 7% are supporting Trump; both Stein and Johnson are drawing more Bernie voters than Trump is. So, setting the third party vote aside, about 90% of meaningful votes cast by Sanderistas will go to Clinton. I don’t have comparison data from past elections, but it seems like that has to be higher than average, since most elections don’t have such a large third party presence.
All this outrage about “Bernie or Bust” voters seems to be about Clinton supporters proactively looking to blame their hypothetical defeat on someone other than themselves and their incredibly unpopular candidate.
I will vote for Clinton, and if she loses, my message to her primary supporters will be “I don’t want to say I told you so…SO I’LL SHOUT IT THROUGH THIS MEGAPHONE INSTEAD”!
I would be for Clinton if I didn’t have Gary Johnson to vote for. I wouldn’t vote for an unqualified libertarian like the ones that usually end up being nominated.
Just curious: why not? The point of voting for a third party candidate is to register a protest. It seems like the candidate’s actual qualifications for an office he/she has no chance of winning should be beside the point.
I always vote as if the candidate can win. Certainly a pair of two term governors deserve to be taken seriously and the early polling gives them a crack at 15%, which could get them into the debates, and then who knows? We’ve never had candidates this unpopular before.
The unpopularity of the candidates isn’t the issue. The issue is that Hillary would be a competent president and Trump would be a reckless and almost inestimably dangerous one. That’s the choice. There is no other. It may be unfortunate that the US is a de facto two-party system, but it is. Giving Johnson your vote based on principle is like worrying about the fair distribution of party favors at a birthday party while behind you the house is burning down. You’re helping Trump win if you don’t address the real choice instead of the pretend one.
Think of it this way. I normally vote Republican. This time I’m not. I’m not a lost Clinton vote, I’m a lost Trump vote, so that’s a good thing.
Hillary’s unfavorables can’t go any lower, they said. She’s been vetted and tested for decades, they said.
It’s the 2000 election all over again. The Dems are nominating a candidate hated by the left, the GOP puts up a buffoon who liberals think has no chance, the Democratic establishment is getting increasingly nervous as their candidate can’t break away, and liberals are asking what’s wrong with the country’s electorate and threatening to move to Canada. The final confirmation will be if Hillary has some innocuous “gaffe” that pales in comparison to anything Trump does but it’s repeated a million times. Like Al Gore’s sigh. Probably raising her voice or rolling her eyes or something like that.
Bernie will play the part of the Nader scapegoat.
Hollywood isn’t the only one churning out stale remakes.
Issues aside, it’s amazing how bad the last several Democratic presidential candidates have been at actual politics. Gore, Kerry, Hillary - terrible. Obama was the only one with a clue.
So true. Hillary could make a gaffe so insignificant that if Trump had done it, it wouldn’t even be noticed, and the GOP spin machine with the assistance of Fox News will build it up into a national scandal of election-changing proportions.
And this is partly because Trump is insulated by the low expectations of being an “outsider” with an offensive boorishness that everyone has somehow inexplicably discounted, and Hillary is expected to be perfect. Trump could spew vitriolic hatred against Muslims, Latinos, and blacks and be adored for it; Hillary could lose the election because of her cackling laugh.
You say you’re not voting Trump, but you are spending a lot of time and effort trying to convince people not to vote Clinton.
That’s not a “good thing”.
Hillary isn’t helping herself by proudly announcing she is making Debbie Wasserman Shultz an honorary chairman. Its as if she has decided she doesn’t want or need the Bernie voters.
She doesn’t want or need the Bernie voters who are so mind-bogglingly stupid that this would make or break their voting for her.
Luckily, there are not as many such fools as some fear.
It is true that this act, in itself, does not help her. But I assume it’s part of a deal in which DWS resigns the DNC and does not speak at the convention–and those things do help her.
Overall, DWS is being dramatically marginalized, for good reason.
The end of May and most of June were horrible months for Trump, but Manafort started imposing his will on the campaign and he has been stronger since. It would seem that Trump may have already hit rock bottom and survived it, although the Trump University lawsuit could pop back up in the news from time to time.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is going through her worst turbulence of her campaign cycle. If last night is any indication, she will probably survive it, but like Trump, she will emerge with some scarring. And it’s now obvious that Julian Assange and the Russians have dirt on Hillary and don’t want her to win – so there’s that.
I think the race will finally begin in earnest after the convention closes on Thursday. I suspect Clinton will get a post-convention bump, though like Trump’s spike it probably won’t be would it ought to be and it will be short lived.
As much as I hate to say it, I’d have to agree with Michael Moore: Trump probably has the edge going forward. To have campaigned this badly, to have been this flawed, without hardly any fundraising until just a few weeks ago, and to be virtually tied with Hillary Clinton, with her mega-millions war chest…is a bad, bad sign.
I also think that the nation is in one of those moods in which they’re tired of incumbency. The democratic party is the incumbent party, and Hillary is in essence an incumbent candidate despite never having been president. And frankly, the nation is just plain ignorant as hell, which always favors conservatives.
This is the problem with inevitable nominees and their coronations.
This is the part that continues to baffle me.
It’s not the media giving Trump a break. His idiocy has been, and continues to be, reported in all its richness. But his supporters are unmoved.
What would Trump have to do to get people to actually think about his actions, his so-called proposals? Kick a puppy on live TV? People would say that this is how puppies need to be trained.
It’s like I have stepped into a bizarre alternate universe. I oppose Clinton on so many policy levels, but she has a basic understanding of government and foreign policy. You may not endorse every decision she made as Secretary of State, BUT SHE SERVED AS SECRETARY OF STATE! She served in the US Senate!
How is this even a debate?
Exactly what I figured, too. A deal. She gives her a largely ceremonial spot to ensure she steps down gracefully. Would have been better if she’d negotiated to do it more quietly, but that’s about all that bothers me.
Though it probably helps that I was a Sanders supporter who didn’t care at all about the actual email revelations. Rigging means making the votes work differently or changing how the debates work or something. I expect everyone to fight for the candidate they support more, as long as they don’t use their power to cheat.
Well, now we’re getting into the interesting part of the discussion, which perhaps merits its own thread.
What I think we’re seeing here is a phenomenon which has always generally been true, which is that people vote based on emotions, not logic. I think people are generally convinced that they vote based on logic, but in fact, for the most part, they do not; they vote on emotion and then retro-fit logical arguments to suit their emotional decision.
Again, I am an outsider to your election, but of course can cite examples not only from American politics but Canadian politics as well; in my direct experience a person’s choice in the last Canadian general election was usually based on an emotional decision and then facts were selectively applied - often in a factually erroneous way, or exaggerated or downplayed - to suit that decision. I believe this has always been the case.
To use past U.S. election results, what do you think impacted the voters more; Barack Obama’s policy positions as different from John McCain’s, or “Hope And Change” and the contrast between his ticket and McCain’s? What helped destroy Barry Goldwater more; a policy argument, or “In your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts”? The Reagan-Carter election of 1980 quite clearly came down to feelings; are you better off than you were four years ago? That is a subjective question, a feeling. It’s not a matter of policy. Note that I have used both GOP and Democratic winners.
Donald Trump, as many people smarter than I have pointed out, simply avoids serious discussion of policy entirely, and concentrating wholly on feelings. He tells his supporters that things are bad, and dangerous, and scary. He will fix them, and make them feel safer and richer. Trump is aware that feelings beat facts; he’s doing what all successful candidates do, but is taking it to an extreme level never before seen by a candidate with the chance to win.
Historically, of course, a politician had to at least display the veneer of policy position and sophistication and civilized behavior or else that would itself evoke feelings that would destroy him. The expectation of the votes was that the candidate would behave in a statesmanlike fashion; that he would look more like Dwight Eisenhower or Jimmy Carter than he would like a used car salesman. That image in itself evoked emotions; a candidate who failed to seem Presidential would evoke strong negative feelings which would destroy him, so you had things like poor Michael Dukakis looking silly in a tank helmet, and that actually affected the polls. Edward Muskie appearing to cry on TV in 1972 sank his candidacy.
Had - to use a huge winner - Ronald Reagan said the horrible things in 1980 that Donald Trump said in 2016, his candidacy would have been absolutely smashed to pieces; the public’s feelings about him would have been that he was a repellent asshole. No debate on policy would have saved him. So why, then, is it that Donald Trump in 2016 CAN say such things, and yet people are willing to vote for him?
That question is very difficult to answer, not because I don’t have any ideas as to why but because I have too many. The political conversation has changed. It has become more polarized, more vicious, and technology has flattened the shape of media influence. The economy has changed, and economic expectations are far different from what they used to be. The nature of celebrity and what is considered acceptable behavior in a famous person has changed, and is applied differently depending on one’s position and perspective. Any one of these ideas or a dozen more could be discussed at great length.