Your link is utter garbage. The author is a 'street pastor, homeless advocate, film producer, and free lance author?"
Bernie may well win Wisconsin, it’s a very white state with an open primary. New York is a super closed primary, you had to change party last October for registered voters or else register to vote 30 days in advance. A Hillary win is guaranteed, I’m hoping for a landslide and to drive yet another stake into the already hopeless Sanders.
Your not understanding the argument? It’s because it is nonsensical.
The author first takes 538’s immediately before a race predictions and documents that the poll aggregating approach has been less than perfect. And that is true. Running numbers, weighting each state as equally meaningful, throwing in the much larger than expected wins for Sanders in the sparsely polled always hard to call caucus states Idaho, Utah, Alaska, so on, he claims that 538 has a Clinton house effect. He goes through some loops to do that, taking out Arizona where the miss went the other way. But for the sake of discussion accept the premise.
It’s the next step of the argument that is the really crazy part. Takes that alleged house bias on reading the polls, add it to what 538 would say a 50/50 election would look like (not what their read of actual polling is) in each of these states, and you get numbers that are a Sanders path! Woo hoo!
Uh yeah. What?
I could follow the logic if he was saying: 538 polls plus is calling it tied in WI and there is (to his convoluted read) a 5.25% Clinton bias to 538’s polls plus calls, so a 6 point Sanders victory is probable. I’ve personally called a 4 point Sanders win.
But he is instead saying he expects an over 19 point one and considers the polling skews such that he is willing to ask “Sanders needs to win by 16% to meet the rose-colored glass scenario. What if he wins by double that number?”
It makes the GOP the polls are skewed folk look like a model of logical thinking.
The thought of him in the WH must be profoundly terrifying to you.
What’s profoundly terrifying to me is the idea of Sanders being the D nominee who then crashes as badly as McGovern, Mondale, or Dukakis did. Against Trump.
A President Sanders doesn’t scare me. Not my idea of great, but he’d certainly be better than any remotely plausible R.
My problem is when the propaganda wars are going full blast and the attack PACs pitch November as a choice between the Businessman Great Patriot versus the Effete Greeny Communist, the Effete Greeny Communist will lose every time. By 40+ states.
That is what a Sanders nomination gives the US. And I *really *don’t want that.
Due to how “hard closed” the New York primary is recent polling there will probably over-state Sander’s chance of winning. We saw a similar effect in Florida, the final polling suggested it was going to be a lot closer than it ended up being. I think that’s because pollsters aren’t able to properly measure “general sentiment” going into the primary versus who is actually properly registered to vote. I think sentiment among people who want to vote in the Democratic primary on 4/16 is getting closer between Hillary and Bernie. But a lot of those people who want to vote in it never thought about it until Bernie got big in the last few months and have missed the registration deadline.
Huh?
Really a freakishly odd post.
Speaking for myself, I see virtually zero chance of Sanders becoming the nominee, but a fairly reasonable chance that he can damage her for the general. The potential for the latter concerns me.
The prospect of a GOP president, especially with a GOP Congress terrifies me profoundly.
The polls at this point are based on “likely voters” the subset of registered voters considered most likely to actually vote. Those screens may be off but why do you believe they are?
Not to speak for Martin, but “likely voters” I suspect are just people who THINK they’re eligible to vote, the pollster doesn’t check their party registration date. I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of people intend to vote until they find out they can’t.
Whatever that is, it ain’t garbage.
Right, I came in to say this.
Nearly all the primaries so far have been open or at least semi-open, and there has been a lot of press about independent voters going to the polls to vote for Sanders. (This was apparently part of what led to the long lines in AZ–people who believed they were entitled to vote even though they weren’t.)
It is easy to imagine people in NYS hearing all this stuff and assuming they are eligible to vote in the Democratic primary, just as non-Democrats have voted (or are about to vote) in places like Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. “Hey, I’m registered, doesn’t matter if I’m an independent! I’m gonna vote!” Some may even think they can do what a few states allow–register right there on the spot. “I’m not registered, but that’s okay–I’ll register when I get to the polls.”
Of course, I have no idea whether the poll samples include a bunch of folks who are thinking this way and will be sorely disappointed on Election Day, but it’s easy to imagine. If so, the polling data may very well overstate Sanders’s support, as apparently happened in both AZ and FL (two of the three closed primaries to date; the other was LA, which Clinton won convincingly but I’m not sure what the polling showed). We shall see.
Thank you all for explaining why the “likely voter” screen might be off. I must admit I am surprised that the pollsters do not ask the questions required to have a reliable screen but a poor LV screen seemed to be the cause of the MI error too.
Brian the article was indeed complete garbage, and that is being very generous. And the qualifications are not exactly the ones that inspire confidence that the author understands the statistics better than the 538 crew does.
It is a bit troubling how people cling so tightly to these cherished memes like McGovernoia. McGovern lost because the economy felt stable at the time, as did Mondale, Dukakis, Dole, Kerry and Willard. Thomas E. Dewey did not lose because of his mustache, but the curse persists in the minds of the pols.
The perceived economic trajectory determines elections, not how far a candidate is to one side. We were all pretty liberal in 1980, compared to where we all seem to be today: Reagan was off the end of the map to the right in those days, but the economy sucked and did not appear to be improving, so he took the election. That is the only reason Reagan won, not because people are more conservative in general.
Yes. The pols and the established pundits have been increasingly clueless about how much the lower classes are suffering. They weren’t expecting Trump or Sanders to make this much of an impact, and now they are scrambling to minimize the damage.
And now that it has become increasingly likely that Trump will not be the GOP nominee, the Democrats are getting nervous. HRC is a flawed candidate, and that has nothing to do with Sanders. In Sunday’s NY Times,this article points out that Sanders could have hit her harder, earlier, and made even more headway. And this is acknowledged by Clinton supporter, Bob Kerrey:
Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1992 and who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton in the current race, said Mr. Sanders might be winning now if he had relentlessly pressured Mrs. Clinton since last fall over her closed-door speeches to Wall Street banks, her role in the finances of Clinton Foundation programs, and other vulnerabilities. Mr. Sanders did not raise the paid-speech issue, after long resistance, until late January.
“Making the transcripts of the Goldman speeches public would have been devastating” to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Kerrey said. “When the G.O.P. gets done telling the Clinton Global Initiative fund-raising and expense story, Bernie supporters will wonder why he didn’t do the same.”
Kerrey even disagrees with Sander’s decision to not go after HRC re the email scandal:
“The email story is not about emails,” Mr. Kerrey said. “It is about wanting to avoid the reach of citizens using FOIA” — the Freedom of Information Act — “to find out what their government is doing, and then not telling the truth about why she did.”
For a supporter to go on the record with stuff like this, when the nomination is almost certainly in the bag???
I got to chat with Kerrey for several minutes one on one a few years back. Interesting, very smart guy, but a bit of a maverick. Still, that is going way off the reservation.
Interesting article. Looks like we dodged a bullet!
As always hindsight is 20/20. In this case though it is even less than that, it’s just saying that Sanders being a conventional candidate doing things in a conventional way would have worked better for him. Maybe. Maybe not.
Part of what made Sanders’ appeal was that initial “let’s talk about the issues” approach. If he had gone the conventional attack dog approach right off he may have made some more headway, true. Or he could have come off badly indeed and opened up the spigots of attacks against him, which he has still never experienced full campaign national campaign mode of, and very highly likely never will.
By the time he went more fully in on the negative campaigning mode it was really too late for Team Clinton to punch back. The nomination was already fairly assured and the risk of causing more divisiveness by attacking back in kind has reasonably been judged greater than the potential benefit.
But from the punditry POV? Sure that was said by various experts from the moment he said “I’m sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails!” Kerrey is not sharing any brilliant insight here, just parroting the established conventional wisdom for politics of all time: going negative and damaging the competition as best you can often works.
Really? Who knew?
As a Democrat single I have no worries about who the candidate is for the other side. The process on their side is assured to make pivoting to unity impossible and Cruz will lose as well as Trump.
And this way, even in the likely event that he loses the nomination, he’s still talked about the issues, which was the primary goal all along.
An advantage, to Democrats, of Cruz possibly getting the nomination, is that when your wife is on a leave of absence from Goldman Sachs, as is Heidi, it doesn’t work to accuse your opponent of having given a friendly speech at one of their events.
As they all are.
Hillary’s biggest flaw is that she entered the public eye, for the average voter, through her husband. Talk about starting out, as a politician, on third base!
But in terms of elect-ability, she probably benefits from said flaw, because of the good US economy during her husband’s presidency.
“Dodged a bullet” is a bit extreme. I doubt Kerrey even came close to winning one primary. Nebraska is a bit late in the cycle, I think he was probably already dead in the water long before that one came around.
I meant we Hillary partisans dodged a Bernie bullet. 
No shit.
Cruz: When will you release the transcripts?
Clinton: Didn’t your wife take notes?
Spouses off limits.