What's Bernie's remaining realistic path to the nomination?

Politics & Elections
21

I would quibble with the notion that increased youth turnout necessarily helps Sanders.

This is because I also quibble with the (widely-expressed) notion that Sanders supporters attend his rallies and post support for him on social media and then don’t bother to vote. (I’m sure there are such people but not enough to be a major factor.) I think the people who attend the rallies and post on social media do vote, but these people are a small -though very visible - minority of the population even in that age group, and the vast majority don’t do these things. What’s driving low youth-voter turnout is that the non-rally-attending young people vote at much lower levels than non-rally attending people in older age groups.

IOW, the cohort of young people is more dichotomous than older people in this regard. There are more passionate fervent political junkies and also more apolitical people.

But here’s the thing, as applied to Sanders. Politically passionate young people tend to be drawn to revolutionary ideas, causes, and people. This has been the case throughout history AFAICT. And this is the basis of Sanders’ strong support among this cohort. He’s the guy who is going to remake the system and lead us to a Brave New World utopia. But it doesn’t follow that Sanders has nearly the same level of support among the more politically apathetic young people.

In sum, people are making the assumption that if younger eligible voters voted at the same levels as older voters, that Sanders would receive the same level of support as he does from others in that cohort. But I don’t that assumption is necessarily correct, and it’s likely that among those marginal additional voters his advantage would be significantly smaller if it would exist at all.

22

In fairness, I think most of his vocal supporters probably voted. But most voters aren’t vocal. Most voters don’t even follow politics online. Most voters have FaceBook feeds filled with family photos, cat videos and special interest material. Most voters don’t watch debates or research candidates. Most voters don’t even feel strongly about their candidates.

Among the older set, there are lots of people that vote because they were conditioned from a young age to do so. Because voting is symbolic of the wonderfulness of democracy. It’s your civic duty and if you don’t do it you have no right to complain about your governance. It’s a right that our forefathers fought for and we need to respect their work.

So the older folks dutifully march to the polls every couple of years and click the box next to the least objectionable candidate. They don’t have to love them or even like them. They don’t have to feel that they are going to do something that will personally benefit them. They do it because that’s what we do. They don’t need the promise of a revolution, because they vote to fufill the promises made in that revolution 250 or so years ago.

Maybe that makes them mindless drones, but it gets out the vote. And young people just don’t vote like that. So they lose the numbers game.

23

It did 60 years ago but only for a very limited amount of time :cool:

24

I wouldn’t assume her voting support goes disproportionately to Sanders. In polling support she is pretty equally split under and over 45. But as we’ve seen, in voting behavior the young ones who likely disproportionately prefer Sanders as their second choice are disproportionately less likely to actually vote. The older ones (skewed to college educated white women) OTOH may go to Biden much more and they are coming out to vote.

25

Warren just quit the race

26

Texas just finished assigning all their delegates.

111 - Biden
102 - Sanders

The other 15 went to Bloomberg and Warren.

That is pretty much a tie.

27

My prediction is that the vast majority of Bloomberg voters will go to Biden. Sanders, at best, might get about half of the Warren voters. I think it’s more likely that Warren’s supporters will split evenly between Sanders and Biden.

In terms of the map, I think it also favors Biden. There are still several southern states where he is heavily favored, including the big ones of Florida and Georgia. Bernie may very well win out west, but those are small states like Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Washington and Oregon are somewhat larger but won’t outweigh Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, etc. So that leaves the Midwest. Sanders would have to win states like Michigan this coming Tuesday as well as Ohio and Illinois, by something like 60/40 or greater in order to have a chance. It’s not impossible, but I think it’s highly unlikely.

My guess is that the odds right now are something like 96/3/1 for Biden, Sanders, and a contested convention respectively.

28

228 delegates left to be assigned from super Tuesday.

Sanders trails Biden by 65 (596 vs 531).

Of the 228, 189 are in states sanders is winning, CA, Co and UT.

23 are in Biden states. AL, MN, NC, TN

3 in MA which was pretty much tied.

13 for democrats abroad, no idea what will happen there.

But yeah, looks like Biden won. There are still southern states that will go Biden and I assume Biden will win the industrial Midwest.

29

Apparently the path does not run through Florida.

30

I guess the 12% who favor Sanders are not Cuban. :slight_smile:

31

It sounds rude, but I would find that awesome

32

Yup. All the delegate rich states are either southern states or rust belt states, states that Biden has a lock on.

Looks like Biden will win an outright majority of delegates. I’m guessing final tally will be about 2000 vs 1500 or so.

33

While I still maintain he aint dead yet, he is indeed circling the drain. Lose Michigan, especially solidly, and there is no path forward.

Next question is how long does he stay in bringing on bigger more desperate attacks against Biden? How nasty do his attacks get?

Unfortunately I am afraid he won’t move to circling the wagons until it is literally the case that Biden has enough pledged delegates of his own to win without winning a single additional one, and maybe not even until they have voted at the convention. And that he will get quite divisive between now and then.

34

I’ve heard that in California it was the mail in ballots that were tallied first, many of which were sent before Biden’s resurgence after South Carolina. So the remaining delegates may not tilt as heavily to Sanders as the ones that have been counted so far.

35

Nitpick: Democrats Abroad voting runs from 3/3 through 3/10, so it’s not really a Super Tuesday primary.

36

I’ll go with the “Bernie gets the nom if Biden dies” trope. The big question is, who will Biden’s veep pick be?

37

There are two demographic facts about Michigan which would seem to make it a tougher challenge for Sanders:

  1. I heard repeatedly on Super Tuesday that Biden tends to do better among African-Americans, and Sanders tends to do better among Hispanics.

As of the 2010 Census, 14.2% of Michigan residents are African-American (the national number for 2010 was 13%). Meanwhile, only 4.4% of Michigan residents in that census identified as Hispanic (versus 16% nationally).

  1. Michigan is, relatively speaking, an older state. Its median age is 39.8, making it the 14th-oldest state.
38

This is what I think, too.

There was someone in another thread, Dallas Jones, I think. S/he said something to the effect of, it’s not two separate wings of the Democratic party. It’s two parties trying to share the Democratic party’s umbrella. Very different things. I think that is nail-on-the-head stuff, there.

A pundit recently summarized where Bernie is at: It’s hard to lead a party when you’re treating many of its members like they are the enemy.

Bernie’s greatest failing is that he has no real allies in the party. No surrogates to speak of to go out and share his vision for the future. Well, I guess Bill DeBlasio and Michael Moore… but even Elizabeth Warren, the person whom most perceive as being the closest to Sanders ideologically, isn’t endorsing him. I’ll be very surprised if she does.

What Bernie has tried to do over these past 5 years is co-opt the Democratic party for his own vision of the future – much as Trump did to Republicans. That’s fine. He can try. But I’ve said for years that if the Republican party had employed super delegates, there would have been no Trump presidency. This is what super delegates are for: To prevent a hostile takeover of your party by an outlier who doesn’t really share your vision of what you’ve worked to build. Someone doesn’t get to just join your party and say, “Hey! Look at me, I’m a Democrat! Now everyone think in lockstep with meeeee!!” We can see what happened to Republicans with this approach.

Bernie is free to go start his own third party. I hope he does. It’s what he really wants.

Maddow gave him a hard knock last night. She didn’t let him spout his talking points unchallenged. She showed him with actual math how his assertions about how he has “excited the American people” with his ideas are simply wrong. In the end, it was kind of sad. Bernie kept returning to his practiced message, but it really no longer resonates.

He said again and again that he would inspire turnout among “hard-working Americans” by showing them that his way is a better way. All I kept thinking was, how long are we supposed to give you to complete this inspirational work while the country burns to the ground?

Agree particularly that if there is a decisive win by or split with Biden in Michigan, Sanders needs to get out. I doubt he will. As the rest of the party coalesces around Biden, I can only hope they give Biden the magic 1,991 delegates before the convention. The “Democratic establishment” learned from 2016. They know they need a decisive win by a candidate in advance of Milwaukee. We’ll soon find out if Bernie really is all about beating Trump – or something else.

39

Sanders won Washington overwhelmingly in 2016 (73/27), though an interesting thing has changed: 2016 was a caucus, whereas 2020 will be a primary (w/ vote by mail, as all Washington elections are.) It’ll be interesting to see how he does this time around.

(Washington actually held a primary in 2016, too, which didn’t allocate delegates. Don’t ask, it’s too dumb to think about. Clinton actually won that narrowly, though I’m not sure it has any predictive value.)

40

AP is showing 603-538 Joe-Bernie. A gap of 65. So that divide seems to be holding pretty firm even as more votes are tallied.