In the 2014 Senate Election in Arkansas, poll showed Republican Tom Cotton ahead of Democrat Mark Pryor by only a singled-digit amount, but on election day Cotton mopped the floor with Pryor by a 17-point margin. Similar things happened in Iowa, Kansas, and some other states: the polls showed a statistical dead heat, but the Republican candidate won in a blow-out.
Good article here on Why Polls Don’t Work. Nevertheless, I am confident that Trump will lose to Hillary in November.
Bah. I mean, yes, caucuses always have issues but then you should know that going in. And the underdogs always do well in them, as Sanders and Obama showed.
All of these are good points. Dudes really have to remember that Caucuses are the least fair and Democratic way of running things- and without them Bernie would have never had a chance. The “System” heavily favored Bernie.
I didn’t think the primaries were stolen until I started seeing reports that the primaries were stolen. This is from election workers in Chicago:
There are so many cases of election fraud in Chicago that when I googled “chicago poll workers election fraud,” Google kept showing me old cases. I changed it to “chicago poll workers election fraud 2016 audit” to find the story.
I guess most media outlets, even the lefty ones, are avoiding this subject. But it really happened.
Also, the New York primary was hinky, with great numbers of registered Democrats being told they weren’t.
“The Story of the Great Brooklyn Voter Purge Keeps Getting Weirder” - Mother Jones
Polling is more pro-Sanders than you’d expect if we’re undersampling cell phones. Why? This rather biased pro-Sanders Reddit link discusses the problem.
A large number of California ballots remain uncounted even today.
Democratic voters are in rebellion, and we’re told there’s nothing to see, move along.
If we can prove fraud, can Hillary, and nominate Bernie, the Democrats still have a chance in the general. But if not, then what are the Dems running on? “We’re too powerful for your vote to count”?! Great, wonderful. That means I can stay home. You seem to think you can win without my vote and the votes of other progressives, so why would I show up?
But can you even steal the general?
All of that added together would likely just give Hillary more votes. *But even if all were for Bernie and multiplied by a thousand, Hillary would still have won. *
There is nothing more pathetic than a sore loser who claims the other guy cheated.
Considering the margins by which Clinton won, I see no evidence of this.
Bernie person says,…“Great, wonderful. That means I can stay home. You seem to think you can win without my vote and the votes of other progressives, so why would I show up?”
This is the shockingly childish attitude of some Sanders people. Never thought I’d see any Sanders people have so little consideration for what’s best for their country.
Regarding the discussion of primaries/caucuses… That last big Tuesday with New Jersey, California and some other states… I recall looking at the vote totals… Several hundred thousand votes or a million or 2 total votes with a great majority going to Clinton. California, several million… and was it Montana? One of those states without people… a caucus state… total votes caucused… about 150. Sanders gets 100, Clinton gets 50. Sanders wins 8 delegates. How undemocratic. And then Sanders cries like an infant about unfairness over Super delegates.
I’ve followed and admired his career since he was a Congressman 20-30 years ago but have lost great respect for that man.
There are some real poor rules in sports. Change them before the season starts.
Just to defend most of the Bernie voters, we should take into account that the extreme Bern ones are a fringe part of the group.
Yes, she can! 
I think that people like you, who are alleging Trumptastic storylines, well ones that make Trump seem relatively rational really, are a lost cause, and fairly few.
No, you do not represent the vote of very many progressives. You represent your own teeny tiny demographic. We can win without you. We will win the support of most progressives and most younger voters. But no not by pandering to the most extreme every desire of the few.
Note that in current polls the circling of the wagons has only barely begun and Clinton is still leading nicely. One expects that as the grief process works through some additional former strong Sanders will end up supporting Clinton or voting against trump, and voting for a Congress that would allow Clinton to implement the progressive plans (even if they are not the exact progressive plans each progressive wants) she has promoted.
You’ll pout instead. Fine. Sit in your corner by yourself throwing your nice little tantrum. The rest of us, inclusive of most progressives as well as old-fashioning liberals and even centrists, have the business of looking out for the best interest of this country and the world to take care of.
[del]It’s a shame to see the Nation go over to the dark side.
We have testimony from primary sources that it* was* rigged. To pretend otherwise is to lie and to insult our intelligence.[/del]
ETA: No, that’s unfair. I really was where they are a little bit ago. But at some point you realize the pattern of behavior. Any one bit of corruption wouldn’t have turned it, but it was multiple state parties all over the country.
Seems to me that The Nation is more reasonable than some Bernie supporters that reach for conspiracy theories.
And as pointed out, the super majority of Bernie voters are also reasonable; Trump needs to be stopped, and while there is some opposition it is Clinton the one that should be supported now.
I mean the reality is this–when someone has bought into the “Hillary stole the election” conspiracy theory, it’s over. It’s like 9/11 trutherism, moon landing hoaxers etc. All the reason and evidence shows that the idea that the primaries were stolen in illegal election fraud by Hillary to be ludicrous, but no amount of evidence can ever convince them. When no amount of evidence can convince someone of something, they’ve crossed over into a matter of faith, and there’s no sense in arguing with those.
Most of which helped Bernie. Clinton won Ca by 60%- uncounted votes would just make it worse. Brooklyn was heavily Hillary.
And it wasn’t “corruption”, it was “irregularities”. Which occur every election and except for Bush vs Gore never make any real difference.
Those irregularities that are impossible to completely stamp out are why an author of an article or book or something that I read said the actual result in Bush v Gore and in Franken’s election should have been a tie. I don’t remember if he advocated flipping a coin or retrying or what, but his main thrust was that it was ridiculous to go through all the ballots looking for errors, when the errors would be overwhelmed by a larger number of errors that led to ballots not even being cast or the person marking the wrong box (like in Florida’s butterfly ballet). At the end of the day, it may be the only thing you can do, but it’s not a particularly statistically rigorous way of deciding an election and there should be some other sort of mechanism in place to deal with the cases when the margin of victory is smaller than the known errors from methodological flaws.
If you have an insurgency against an established candidate, and there is a large undecided bloc right up to the election, historically, the bloc tends to break largely for the insurgent.
Did all the polls predict Obama would win by 11? Which polls are we talking about?
I went to 538’s final post before the 2008 election. According to that post, the nationwide polls had Obama winning by about… seven points. So I’m not sure where your 11 comes from.
Do you have a cite for this? It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s that this statement involves a lot of interpretation which makes it difficult to falsify. Who qualifies as an insurgent, who is “an established candidate”? How large an undecided bloc is “large”?
I mean, Trump probably qualifies as an example of what you’re saying based on what he did in this year’s primaries, but Sanders was clearly an insurgent fighting against a seriously establishment candidate, and he didn’t win the primaries or come particularly close. Were there enough “undecideds” to make the Sanders-Clinton race an exception to the general rule, or are we ruling this example out because the undecided bloc wasn’t large enough?
Thinking about presidential elections in the last half-century or so, Goldwater was surely an insurgent (and didn’t win), George Wallace likewise (and likewise) four years later. George McGovern. maybe? He lost, too. Would we consider Carter an insurgent in 1976? He certainly ran against a Washington-insider incumbent on an anti-Washington platform. Reagan would qualify in 1980 (but John Anderson would qualify even more, and he didn’t win). We’re not considering Bill Clinton an insurgent in '92, are we? (The real insurgent that year was Perot.) I don’t know that we’ve had any race that is truly insurgent vs. established candidate since then. But again, what do we mean when we use these terms?
It just seems very open to interpretation, is all, too easy to rule out examples of elections that broke late toward the establishment candidate by saying that the winner wasn’t *really *establishment or that the loser wasn’t *truly *insurgent or that the undecided bloc wasn’t large *enough *. So, I’d be curious about the source of your statement, if you have it. Thanks in advance.
From the source linked … which admittedly is a wikipedia article. Last number reported 53 to 42. My apologies for trusting wiki, but it did report all the elections with polls and final tallies. Apparently I gave up accuracy for convenience. RCP actually reports the very last poll as Obama + and their rolling average as an amazingly on the money 7.6, within 0.3 of the actual.