I think we’ll know before then, I think we largely already know now. Hillary would need to suffer an historic collapse to lose. It certainly bodes well for Sanders that he won by huge margins in the “small Western caucus states” last night, but that largely just mirrors what Obama did in 2008, he did great in those states as well. But he also won the South, something Sanders did not do. Obama wouldn’t have beaten Hillary if he had lost the South and was relying on huge wins in California and etc.
Winning such a lopsided victory is very difficult for Sanders outside of small, ultra-white, caucus states. Washington will be an interesting test this weekend because it’s a larger caucus state. Sanders will likely win, but I ran some numbers in another thread where he could win 74% of the vote there and 80% in Oregon, 65% in Pennsylvania and 55% in Wisconsin (and win most of the other primaries between now and the end) and he still comes up short of 2026.
Arizona and Nevada are probably the best demographic/geographic predictors of California, and both suggest California will lean slightly Clinton.
And her lead will only increase as the bandwagon effect intensifies. The less-diehard Sanders supporters will come to see it to be better to support the party’s nominee than to distract or damage her. It happens every time; it’s human nature to want to get on board with a winner.
The usual mistake is to confuse how enthusiastic a support group is with how big it is. This is especially easy to do on social media where one person gets a lot more than one opportunity to make supporting posts. Unlike in voting where it’s one per person. Period.
Sanders supporters are definitely fired up. Which leads to lots of noise in the press and social media. Which leads them to assume they have lots more silent supporters out there.
The evidence to date shows the truth to be generally otherwise.
Agreed that Clinton is not the D’s dream candidate for this election or indeed any election. But at the same time, the only thing Sanders is accomplishing now is ensuring some ongoing media coverage of the D nominating process.
Here is what I think. If Sanders catches her, and passes her, it won’t be by enough votes to override the Supers. If the Supers vote for Sanders, it may be seen by the African American community as a disenfranchisement of them - they have overwhelmingly gone for Clinton. There is the smaller chance it will be seen as a disenfranchisement of Hispanics/Latinos and middle aged and older women as well. I don’t see the party elite doing this - they recognize their future is tied up in diversity. The Supers were put in place so that if things got close, they could make a choice that was best for the party.
I don’t see that as a desperate thought, I’d perfer Clinton as President over Sanders - I’m a political pragmatist and so is Clinton, but I’d happily vote for Sanders - I see that as the probable political reality.
There’s no recent polling. I assume you are looking at the Real Clear Politics page. Your number is the average of a poll from last Sept and a poll from the beginning of January.
Something I noticed during CNN’s coverage: they showed a group of what looked to be college-age people waiting in line to get into their caucus in Idaho, and, when asked who they supported, all said Sanders - but has anybody bothered to ask these people, “Why?” Is it more than “free public education and pretty much free health care”?
As of 1 PM Eastern on Wednesday, CNN has 62 for Sanders, 55 for Clinton, and 14 still to be determined (9 in Utah, and 5 in Arizona).
Of course, in caucus states, it’s hard to tell how many delegates somebody has until they actually vote at the convention, but with only two candidates, it’s fairly safe to assume that the percentage breakdown at the lowest level will be close to how the delegates break down at both the district and statewide levels.
Yeah, and the breakdown of their supporters I think affects how loud/noticeable those supporters will be. Unfortunately the census doesn’t have data with as much granularity as I’d desire, but under-18 year olds represents about 24% of the population. Now, none of them can vote in Presidential elections (a few of them can vote in primaries if they are 17 and will be 18 by November, but it varies by state), but I know that a lot of Bernie’s supporters on the Bernie subreddit are actually teenagers who cannot vote at all. So right there you have a group of people who are very noisy/loud in social media but who have no say at all on this election.
Then 18-24 represents 9.9% of the population.
25-44 represents about 26.6% of the population.
45-64 is 26.4% of the population.
65+ is 13% of the population.
Now these groupings aren’t as useful as they could be. We know Bernie dominates in the entire 18-24 band. But in the 25-44 band we know that at least from exit polling Hillary is winning at least some of those years at the older end of that band, and then she wins in the 45-64 and 65+ band as well.
But importantly, 65+ is 13% of the population, without even checking I know they are more than 13% of the voters, because old people vote in extremely high numbers. Far more often and reliably than young people. Even young people enthused about Bernie Sanders. So there’s a large base of people 65+ who may not go to rallies, probably do not tweet, reddit, or spam facebook with Hillary posts, but they vote–every damn time.
The 45-64 group is a little more varied, as there’s certainly at least some decent social media penetration among these groups, especially on the most mainstream social media like facebook. But they probably have a much lower rate of participation in online discussions like reddit. Their attendance at rallies is probably higher than senior citizens who sometimes prefer to stay at home for various reasons, but it’s probably lower than 18-24 year olds who are less likely to be juggling a full time job, a family, kid’s soccer practice/karate lessons and etc. But there are a lot of voters in that 45-64 group, and while they may not be as loud as people who are say, 16-34ish, what really matters in an election is do they vote or not.
I don’t know the specifics too much. Obviously in caucus states it’d be the fault of local party people if there was some voting problem. If it is in a primary state then the state runs the election, but I don’t think that a Republican Secretary of State has any real motivation to not allow Democrats to vote in their primary.
I think the lion’s share of election day problems in the primary have related to polling places just not having enough workers, enough open machines to process people quickly in the machine voting states. In the paper ballot states not enough ballots have been printed in advance. In some caucus states that require you to fill out paper ballots not enough of those were ready either. The turn out in the Democratic campaign has generally been a little lower than in 2008, but still somewhat high. It’s easy for simple lack of preparedness to be at play here, especially because a lot of the mechanics of the election process are facilitated by volunteers in many states who receive a single training session that lasts a few hours.
I don’t know much about the site, other than that many of its commenters are highly enthusiastic about Sanders and equally highly conspiracy-minded*, but the article itself is pretty hard to take seriously. Among other things, the author seems unaware that AZ has a closed primary. Much as independents might like to be able to vote in AZ primaries, they can’t. It isn’t voter suppression to make them cast provisional ballots, nor is it some kind of evil anti-Sanders stratagem as the article implies.
And lots and lots of independents showing up at the polls when they can’t vote (and then arguing about it) is going to slow things down considerably.
Which doesn’t mean there aren’t issues. If you lower the number of polling places you should expect a problem…
*Sample comment on the site: “What a freakin joke. Gimme a break. Voters will get provisional ballots but they won’t count? WTF? ABSOLUTELY UN-AMERICAN ARIZONA!! Do any if us really want a candidate or president who is willing to win by participating in these kinds of rotten, underhanded tactics? Just what the hell are the Clinton ’ s and the Donald so damned afraid of…THE TRUTH AND THE BERN ME THINKS!!!”
Umm. Actually no, not unless the numbers from 538 are wrong. Before last night he needed to average over 58% of all delegates to bring it to a pledged delegate tie. They list totals as Sanders 74 and Clinton 57, which is a very respectable 56.5% but doing that all the way would still have him coming up short. He needs to do better than that all the way from here, inclusive of large states that are not so demographically favorable for him. (By demographics he should have won Arizona too.) And of course NY where the little recent polling there is places him down an average of 34 points.
No question that his performances in Idaho and Utah were impressive. Still end of day he did exactly where 538 had placed the 50/50 metric at, no worse but no better. Since he’s been doing much worse than that that is something, anyway. Good job!
California is proportional, but it also is a Congressional-district-specific vote. You win delegates based on how you do in each district. You could win huge in one district and lose in every other district and only get the one district’s total vote. Though it is also proportional. It’s very complicated.
For the Democrats all the States are the same, there are district delegates awarded proportionally based on the vote in that district and statewide delegates awarded proportionally based on the vote statewide.
The purported issue in Arizona is not “independents are not being allowed to vote in the closed primary”. It’s “registered Democrats are not being allowed to vote, because the records incorrectly list them as independents”. Is that true? I dunno, but if it is, it does point to a real issue.
That would be true, but I wouldn’t rule out “user error.” It wouldn’t surprise me at all if someone didn’t know how they were registered because if they had never bothered to vote in a primary before then if they had accidentally registered with the wrong party, or never bothered to update their registration, they’d have no reason to even think about it.
As I said above, if any voter’s party registration was changed without their knowledge or consent it’s a big problem and needs to be addressed.
I’m not sure if that’s what’s actually going on, though, at least on a significant scale. From the cites that I posted before, it does seem that there has been a lot of confusion regarding the fact that independents are not allowed to vote in a closed primary like Arizona’s. People who don’t know that; people who do know but don’t want to hear it.
For instance, from http://gazette.com/the-latest-arizona-independents-confused-about-voting-rules/article/feed/328814: “Election officials in Coconino County handed out more than 100 provisional ballots at a polling site to people who insist they are able to vote in Tuesday’s presidential primary despite not being registered as Democrat or Republican. County recorder Patty Hansen says poll workers have been telling those people the votes won’t count. She says students at Northern Arizona University who aren’t registered to vote in Coconino County also have been demanding ballots.”
And issues with the online system (aka “user error,” though for all I know the process is way more complex than it needs to be) seem to have been an issue as well: “Elections Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Bartholomew says Democrats passed on concerns and acknowledged the problem may be with voters who update their information on the Service Arizona website. She says voters who go in to update their addresses apparently didn’t complete the form and choose a political party, defaulting to independent. Bartholomew says of about 20 voter registrations they have actually checked, all were registered as independent.”
So for now, anyway, I’ll reserve judgment on whether lots of people had their registrations changed.
Yes, few polling places and looooong lines are ridiculous.