2016 elections - because it's never too early

[alfred russel]

Trump is now bringing up Vince Foster. He really should pick Newt Gingrich as a running mate--Newt can help him dredge up all the 90s "scandals". It worked so well back then, I'm sure it is a winning strategy now.

[CountDeMoney]

I think he's going to go with Sarah Palin.  Please God, let him go with Sarah Palin.

[Tonitrus]

I think he's going to go with Sarah Palin.  Please God, let him go with Sarah Palin.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tVrnVJBRynQ

[celedhring]

Sanders was interviewed yesterday by a Spanish newspaper. He outlined his path to the nomination, and certainly reasserted he's there to win it.

1) Make the case to superdelegates in states he won, that they should follow the will of the voters and support him in the convention (he didn't go into details, but if we go with proportional allocation of superdelegates, I guess that doesn't help him much, and hasn't Clinton won more states?)
2) Win big in California.
3) Make the case to Clinton-pledged delegates that he has a much better chance of beating Trump, because of the polls.

Those are some really thin straws he's grasping, I'd be much happier if he just plainly said he's just there to make the case for his policies in the convention. That "path" sounds very dishonest.

[garbon]

1) Make the case to superdelegates in states he won, that they should follow the will of the voters and support him in the convention (he didn't go into details, but if we go with proportional allocation of superdelegates, I guess that doesn't help him much, and hasn't Clinton won more states?)

Yes, he has been mocked from early on when he started making that appeal as he would also need superdelegates in states he lost to change over and go for him. Sort of conflicts with his message of superdelegates being undemocractic.

[Martinus]

Superdelegates are like the jury vote in Eurovision - no matter what they do some people will be pissed off.

[CountDeMoney]

Clinton has 2.9 million more votes than Sanders.  There's your will of the voters right there.

[garbon]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/conventional-wisdom-sanders-refuses-to-play-nice/

Sanders Refuses To Play Nice

The Democrats. Remember them? You've not read much about the blue donkeys in this space, given the Republican Party's particular devotion to political acrobatics this year. But it's high time the high drama of Sanders v. Clinton gets its due.

One might guess that Bernie Sanders has done a lot of reading of Dylan Thomas — he will not go gentle into the good night. Instead, he's spent a lot of time of late telling the Democratic Party's leadership to go to hell.

Take this past weekend. In a television interview, Sanders said he would support the primary challenger to Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who represents a House district near Miami. "Clearly I favor her opponent," Sanders said on CNN. "His views are much closer to mine."

The reason for the shade? The Sanders campaign has long felt that the DNC favored Hillary Clinton and has publicly aired many grievances, including complaints over the scheduling of debates on weekends. But the acrimony has increased of late.

At the beginning of this month, Sanders wrote a letter to Wasserman Schultz, complaining that only three of the 45 people he had submitted for consideration to serve on Democratic National Convention committees had been selected. He noted, in particular, that none of his supporters would be serving on the Rules Committee, a crucial group at the convention, and was blunt about his plans should the national committee not cede any ground: "If the process is set up to produce an unfair, one-sided result, we are prepared to mobilize our delegates to force as many votes as necessary to amend the platform and rules on the floor of the convention."

One of the biggest tiffs with the party — actually, more like a tussle — came at Nevada's state convention on May 14, when Sanders supporters disrupted the proceedings and then threatened the state chairwoman. The Sanders campaign came under fire from Democratic leaders after it condemned violence and harassment but went on to challenge the integrity of the convention.

Reports have suggested that Sanders's campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, has more than a little to do with the pitched rhetoric the campaign has been slinging. The New York Times reported that this has some inside the campaign worried that Sanders could be hurting the party going into the general election: Weaver's most recent job, after retiring from Sanders's Senate office, was running a comic book store, not working within the party's Washington network, and his outsider status has some worried that party unity isn't a priority for Weaver as the general election nears. The Times also noted that several people had "described the campaign's message as having devolved into a near-obsession with perceived conspiracies on the part of Mrs. Clinton's allies."

But writing at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall said it wasn't Weaver who was driving the campaign's more aggressive tone, it was Sanders himself: "What I understand from knowledgeable sources is that in the last few weeks anyone who was trying to rein it in has basically stopped trying and just decided to let Bernie be Bernie."

[derspiess]

Sending Bernie some money and a note of encouragement

[Valmy]

Sending Bernie some money and a note of encouragement

Is the rise of the far left a joyous occasion for you? They might actually take over your state at some point.

[Legbiter]

Trump is now bringing up Vince Foster. He really should pick Newt Gingrich as a running mate--Newt can help him dredge up all the 90s "scandals". It worked so well back then, I'm sure it is a winning strategy now.

He's methodically baiting her with these lovingly-crafted persuasion harpoons into his prepared killzone. 

Also, there goes Clinton's plan A. 

Report: Hillary Dropped Gender Talk After Negative Internal Polling


Hillary Clinton stopped referring to herself as the potential "youngest woman president" during campaign stump speeches after polling showed that it was not helping with voters and donors.

The decision to scrub her speeches of the gender reference — which was reported by the Associated Press — highlights the longstanding critique of the former first lady and her husband Bill that they rely heavily on results from political polls and focus groups before making the slightest political decision.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton reportedly poll tested family vacation spots.

Clinton dropped the reference after Emily's List, a group that supports pro-abortion Democratic women and is backing Hillary, provided the campaign with a report showing that it did not help the former secretary of state.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/23/report-hillary-dropped-gender-talk-after-negative-internal-polling

[Berkut]

Sending Bernie some money and a note of encouragement

Is the rise of the far left a joyous occasion for you? They might actually take over your state at some point.

You thinks Sanders is "far left"?

[CountDeMoney]

American voters hate people who pee sitting down, film at 11.

[garbon]

Sending Bernie some money and a note of encouragement

Is the rise of the far left a joyous occasion for you? They might actually take over your state at some point.

Actually NYT had this to say yesterday:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opinion/campaign-stops/do-sanders-supporters-favor-his-policies.html?src=me&_r=1

Do Sanders Supporters Favor His Policies?

Bernie Sanders is widely credited with pulling Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to the left on major issues like health care, trade, financial regulation and the minimum wage. Now he says he will battle all the way to the convention on behalf of "people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change." But the premise animating that battle — that Mr. Sanders's surprising success in the primary race is because of his liberal policy positions — may be familiar and comforting, but it is greatly exaggerated.

The notion that elections are decided by voters' carefully weighing competing candidates' stands on major issues reflects a strong faith in American political culture that citizens can control their government from the voting booth. We call it the "folk theory" of democracy.

When candidates surpass expectations, observers caught up in the folk theory believe that they have tapped some newly potent political issue or ideology. Thus, many analysts have argued that Mr. Sanders's surprising support signals a momentous shift to the left among Democrats.

But wishing does not make it so. Decades of social-scientific evidence show that voting behavior is primarily a product of inherited partisan loyalties, social identities and symbolic attachments. Over time, engaged citizens may construct policy preferences and ideologies that rationalize their choices, but those issues are seldom fundamental.

That is one key reason contemporary American politics is so polarized: The electoral penalty for candidates taking extreme positions is quite modest because voters in the political center do not reliably support the candidates closest to them on the issues. (Mitt Romney is just the most recent presidential candidate to lose despite being perceived by most voters as closer to their ideological views than his opponent on a spectrum running from "extremely liberal" to "extremely conservative.")

The most powerful social identities and symbolic attachments in this year's Democratic race have favored Mrs. Clinton, not Mr. Sanders. She has been a leading figure in the Democratic Party for decades, a role model for many women and a longtime ally of African-Americans and other minority groups. For many primary voters, that history constitutes a powerful bond, and their loyalties are propelling Mrs. Clinton to the nomination despite her limitations as a candidate.

Mr. Sanders, on the other hand, is a sort of anti-Clinton — a political maverick from lily-white Vermont whose main claim to fame has been his insistence on calling himself an independent, a socialist, anything but a Democrat. That history has made him a convenient vessel for antipathy to Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic establishment and some of the party's key constituencies. But it is a mistake to assume that voters who support Mr. Sanders because he is not Mrs. Clinton necessarily favor his left-leaning policy views.


Exit polls conducted in two dozen primary and caucus states from early February through the end of April reveal only modest evidence of ideological structure in Democratic voting patterns, but ample evidence of the importance of group loyalties.

Mr. Sanders did just nine points better, on average, among liberals than he did among moderates. By comparison, he did 11 points worse among women than among men, 18 points worse among nonwhites than among whites and 28 points worse among those who identified as Democrats than among independents.

It is very hard to point to differences between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders's proposed policies that could plausibly account for such substantial cleavages. They are reflections of social identities, symbolic commitments and partisan loyalties.

Yet commentators who have been ready and willing to attribute Donald Trump's success to anger, authoritarianism, or racism rather than policy issues have taken little note of the extent to which Mr. Sanders's support is concentrated not among liberal ideologues but among disaffected white men.

More detailed evidence casts further doubt on the notion that support for Mr. Sanders reflects a shift to the left in the policy preferences of Democrats. In a survey conducted for the American National Election Studies in late January, supporters of Mr. Sanders were more pessimistic than Mrs. Clinton's supporters about "opportunity in America today for the average person to get ahead" and more likely to say that economic inequality had increased.

However, they were less likely than Mrs. Clinton's supporters to favor concrete policies that Mr. Sanders has offered as remedies for these ills, including a higher minimum wage, increasing government spending on health care and an expansion of government services financed by higher taxes. It is quite a stretch to view these people as the vanguard of a new, social-democratic-trending Democratic Party.

Mr. Sanders has drawn enthusiastic support from young people, a common pattern for outsider candidates. But here, too, the impression of ideological commitment is mostly illusory. While young Democrats in the January survey were more likely than those over age 35 to call themselves liberals, their ideological self-designations seem to have been much more lightly held, varying significantly when they were reinterviewed.

Moreover, warm views of Mr. Sanders increased the liberalism of young Democrats by as much as 1.5 points on the seven-point ideological scale. For many of them, liberal ideology seems to have been a short-term byproduct of enthusiasm for Mr. Sanders rather than a stable political conviction.

Perhaps for that reason, the generational difference in ideology seems not to have translated into more liberal positions on concrete policy issues — even on the specific issues championed by Mr. Sanders. For example, young Democrats were less likely than older Democrats to support increased government funding of health care, substantially less likely to favor a higher minimum wage and less likely to support expanding government services. Their distinctive liberalism is mostly a matter of adopting campaign labels, not policy preferences.

Abraham Lincoln promised Americans "government of the people, by the people, for the people," a notable departure from the republican system set up by the architects of the Constitution. In the 150 years since Lincoln, the ideal of government "by the people" has reshaped Americans' democratic aspirations and their political practices — for example, in the Progressive Era introductions of direct primary elections and referendums and initiatives. It has also altered the way journalists and analysts see and describe electoral politics.

But that ideal makes sense, descriptively and normatively, only if citizens understand politics in terms of issues and ideologies and use their votes to convey clear policy signals that then determine the course of public policy. Americans' commitment to the folk theory of democracy may make them wish that elections worked that way. But in the case of Bernie Sanders, as so often, belief in the folk theory is an act of faith, not realism.

[Berkut]

But wishing does not make it so. Decades of social-scientific evidence show that voting behavior is primarily a product of inherited partisan loyalties, social identities and symbolic attachments. Over time, engaged citizens may construct policy preferences and ideologies that rationalize their choices, but those issues are seldom fundamental.

I do believe I've been saying this for as long as I've been posting on EU-OT or Languish.

It is why so few people actually take positions on politics driven by actual policy at the particular policy level. It is mostly partisanship, and their position on policies follows their partisanship, rather than the other way around.

It is exactly similar to people who believe in some religious tenet or another - they aren't Christian because they believe Jesus was the Son of God, they believe he was the son of god because they are Christian.