Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

[Grefter]

California artificially inflating its own importance?  Neeeeveeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrr.

#iceburn

[Cotigo]

Except it is doing the exact opposite?

[Grefter]

You're not my dad.

[NotMiki]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/wow-she-s-right

lolgop

[Captain K]

Just close your eyes and repeat "there's no place like home".  When you open them the scary election season will be gone.

[SnowFire]

For the record, I'm *pleased* that the GOP has no reference to Trump on their home page.  This is a good thing, right?  Right?  Some sane people are left over there?

[NotMiki]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-doesnt-have-a-national-campaign-so-the-gop-is-trying-to-run-one-for-him/2016/06/09/a9e1f488-2df0-11e6-9b37-42985f6a265c_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trump-rnc-625a-lede%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

I'm not sure, if you're sane, why you're trying to elect Trump even halfheartedly?   A senator, forget who, in supporting Trump said, basically, "don't worry, if he turns out to be an autocrat, Congress will stop him!"  Really.

Anyway, all that dovetails with this: Trump is relying almost entirely on the GOP to supply a ground game.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Bernie Sanders fans seem to have gone off the deep end, it's hilarious. everyone cheated everything, my god

ET TU, LIZ?

[NotMiki]

Kinda crazy considering Bernie was reportedly very happy with Obama for not endorsing Clinton til now (and how he's butthurt that Sherrod Brown endorsed her earlier).

[Pyro]

That's the danger of playing yourself up as the only hope for change, being the sole ray of light fighting a corrupt order, and so on. It creates a sense of righteous anger that demands heads and demonizes the very people that should allies. Even though the Dem primary has been shockingly non-negative the narrative Sanders sold is inherently going to make people see Clinton as evil, corrupt, and insufficient to effect the changes that need to be made for our survival and so on and so forth.

I doubt Bernie Sanders can even get his young supporters hyped for Clinton now. I can't see this ending very well.

[Luther Lansfeld]

I'm sure they'll love President Trump

[Excal]

Sometimes ya gotta let the purifying flames run wild in order to build something better from the ashes.  So Bern, baby, Bern.

[The Duck]

If Bernie is conciliatory and endorses Hillary, will some of his own followers see that as a moral failing and assume he's a sellout? Or will they become disillusioned with his messaging and abandon the political process? There are already a handful who say they'll vote for Trump or Gary Johnson, although the proportion of people who would actually do so probably isn't that high (it can be hard to have a sense of proportionality sometimes with internet echo chambers).

It'll be interesting to see what happens, but I think this kind of ideological purity test thinking is dangerous.

[Cmdr_King]

It makes a twisted sort of sense.  Warren was already considered a bit of a traitor for not endorsing Bernie when it counted (after all, the most progressive member of the senate lost in Massachusetts), so her going all the way and actually endorsing Clinton confirms that earlier sense of betrayal for the conspiratorially minded.

The last month-ish has been frustrating for everyone Democrat-affiliated of course.  The calls for Bernie to drop out went from "persistent" to "genuinely angry", which only dumped fuel on the conspiracy theory fire because that's how conspiracy thinking works.  The epic snarkfest would probably have been hilarious for anyone on the R side of the fence if they weren't all busy putting guns in their mouths.

What's frustrating is I get it to some extent, even from a pragmatic point of view.  Like, the argument looks a bit like this.

(Disclaimer: it's entirely possible there's the simple explanation of "Bernie bought his own hype", and presumably it's a 'little from column A, little from column B' scenario, but you know me, I love the long form arguments.)

- Bernie's main goal is (and perhaps always was) to influence the party platform in a more progressive direction.
- His ability to do so increases as he gains more voters in the primary.
- THEREFOR he needs to run the primary to the end as gain as many votes as possible.
- THEREFOR he needs to keep potential supporters willing to vote, ie he needs to have a chance to win.
- The perception of fighting for every single vote and  calling to question every instance of potential shenanigans presents a candidate as more viable than the pure numbers suggest.
- THEREFOR call out all instances where the DNC or state parties seem to take actions that could potentially favor Clinton over Sanders.

and after a while that turns from "the system is kinda fucked up" to "CONSPIRACY", although Sanders seemed to play more to the latter than the former a lot of times anyway (*sigh*).  But in principle it's an effective option, but it's also playing with fire.  Because once people are in CONSPIRACY mode, it's very hard to deescalate from it.  People were pissed off when he didn't suspend/concede on Tuesday night and I kinda went "well duh he's not going to concede, giving up in the face of CORRUPT CONSPIRACY will just make the base bugger off into awfulville".

I mean, we may indeed be at the point where nothing is going to work, but at a minimum he needs to be able to enumerate all the gains he's made and show very clearly that he was able to sway the party to his views (or strongly in that direction) despite not actually winning the nomination.  Shows the system can be corrected and that working within it is a viable path, which is one of the main sticking points for his holdouts.

Shit, not gonna lie.  I have a lot of reservations about sticking with the Democrats after November myself.  If things don't change quite a bit we're gonna run out the clock on climate change or some other fascistic demagogue actually winning, and if this primary hasn't been a wakeup call for the Democrats then they're just not going to do it until the generational shift in ~20 years and we'll have to find some other, faster means of effecting change.

[The Duck]

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. The PUMAs in the last democratic primary were also fairly adamant that they would not vote for Obama and they ended up doing so, in a primary that was much more negative than this one. One of the narratives from data driven sites is that we should expect the something similar here, especially given the endorsements from a popular sitting president, VP, and with people like Elizabeth Warren. As things move to the general election, people might throw more of their support behind Clinton? The messaging of this campaign based on stoking conspiracies and corruption might change things, but I think a large proportion will back Hillary, especially as the prospect of Trump looms large.

It's true that there might be some die hards but I don't know how many there actually are. The disaffected from both sides might run to third parties candidates like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, and actually the libertarian party is getting a decent amount of support.

The best thing for Trump would be to make this campaign really nasty and disgusting such that people will disengage, keeping turnout low. The other is if the polls don't look particularly close and people get complacent, kind of like what people theorized happened in Michigan. It seems like there's enough fear and vitriol stoked against Trump so that won't likely happen, though.

[Grefter]

Poll results I could quickly Google suggest that an overwhelming majority more (6:1 if you don't wanna click through, method being asking to pick from Trump, Sanders, Clinton and Johnson, then same question swapping Sanders for Stein).

Single poll point and of course lols polls, but it suggests the pattern you really do expect to see.  A lot of people supporting Sanders agree with what he is saying,  but the majority is not really the militant Bernie Bros of the Internet.


CK when you want that faster more effective means of effecting change let me know and we can talk about my boy Vladimir Lenin.

[metroid composite]

Ooh, can you put Vladmir Lenin in charge of the US?  Pretty please?

The whole "bernie bros" thing is a bit of a myth as far as I can tell.  As someone who's been on twitter, and said negative stuff about both Bernie and Hillary, I want to say I've gotten weirder shit from the Hillary supporters.

Of course, were they really Hillary supporters?  Mighta been the fine folks from 4chan

http://boingboing.net/2016/06/02/lets-troll-bernie-and-hi.html

Or it might have been one of the hired online trolls from that Super PAC

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/21/1518537/-Clinton-SuperPac-Admits-to-Paying-Internet-Trolls

But either way, that's been my experience.


What is true statistically, and we have primary results to back this up, is that Bernie does much better than Hillary when primaries are open, which is to say when Republicans and Independents can vote in the Democrat primary.  Someone who is a life-long Republican, and reacts with revulsion to the name Clinton, tends to be more open to Bernie who spent most of his political career as an independent.  Independents, obviously, like Bernie for being an independent.  Independents don't like people with strong party attachments.  (Incidentally, a poll recently from Fox News that broke down percentages by party affiliation, had the Independents breaking down as follows: Trump: 32%, Gary Johnson: 23%, Clinton: 22%.  Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interactive/2016/06/09/fox-news-poll-national-releas-6-16/ ). 

So...while yes, in general, Bernie supporters are on average the furthest left voting block, he did seem to bring in independents and a few republicans who probably have never set foot in a Democrat primary before, and may never set foot in one again.  Hillary's unlikely to hold on to these voters.

[Grefter]

Bernie Bros are definitely a thing, but they are a minority in there own little microcosm that is Reddit.

Edit - Lenin for Skeleton President of the United States of America 2020 lets do this.

[metroid composite]

Bernie Bros are definitely a thing, but they are a minority in there own little microcosm that is Reddit.

Reddit mixes racist, sexist dudebros with any subject matter, though.  Want to see MRA Hillary supporters?  You can find 'em on Reddit!

(Although admittedly, the Hillary Clinton subreddit is much smaller than Trump's (the largest) or Bernie's (the next largest) so...she has fewer such supporters, I suppose?)

[Excal]

What is true statistically, and we have primary results to back this up, is that Bernie does much better than Hillary when primaries are open,

Not technically correct.  What is correct is that Bernie does better, but there's a strong case that if every state was an open primary that Clinton would be doing roughly as well as she is now, if not potentially better.  It's also worth noting that of the 11 most populous states, 10 of them went Clinton.  It seems to be a pattern that when you have more people voting, and when you make it easier to vote, Clinton gains more than Sanders does.

It's unknown whether Trump will show a similar weakness to Clinton.

[Cmdr_King]

It's worth correcting there: what they say is that switching to open primaries would significantly close the popular vote gap, but at the expense of increasing Clinton's lead in the pledged delegate count; Bernie was able to run up the score a little in some of the caucus states (because caucuses are horrible things that take hours, and thus how dedicated your voters are matters a lot more than how many people support you), such that he'd likely still win those states but by smaller margins in such a scenario.

FiveThirtyEight in general has taken some pains to explain, at length, at any opportunity that the Democratic primary correlated much more closely with racial demographics than any other factor.  Which is the long form of saying the same thing I said way back on page three or whatever: Bernie lost this primary in South Carolina.  To an extent he gambled and lost (one of his most frequent talking points was about protectionist policies aimed at reinvigorating American manufacturing, which is a big deal to wide swathes of formerly-middle-class white people and fairly meaningless to not-white people), and to an extent other stuff that we talked about back then, and also frankly fear.  But so goes.  There's only one matter left.

President Clinton: Don't fuck it up.  Don't be timid, don't cry about the republicans and their obstructionism, don't pretend trifles are major victories.  I'd quite like to not face down Trump 2.0 or evacuate the west coast.  Get it the fuck done.

[metroid composite]

What is true statistically, and we have primary results to back this up, is that Bernie does much better than Hillary when primaries are open,

Not technically correct.  What is correct is that Bernie does better, but there's a strong case that if every state was an open primary that Clinton would be doing roughly as well as she is now, if not potentially better.  It's also worth noting that of the 11 most populous states, 10 of them went Clinton.  It seems to be a pattern that when you have more people voting, and when you make it easier to vote, Clinton gains more than Sanders does.

It's unknown whether Trump will show a similar weakness to Clinton.

I was speaking specifically about the popularity among independents (which that link confirms, incidentally).  Specifically, exit polling for primaries I looked at usually had Clinton winning among registered democrats, and Sanders winning among independents.

Yes, I agree, Clinton benefits a lot from having primaries instead of caucuses.  (And in general she is very well-positioned to win a democrat primary since it is mostly democrats voting--her strongest voting block).  I'm not talking about her primary strength (which is strong) I'm speculating about her general election strength.  In a general election, republicans and independents become a much larger percentage of the voting base.

On which subject, the structure of US general elections historically is that there's a large voting block of democrats who almost always vote democrat, a large block of republicans who almost always vote republican.  And then 10%-20% of the population is a swing vote.  Usually elections are won by winning the swing vote.  (Although sometimes elections are won by just having a more energized base).  And right now getting the swing vote looks hard for Hillary.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Actually, it's worth pointing out that while going from closed primaries to open primaries benefits Sanders relatively, Clinton still won a majority of the states with open primaries, and as Excal noted, does better in open primaries than she does in caucuses (though closed primaries are better still for her, of course), see e.g. Washington.

I'd also be a little bit leery about classifying all "independents" as a monolithic bloc, and assuming that the same bloc shows up to primaries and especially caucuses as it does to the general. The "independent" who is fed up with the political system and/or feels the Democrats are too right-wing probably prefers Sanders, while the "independent" who is a centrist lying between the Democrats and Republicans probably prefers Clinton. And of course there are other independents like hardcore conservatives who think the Republicans are a pack of cowardly weasels (whom Trump has sewn up).

Still, it's all water under the bridge now.

[metroid composite]

I'd also be a little bit leery about classifying all "independents" as a monolithic bloc, and assuming that the same bloc shows up to primaries and especially caucuses as it does to the general. The "independent" who is fed up with the political system and/or feels the Democrats are too right-wing probably prefers Sanders, while the "independent" who is a centrist lying between the Democrats and Republicans probably prefers Clinton. And of course there are other independents like hardcore conservatives who think the Republicans are a pack of cowardly weasels (whom Trump has sewn up).

Of course; it's very possible that the independents who vote in democrat primaries are different than those who vote in general elections.  Which is why I also included recent polling of independents.

(And while yes, there are definitely independents who are too far left for the democrats, or too far right for the republicans--those will probably vote for their appropriate left/right wing candidate.  Ones who are only independent because they're half way between the left/right spectrum...I dunno how those will go.  That said, the "fed up with the political system" type independents, which aren't easily classifiable as left/right, and anecdotally seem to be a significant percentage of independents, prefer the candidates billed as political outsiders (Trump, Sanders, Carson, to some extent Cruz).  This is a group that Trump seems likely to pick up, and anecdotally the group seems large enough that he currently seems likely to have a majority of the independent vote).

[Excal]

If you want to be simplistic, you can go with 5 general shades of independents.  There's the traditional folks who are to the left of the Dems, right of the Reps, and in between, but also the folks who share space with those two parties that don't like them enough to identify with them.  Perhaps they don't like some of the core doctrines?  Perhaps they think they're far more independent than they actually are. 

Regardless, Sanders does well with independents who Democrats in all but name, whereas he falters once you get outside of that.  Which makes sense, folks who balk at the Democratic party as a whole because it's too left leaning for them won't suddenly look at Bernie Sanders and think, that's right, let's go even further left!  Whereas a bunch of people who feel the Democratic party should be their home but who are anti-establishment for whatever reason will look at Sanders favourably.

((EDIT: Incidentally, I am amused that in this topic on the US election, on a site filled mostly with Americans, the last 9/10 posts are from Commonwealthers.))