Bernie's In

You are asking us to stop talking about Bernie on the Bernie thread.

Why don't you people stop touting him?

Frank said

Quote:

Why don't you people stop touting him?

I don't understand why anyone would come to a thread and in effect tell people to stop talking about the thread topic.

What were you referring to at that writing, edgar? Trump's popularity? It was higher for a while, but after his McCain remark, he's fallen off. I have a feeling he'll continue to fall. He's not even a legit R. Now, Kasich has entered thinking things look weak enough that he has a chance.

What do you think of these recent events?

What were you referring to at that writing, edgar? Trump's popularity? It was higher for a while, but after his McCain remark, he's fallen off. I have a feeling he'll continue to fall. He's not even a legit R. Now, Kasich has entered thinking things look weak enough that he has a chance.

What do you think of these recent events?

The Bernie Sanders surge, in other words, has a lot more to do with Bernie Sanders than with Hillary Clinton. More specifically, it has to do with his left-populist politics. We’re going to break some news here: It turns out that some Democrats are really liberal, and they like a really liberal candidate like Sanders.

Right now, Sanders is winning about half the support of white liberal Democrats, but little support from other groups within the party. That works out to around 25 or 30 percent of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire but more like 15 percent among Democrats nationally.

It’s possible that Sanders’s standing will continue to improve. If he goes from winning half of the white liberal vote to most of it, he could win Iowa and New Hampshire, though not very many other states.

But he could also encounter some headwinds. Sanders’s name recognition is now 70 to 80 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire, so he doesn’t have that much more room to grow on the basis of improved name recognition alone. And while he’s an appealing choice to some very liberal Democrats, Democrats who describe themselves as “somewhat liberal” may instead prefer Clinton. The policy differences between the Democrats aren’t all that profound; Clinton is pretty liberal herself, and she and Sanders voted together 93 percent of the time in the two years they spent in the Senate together.

Ordinarily, Democrats might push back against what they perceived to be unfair or inaccurate coverage about Clinton. But Democratic activists and commentators are more liberal than Democrats as a whole. Many of them like Sanders’s policy positions — and even though they may also like Clinton, they’d like to see her pulled further to the left before the general election gets underway.

There isn’t much of a market among Democrats for an “anybody but Hillary” candidate, in other words. And it’s particularly illogical to argue that Biden might serve as a better foil to Sanders. Biden has lower favorable ratings and higher unfavorable ratings than Clinton and by statistical measures is further to the right.