Progressives (Liberals)

I’m going to vote for Liz Warren in the NC primary tomorrow, and then just sit back and hope for the best.

snood wrote:

I’m going to vote for Liz Warren in the NC primary tomorrow, and then just sit back and hope for the best.

Voted early, ended up losing my vote since Buttigieg dropped. Where in Nc are you?

Matthews gets put out to pasture because his mind is going yet there is a concerted effort to elect Biden who is probably further down that road. Shrugs

There were jokes about Reagan hitting the 'Nuke' button instead of the 'Nurse' button.

your friend is as much of an idiot as any Bernie-or-burster...

It really amazes me how easily petty hatred and fanatism are taking over people's mind.

Nothing to see with Sanders apparently. Matthews was "MeTooed":

I think anyone comparing Sanders to the Nazis deserves a) a huge Godwin award, b) a looooong rest, and c) some weeks in rehab.

I wonder how many thousands of early voters lost their vote.

As Bernie Sanders has taken the lead in the Democratic primary, those of us with doubts that America would elect a Jewish democratic socialist president have been able to comfort ourselves with polls showing him beating Donald Trump, often by larger margins than his competitors.

New political science research by David Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla of Yale erodes some of that comfort. Broockman and Kalla surveyed over 40,000 people — far more than a typical poll — about head-to-head presidential matchups. They found that when they weight their numbers to reflect the demographic makeup of the population rather than the likely electorate, as many polls do, Sanders beats Trump, often by more than other candidates.

But the demographics of people who actually vote are almost always different from the demographics of people who can vote. That’s where their analysis raises concerns about Sanders’s chances.

According to Broockman and Kalla’s figures, Sanders loses a significant number of swing votes to Trump, but he makes up for them in support from young people who say they won’t vote, or will vote third party, unless Sanders is the nominee. On the surface, these Bernie-or-bust voters might seem like an argument for Sanders. After all, Sanders partisans sometimes insist that Democrats have no choice but to nominate their candidate because they’ll stay home otherwise, a sneering imitation of traditional centrist demands for progressive compromise.

But if Broockman and Kalla are right, by nominating Sanders, Democrats would be trading some of the electorate’s most reliable voters for some of its least. To prevail, Democrats would need unheard-of rates of youth turnout. That doesn’t necessarily mean Sanders would be a worse candidate than Joe Biden, given all of Biden’s baggage. It does mean polls might be underestimating how hard it will be for Sanders to beat Trump.

“Given how many voters say they would switch to Trump in head-to-heads against Sanders compared to the more moderate candidates, the surge in youth turnout Sanders would require to gain back this ground is large: around 11 percentage points,” Broockman and Kalla write in a new working paper.

About 37 percent of Democrats and independents under 35 voted in 2016. According to Broockman and Kalla’s figures, Sanders would need to get that figure up to 48 percent. By comparison, Broockman told me, in 2008, Barack Obama raised black turnout by about five percentage points.

Disclosure: My husband is consulting for Elizabeth Warren. According to Broockman, she fares even worse than Sanders in their data, sharing his disadvantages among moderates without any sign of a compensatory surge among young people. Broockman said that if either Warren or Sanders is on the ballot, more Republicans will likely be motivated to go to the polls in response. “When parties nominate candidates further from the center, it actually inspires the other party to turn out,” he told me.

In our age of extreme polarization, a widespread school of thought holds that swing voters are nearly extinct, and that turnout is everything. But that’s an exaggeration. While there seem to be fewer swing voters than in the past, they can still be decisive.

As Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, pointed out in The Washington Post, the 2018 elections saw the highest midterm turnout in over a century, yet most of Democrats’ improved performance “came not from fresh turnout of left-of-center voters, who typically skip midterms, but rather from people who cast votes” in the last two national elections and “switched from Republican in 2016 to Democratic in 2018.”

The primaries have yet to demonstrate that Sanders can generate the hugely expanded turnout his campaign is promising, though that could change when the Super Tuesday results come in. In New Hampshire, turnout increased most in the places that voted for Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Dave Wasserman, an editor at The Cook Political Report, tweeted that most of the Democrats’ turnout bump was attributable to moderate Republicans “crossing over from ’16 G.O.P. primary — not heightened progressive/Sanders base enthusiasm.” South Carolina saw record turnout, but it benefited Biden, not Sanders.

None of this means that Democrats would be justified in denying Sanders the nomination if he arrives at the convention with a strong plurality of delegates. Doing so would tear the party apart, probably leaving the eventual nominee even less electable than Sanders is. But it does mean that if Sanders wins the primary, his campaign has to learn to persuade people, not just mobilize them.

College-educated white women, for example, helped flip the House in 2018. They favor Biden over Trump by double digits, but Sanders by only two points. Sanders, however, seems to see little need to reach out to them. Speaking to The Los Angeles Times editorial board in December, Sanders said he didn’t believe the way to win against Trump “is to just speak to Republican women in the suburbs.”

Instead, he said, “The key to this election is, can we get millions of young people who have never voted before into the political process, many working people who understand that Trump is a fraud, can we get them voting?” Even if the answer is yes, it probably won’t be enough. If he’s going to be the nominee, the rest of us can only hope his campaign has a Plan B.

Speculations that the forthcoming Democrat (sic) Convention will likely be "rigged" against Sanders are merely observations based on the words and behaviors of many prominent Democrat leaders and even many Democrat supporters on these threads.

There's a trend toward writers and commentators reframing the Democratic Party as the "Democrat" Party. It's seen often in right-of-center commentary, particularly on the internet. At AT we see it in potential copy all the time. (I saw it in a submission just yesterday.)

The argument goes that the party is, in fact, not "democratic" at all, so it's wrong to allow Democrats to degrade the term by making claim to it. There's certainly something to that.

But here's the thing: back around 2006, the term "liberal" became radioactive. This was a culmination decades in the making. Efforts to turn the word "liberal" into a curse had been carried out by a small number of conservative columnists for many years, with middling success. It was probably the rise of the internet, with the entrance of real, unvarnished opinion onto the national stage, that clinched it. It was very likely Sarah Palin's slashing use of the term in the 2008 campaign that put the cap on the matter.

From that point on, they couldn't run fast enough. They had defended themselves for years by pointing to the dictionary definition of "liberal": "Oh, but liberals are generous and openhanded – what could possibly be wrong with that?" But that didn't work any longer, and they began casting around for replacements, such as "left-liberal" and "progressive," none of which quite clicked. Today it's "social-democrat." Whatever – they all mean the same thing.

This marked a vast and unheralded victory in the battle against the left. No longer could leftists hide behind a term representing everything open and good while attacking conservatism as dank, unhealthy, and medieval. The poisoning of "liberal" remade the battle space in a way unseen in half a century.

So what's wrong with doing the same to "Democratic Party"?

We need to make the party name as ridiculous, shifty, and unacceptable as "liberal." Ruining the very name of America's left-wing party would be something to write home about. But we can't do this by attacking a party that doesn't exist. Striking against the "Democrat" Party accomplishes nothing. It's a tactical error that may provide a moment's emotional release but nothing more.

We need to clean our sights, home in on our target, and make every round count. Once the Dems have been humiliated, we may well wish to recover the term and restore the respectable patina it once wore. Until then, we use "Democratic" as an insult, and make the jackasses hurt.

Despite these obvious facts, Blatham sees a dark conspiracy afoot here. Perhaps it is the latest manifestation of {shudder) "movement conservatism".

Greg Mitchell
@GregMitch
Yeah, the Dem "establishment" and "billionaire class" really "fixed it" for Biden--yet somehow he had no money, no organization in most states--not even Calif. Maybe preferences of actual masses of voters have something to do with it.