Interesting recent article from HuffPo about the current standing of the Democratic and Republican candidates.
The Democrats Are Flawlessly Executing a 10-Point Plan to Lose the 2016 Presidential Election
...
From the link:
1. Assume that Donald Trump will be the Republicans’ 2016 nominee, though it’s now clear he won’t be.
That's a tad premature.
2. Nominate the only person who can reunite the Republican Party once Trump failing to get the nomination has fractured it beyond repair.
Same old same old... The right wing hate the welfare state and socialism with a passion. And more than a few right wing women can empathize with the unfair attacks on Clinton. Some of the GOP women may very well vote Clinton, especially the more moderate among them.
See, I can come up with a scenario too.
3. Fracture the Democratic Party by broadly supporting the Clinton camp’s attempts to smear Bernie Sanders and his supporters.
Wow, that's some warped perception of the facts.
You don't hear many Clinton supporters saying if Sanders wins they won't support him. But some Sanders supporters are rabid Clinton haters. Like Susan Sarandon saying she might vote for Trump to speed the revolution.
Even she recognized how bad that was and took it back but a lot of Sanders supporters have absolute hatred toward Clinton.
4. Fatally underestimate the electoral chances of the two men now most likely to be the Republican presidential nominee in November: Ted Cruz and John Kasich.
That's nothing but a repeat of #1. Guess they are trying to pad the list, or maybe they wanted a round number.
Cruz is beatable, he's too far to the right. Kasich remains an unknown but it's unlikely he's going to win.
5. Fail to nominate their most popular candidate, in particular the one with the best chance of beating Ted Cruz or John Kasich in the fall.
So we should nominate the guy that is losing?
6. Freeze one of the most popular Democrats nationally, Bernie Sanders, out of the picture altogether.
That's absurd. It's not happening at all.
7. Reject Sanders’ call for a fifty-state general-election campaign.
IOW, reject the actual winner and nominate Sanders despite his losing the primary based on some imaginary formula that he can win the blue states. But the blue states are not going to vote for Trump or Cruz.
8. Do nothing whatsoever to address outstanding concerns about the character, integrity, and judgment of the Party’s front-runner.
An outright falsehood even without the hyperbole.
9. Over-rely on the national media to set the political narrative for the campaign season, further alienating voters who want to vote for a candidate with vision.
And the Democrats are controlling this how?
10. Ignore the youth vote.
Not on purpose. But here again are Sanders supporters saying he should win when he is losing.
I hate to use the analogy of imagining-they-are-persecuted Christians, but it does smack of that sometimes. For example:
News coverage is up, but 'Bernie blackout' is a rallying cry for Sanders supporters
Sanders did receive less coverage than Clinton in 2015. At the time, he had not yet won anything, and she was receiving intense media scrutiny over her use of a private server to handle email while she was secretary of State and over Republican accusations that she acted wrongly in connection with the deaths of four Americans in the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
Since the start of this year, the two have received very similar amounts of coverage, according to data from the Internet Archive's presidential tracker project, which logs all candidate mentions on news shows and a variety of other programs. Each currently accounts for about 15% of all mentions of a candidate on TV, the tracking data indicate.
Another study, by researchers at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, also found rough parity between the two.
Ev Boyle, the associate director of the center, and a group of researchers spent a week counting every mention of a candidate on 14 major news websites, including latimes.com.
"The Bernie Blackout isn't really a thing," Boyle concluded, noting that Sanders had close to the same level of coverage as Clinton, although both were far behind Trump.
All the attention to the volume of attention implies, of course, that more coverage is always good for a campaign. That's seldom actually true, as the scrutiny of Clinton's email demonstrates.
The data from two different media researchers provides evidence Sanders supporters are not perceiving reality in focus.
Mostly the news media, especially CNN and MSNBC, want Sanders to be doing well, it's better for their bottom line and their need to not get boring. If the race is over, how are they going to keep the audience interested 24/7 when all they are talking about is the primary?
It really shows with the most recent coverage, talking like Sanders is pulling ahead in NY when he's still double digits behind in the polls. Noting he had a big crowd in Brooklyn, diminishing the number of people who showed up for Clinton at the Apollo describing it as "a few hundred" when it was well over 1,000 and not mentioning only half the hall was filled at the last Sanders event in Milwaukee.
There is no way the news favors Clinton over Sanders. But I see it claimed again and again on this and other forums.
