Democratic caucuses and primaries

Cabbage said:
Most Americans will not vote for a socialists.
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Then I'll ask you the same question: x% claim they refuse to vote for a socialist, yet >(100-x)% prefer Sanders over Trump, despite the fact that Sanders self advertises as a socialist.

Why the discrepancy?
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Personally I think there are 2 issues going on here:

- Many of the polls showing support for various candidates only talks about preference, not likelyhood of going out and voting. Thus, if a shows "sanders is the preferred candidate of 90% of everyone in the universe", but only 1% of those voters put down their bongs and head to the polling station, he's not going to win. (Another poster referred to an article that touches on that.)

- Not everyone is fully paying attention to the election right now. Yes, WE are paying attention in this forum, but I don't think InternationalSkeptics is representative of the American population as a whole. So for many voters, they may recognize the name ("Oh, that Sanders guy? I like him. Reminds me of my senile uncle") but they haven't yet been exposed to his policies in detail, nor have there been any attempts (other than perhaps an occasional Fox news story or Trump tweet) to really highlight his "socialist" leanings. It won't be until later in the election cycle when many voters will be able to fully analyze the different candidates.
 
Distracted1 said:
I provided you with some evidence earlier which you "skimmed".

Yale professors conduct survey of 40,000 likely voters and conclude that the polls showing Sanders tied with- or defeating- Trump underestimate the impact Sanders' candidacy will have on motivating moderate undecideds, and Right leaning moderates to vote for Trump- while at the same time they rely on an expectation of youth turnout that is wildly unprecedented.


https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...sanders-electability-president-moderates-data
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I offered to address any specific points you wished to bring up. Evidently you refused; I never heard back from you.

I did say, and I stand by it, that what polls concerning x say about x are more reliable than what polls concerning y say about x. What information, specifically, in that link would you like me to know?
 
Belz... said:
Speaking of lying, they're freaking out over the possibility of Trump winning, not Sanders.
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They're freaking out over the possibility of Trump winning due to Sanders winning the nomination, like I said.

I don't see why you have a problem with how I stated it.
 
Cabbage said:
You have no evidence he will crumble; we are equally ignorant in speculating the future.
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I have evidence of structural weaknesses which have yet to be tested, a few of which I mentioned in passing above. None of the other Democratic candidates have a history of cozying up to Soviets and Soviet-backed regimes, and thus none of them would be subject to this particular line of attack.

Cabbage said:
My point, however, is that if this race comes down to the label of socialism (as some anti-Sanders people pretend it will), it is worth pointing out (as I did) that it clearly hasn't hurt Sanders even when he advertises himself as a socialist.
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It's not just the label, it is how the label is used and whether it will stick.

We all know that "Socialist" means something very different in the phrase "Democratic Socialists of America" than it does in "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," and we can all reasonably suppose that Sanders is more interested in the programs proposed by the former (which have been shown to work well in practice) than the latter (which have failed abysmally whenever and wherever attempted).

We have yet to see a concerted effort to reframe Sanders' adherence to socialism from the Scandinavian model to the Muscovite model, but we have good reason to believe these ads are going to be cut eventually. Perhaps they will find film of Mayor Sanders at the inauguration of the Marxist-Leninist leader of Nicaragua in 1985. Who knows? My point is that you cannot pull this sort of thing with any other American politician, since none of the rest of them were palling about with Marxists during the Cold War.
 
Cabbage said:
They're freaking out over the possibility of Trump winning due to Sanders winning the nomination, like I said.

I don't see why you have a problem with how I stated it.
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Because the way you said it makes it seem like it's Sanders they have a problem with, not Trump.
 
The only thing I have against Sanders personally is my opinion as to his ability to beat Trump in the states and with the demographics that actually matter politically; nothing more, nothing less.

There's some details in the margins about the whole "If I don't get my candidate I'm taking my ball and going home" mentality and how that's a bad precedent to set, but that's a distant secondary concern in light more more pressing problems.

I don't know often I have to say this or how to say it clearer.
 
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With Pete and Klobuchar dropping out, I am hoping Warren follows their example.

A brokered convention would be a disaster. There's still plenty of time for the voters to pick a majority candidate, but that means spoilers need to drop out.

It's looking like it's Biden or Bernie. Warren should gracefully exit the race. She has no path to victory besides a backroom deal at a brokered convention, which would only leave the party bitterly divided.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
With Pete and Klobuchar dropping out, I am hoping Warren follows their example.

A brokered convention would be a disaster. There's still plenty of time for the voters to pick a majority candidate, but that means spoilers need to drop out.

It's looking like it's Biden or Bernie. Warren should gracefully exit the race. She has no path to victory besides a backroom deal at a brokered convention, which would only leave the party bitterly divided.
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Or she picks up a similar number of voters from both wings of the party- making her the Uniter.
 
I don't see a brokered convention being any more damaging then coming out of Super Tuesday with out a clear winner, which sadly I'm not seeing as all that likely.

I agree that Warren's chances are slim to the point that her dropping out is an inevitability.

I don't think Bloomberg is ever really going to "drop out." He might go away, but he won't have the whole "I'm stopping my campaign... now." moment.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
A brokered convention would be a disaster.
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A widely-respected Democratic candidate once said, “...at the end of the day the responsibility that superdelegates have is to decide what is best for the country and what is best for the Democratic Party.”

Do you disagree?
 
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d4m10n said:
A widely-respected Democratic candidate once said, “...at the end of the day the responsibility that superdelegates have is to decide what is best for the country and what is best for the Democratic Party.”

Do you disagree?
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No, I broadly agree with that sentiment. The superdelegates have a difficult job as a result of the way that the primary process is conducted. In this scenario, the best thing for the party would be avoiding a brokered convention by having non-viable candidates drop out early enough for a majority candidate to emerge.
 
Sanders didn't concede to Clinton until mid-July in 2016 and we didn't have a brokered convention in that case so I don't think one is likely here.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Yeah just how my credibility with the Trumpers goes down every time I say anything bad about Trump. Funny how that works.
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No, you say something is a fact when it's your unsupported but strongly held supposition.

Accusing people of acting like Trump supporters for calling you out on your mistakes is just being immature about it.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
No, I broadly agree with that sentiment. The superdelegates have a difficult job as a result of the way that the primary process is conducted. In this scenario, the best thing for the party would be avoiding a brokered convention by having non-viable candidates drop out early enough for a majority candidate to emerge.
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Historically, brokered conventions have often led to the nomination of a "Dark Horse" candidate, which was sometimes somebody who wasn't even running prior to the convention, or sometimes a candidate who didn't seem to be in the running prior to the convention, but who was somebody that supporters of both of the two leading candidates could supoprt. I'm not sure who that might be this time. Warren? Bloomberg? Hillary? (Please no).

Bernie is already pushing the notion of nominating the plurality candidate (probably on the assumption that would be Bernie). If he really believes in that as a general principal, I would expect to see him drop out if Biden ends up having the plurality. I can't say I'm really fond of any of the current candidates, though I cast my primary vote for Warren. If any of them were running against a moderate Republican (if such a beast is not extinct), I'm not sure I would vote for them. Since whoever it is will be running against Trump, I will vote for whoever wins the Dem nomination. Hell, if you selected somebody at random from off the street, I would vote for them over Trump.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
No, I broadly agree with that sentiment. The superdelegates have a difficult job as a result of the way that the primary process is conducted. In this scenario, the best thing for the party would be avoiding a brokered convention by having non-viable candidates drop out early enough for a majority candidate to emerge.
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How can we realistically call a candidate "Non-viable" when %95 of the Party members are yet to be heard from? It is a phenomena similar to the "famous for being famous" one.

Why is candidate "X" campaign dead? Because he/she is unelectable.
How do we know? Because he/she didn't lead in the first %6 of the voting.

Unless the primaries are to be held simultaneously, "viability" is an iffy concept.

As a Pennsylvania Democrat,I am not satisfied being left to choose from among the two candidates decided two months ago in Iowa.

The way the primaries are held, Every convention should be a brokered one in the interest of simple fairness.
 
That's why I like my idea of every running the primaries in order of which states had the slimmest margin of error last time.

Nobody cares who's going to win California because newflash the Dems have those votes already.
 
Belz... said:
Because the way you said it makes it seem like it's Sanders they have a problem with, not Trump.
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It's some of both, if you want to be honest about it. They are uniquely concerned about Sanders ability to beat Trump compared with the other Democratic candidates.

Which is entirely obvious, yet for some reason you feel a need to be pedantic about it. :rolleyes:
 
JoeMorgue said:
Sanders didn't concede to Clinton until mid-July in 2016 and we didn't have a brokered convention in that case so I don't think one is likely here.
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Slightly different circumstances though...

In 2016, the Democratic primaries were largely a 2-person race. There was nobody there to actually act as a spoiler, and it was pretty darn clear that Clinton was the clear winner.

In this election, you have 4 candidates all with a mediocre to strong chance of winning, a few significant policy differences, and lots of ego to go around. Its possible that Bloomberg or Warren will drop out after super tuesday, but by then they may have already spoiled the chance for any one candidate to end up with a clear majority.
 
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