Suffolk has the race polled at 41% Clinton, 31% Sanders. This follows a couple days after another firm had Bernie within 12% of Hillary in NH.
These are some pretty astounding numbers for a guy that half the population’s never heard of and the punditry refuses to take seriously.
Folks, we have ourselves a primary here.
Please share widely!
Sanders is from a neighboring state, the New Hampshire press is in a snit because Hillary is not treating them like the arbiters of All That Is Good, Sanders has that new-candidate smell, Clinton is mum on the all-important TPP issue. If with all that breaking for him he can’t get to one-third, I don’t know how he really goes beyond a boutique candidacy (and I’ll probably end up voting for him).
…Bernie is well above 1/3 – and 31% is within the margin of error of 33%
Half the population doesn’t even know who he is.
Hillary’s been running for this all her life, and 99% of the population knows her.
If *she* isn’t at 50%+1 by now, in a state that’s been very near and dear to the Clintons (and their political fortunes) for decades now, isn’t that the more instructive takeaway?
This poll is really, really good for Bernie. There’s no other way to put it.
Everybody knows who Hillary is =/= Hillary running a campaign. Lots of people know who Michelle Obama is or Taylor Swift or Donald Trump – it doesn’t mean that they are actively considering a different First Lady, Celebrity or whatever the hell Trump is until they actually run a campaign.
The polls are really good news for Bernie because with far less name recognition and far less campaign cash and far less media credibility, and far less, well, everything, he is in striking distance. I think that’s what you mean.
just the past few decades.
I think a lot of people currently supporting him don’t know who he is, either. Sanders right now benefits from being Not Hillary. What happens when we go through all of his record. Is 31% of the population going to vote for a Socialist with an extremely negative article in his past, that we know of? Sanders has never been vetted, and I imagine the oppo researchers are crawling all over Burlington right now.
And that is not how margin of error works, and I really think (hope) you know that.
I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high. But take a step back from the actual world for a moment, and look at the way the races have been shaping up as if it were a movie. Don’t the characters look eerily familiar? You can almost hear the voice-over, and see the trailer. There are your front-runners from both parties: polished, wealthy, sophisticated, carefully staged. There are the shots of the private jets, the Wall Street donors. There are the teasers where we see people in plush boardrooms or cocktail parties, with the operatives and donors telling each other why some issue with the candidate’s past isn’t a crisis, or how the candidate will totally take care of the donor’s interest in not having any trouble over that little business venture in Africa, the one that those pesky reporters are being so annoying about. And there are the background scenes showing economic stagnation outside those comfy rooms, and homeless people, and demonstrations.
And now, here’s some crazy politician determined to make a difference. The authentic one, without the jets or the champagne or the fancy video uplinks to a hundred fundraising parties. He’s a plain talker. He doesn’t do soundbites. You can’t find any scandals in his past. He’s done a good job in his prior offices. He sounds like he’s running for office because he can’t stand by and watch the wreckage take place around him any more, not because he particularly wants fame or fortune. He announces and promptly raises a respectable amount of money from an army of Little People, and college students start turning up at his rallies along with the usual older activists; and suddenly he’s gone from nowhere to polling within ten points of the establishment candidate in New Hampshire. The press still doesn’t take him quite seriously, but they like and respect him even though they think he’s crazy. (They do seem to like him. Hell, Matt Taibbi likes him, and Matt Taibbi hates everybody.)
My point (and I do have one) is that we have an established and much-beloved story template in American culture that’s an eerily strong fit for Bernie Sanders in this electoral cycle. Narrative isn’t everything, but the stories we tell ourselves matter, and people like it when life imitates our favorites. And we’re right at the beginning of this story, structurally speaking: barely into the middle of the first act. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.
Well done
The fact that Taibbi really does hate everybody, and expresses it with such a finely-wrought combination of vitriol and style, is what I love about his work. I was honestly surprised when I found his two pieces about Sanders for Rolling Stone, and found nothing in either one but bewildered and heartfelt admiration. It was like finding a unicorn; buzz or no buzz, you don’t expect to see that in real life.
If this Sanders boomlet has anybody rethinking whether Hillary’s invincibility and a prior decision not to run.
Jim Webb enters the ring when the Clinton shadow is gone and he can grab the limelight.
Polls this early in the game don’t mean much, I think. Who’s got the organization in place? Who’s got the money? That will determine the nomination, I think.
My worry is that whoever wins will not be able to motivate enough people to vote in the general election, and the Republican will win. The past six and a half years have seen a lot of people disappointed; virtually none of the hopes of 2008 have been fulfilled. Can anyone, but especially an establishment candidate, get the millions of new voters who turned out for Barack Obama in 2008 to come back?
“Fool me once, shame on — shame on you; fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
is because of a Republican party in Congress determined to block anything President Obama wants to do at any cost. He deserves a good share of the blame, too, for not working the Congress as a president should.
As for Sanders, think back to the many Republican flavors of the week during the last presidential race. Cain, Gingrich and Santorum all come to mind. They ran up big poll numbers before the inevitability of Mitt Romney took hold and they faded into oblivion. Of course, Romney was never more than ‘Gee, I guess we have to support this guy. Who else do we have?”.
Maybe Sanders is just getting some of that flavor of the week treatment, but there is a world of difference between Sanders and the Republicans you name.
They all faded quickly because even the slightest scratching of the surface revealed how absolutely terrible all of those candidates were. With Sanders, when you scratch the surface, you often like him more because there is so much there there.
I don’t think we’ll see a similar huge bump and then a complete collapse from Sanders. I think it will be steadily increasing support, but not enough to overtake the Clinton machine, although maybe with a couple of scares in early states where Sanders populism and deeply contrasting style might work well (compared to say CA, NY, MA, TX, VA, FL).
Cain in particular was a joke candidate, but even Gingrich and Santorum were treated by the mainstream media as entertaining sideshows. We’re seeing a different pattern with Sanders: the Cult of Savvy says, “But . . . but . . . Socialist!!!” and then more and more often follows it up with articles that say, “OTOH, his positions on the issues have solid majority support among actual voters, and he’s Mr. Clean, and a lot of people are turning out for his events, and Clinton is inevitable but we think we might like this socialist guy after all, hmmm . . ..”
I don’t have a crystal ball here, and I don’t know where this is going, but it looks like a different basic pattern to me. If we’re looking at Republican analogues, I’d call this more like McCain v. Bush in 1999/2000 than like Cain v. Romney in 2012 — though possibly more like Gene McCarthy in 1968 than either one of them.
Then I would expect Clinton to eventually savage him on the “socialist” thing in a way that will make many here cringe.
In other words, I think it will be interesting to see, if his insurgency campaign gets any traction, whether Clinton will move left in order to occupy some of his space, or instead forthrightly attacks him from the right.
If Clinton goes to “you’re a Socialist” the way that Bush went after Dukakis with “Liberal,” I expect Sanders would mount a much stronger defense than Dukakis did.
It could be a win for public discourse on a whole lot of levels. Especially since it’s a safe bet that no matter who the Republican nominee is, he’ll call any possible Democratic nominee a socialist during the general election. Hillary Clinton, Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, it won’t matter. So if we can get the word defanged ahead of time, that’s all to the good.
More likely she will go with ‘you are not a Democrat’ as the only reason he is on the Dem ballot is to get access. He joined the party to run, a sort of Mark Fisher TEA Party democrat. She will point to her decades of raising money to support the party and other Dems and ask – so where were YOU when there was work to be done, Mr. Purer-Than-Thou?
And has the legislative record to show it. Her people might well take that line with party insiders and activists as she works to build support in caucus states and to pile up endorsements, if Sanders becomes any kind of real threat. But I’d be astonished if she tried that line of attack with actual voters. “I’ve been around forever, and I’m first in line” isn’t exactly the public message her campaign has been trying to send.
only works in Massachusetts
Maybe, but it’s more likely she would try a more sophisticated approach.
He’s the beloved uncle with a good heart. But. That sort of thing.
I recalled off the top of my head as having been briefly high flying flashes who disappeared after being exposed as frauds. I didn’t mean to imply any more than the quick in and out as favorites of the campaign trail.
Obamacare? Hello?
Until we have single payer, we will never control health care costs. “Obamacare” does not eliminate insurance companies and lawyers, nor does it get employers out of the health care business. We still have people in the system whose profits are inversely proportional to the amount or quality of care they provide. Costs have not fallen since “Obamacare” but continue to rise. “Obamacare” is the equivalent of an anti-crime program worked out by a committee including John Dillinger and Al Capone; only a politician could ever love it.
As I did last year. It is significantly better than the status quo prior to Obama’s presidency. We won’t get single payer until we reverse Citizens United and really start limiting the power of corporations to lobby politicians with campaign donations. All the more reason to support Sanders, though Hillary Clinton has recently made it a priority and a litmus test for judges.
It’s really no laughing matter for the millions that could lose their insurance if the Supreme Court overturns aspects of ACA this session, a prospect that has Congressional Republicans terrified. I would agree it’s high time Democrats go on the offense on this issue, especially since the wind is at our backs.
It’s hurt millions too, though, pushing a product on them that they can’t afford to use, being incredibly complicated and hugely flawed.
ACA was a better than nothing bill, but not a good one.
No one has answered that argument, and it’s not “if only Obama had balls”. We are more sophisticated than that here. If it was designed to eliminate or nationalize the insurance industry it would’ve failed. Don’t get me wrong-it’s a reality that can and must change. But it’s reality.
It’s why I am supporting Sanders-to get money out of politics and create a climate where policies are passed on their merits and not because of lobbying. But bitching about how weak ACA is just helps the right repeal it-after all, if it’s that weak why should we keep it? Who will miss it? The six months I used ACA insurance I didn’t think I was being hurt by the insurance company-I was so happy to have affordable coverage. Your correct on the merits, but it’s a really self defeating talking point.
…it would have been nice if the 80 or so cosponsors that Medicare For All already had tried to pull the ACA debate in their direction as hard as some were trying to water it down by for example sacrificing the public option.
All that meant is that they wound up in emergency rooms before and we all paid for that with rising insurance premiums.
And thus wound up costing all of us far more than any more rational system.
Single payer just didn’t have the political support to get enacted. The enactment of the bill we got required a miracle, and still cost the Democrats the Congress.
It’s unrealistic to think that the USA could make it to single payer in one jump. Obama Care is one step in that direction and how things move in Washington. Costs have risen, but slower than before.
While I’m glad the ACA passed, it’s created as many problems as it’s solved, and it’s forcing people to buy a product many of its policy holders can’t afford to use (because of high deductables and co-pays).
Before ACA went through, the majority of medically-related bankruptcies happened to families who had insurance, and the ACA doesn’t do anything to change that. I’d argue it probably makes that problem worse.
Additionally, as someone who’s predominantly worked by contract and who’s income can fluctuate pretty widely year to year, it’s certainly made my life more difficult. The one thing that was going to come with the ACA that would have been a huge asset (and made my life a lot simpler), was something Obama threw away at the first sign of trouble — the public option — and it was a bad mistake, that’s made the ACA a lot worse and the process more frustrating for everyone.
The health care system stinks, and while the ACA fixed some problems (getting rid of preexisting conditions, helping expand access by a little, though not as much as anyone hoped), it’s also made things a whole lot more complicated and failed to effectively tackle the worst problem with our system (cost).
It was better than nothing, but I don’t think it’s good enough to sing its praises. A simpler bills that nixed preexisting conditions, allowed people to stay on their parents’ insurance until 26 and increased medicaid funding would have been 90% as effective as the ACA, with about 5% of the grief — and had the President gone that route, there would have been no “Tea Party,” the democrats wouldn’t have lost the majority in the house, and they could have tried to pass a bill that allowed people to buy into medicare a year or two later, once people had the benefits of the what would have been a much more popular health care bill. That could have set the country onto the path of single payer.
So while I think the President has plenty of big successes to put to his name (getting out of Afghanistan, ending DADT, helping push for marriage equality), I don’t think the ACA is going to be remembered as fondly as anyone would like. It’s at best a bandaid until we can get something better, hopefully with our next President.
That “simpler bill” is what the Republicans are proposing now and it would wreck the exchanges since you lose the economy of scale that comes from the mandate and ensuring everyone has to pay into the pool. It’s been remarkably more successful and reducing and containing costs than predicted, it’s lowered the deficit, and in about ten or fifteen years it’ll be a lot easier to patch it with a public option. That climate doesn’t exist now. It would’ve failed the senate, and it’s not Obama’s fault but the system that allows lobbyists to buy the finance committee. Interest group rated “liberals” like Maria Cantwell came out against it because of that interest money. I’m on my phone but this is a good Vox article on the how. http://www.vox.com/2015/1/7/7503247/obamacare-full-time
https://gradycarter.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/the-very-real-impact-of-obamacare-opposition-in-one-map-vox/
applauding the aggregate “cheaper than expected” costs, while forgetting about all thousands of dollars a year people are now forced to spend for services that they then can’t afford because of high deductibles is missing the forest for the trees.
Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias often do that, though, which is one of the reasons why I’ve never been huge fans of them.
They’ll applaud something because it’s costing the government less than expected, but aren’t overly concerned that parents aren’t sending their kids to the ER when they’re sick because of extremely high copays or the fact that they’ll have to spend thousands a year before their insurance, which costs additional thousands of year, will kick in.
That’s not a win for them, but Klein and Yglesias haven’t lived that life, and they’ve been too close to the neoliberal establishment in DC.
Yes, I’ve never been very big fans of them.
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Re: your GOP comparison
I am in no way arguing in favor of backtracking, and I think you’ve also terribly articulated what the GOP today wants. They aren’t much interested in anything other than killing the ACA, and as we can see in Republican states across the country, they have no interest in medicaid expansion.
So, with all due respect, no, that’s NOT what they want… and I’m a little offended that you’d compare anything I said to what they’re saying now.
Further, I said that there was a better course the President could have taken, not that he should backtrack now.
And I’m right about that. Obviously, no one can rewind time, but if we can’t learn from our mistakes in the past, we’re bound to repeat them. We need to learn that giant, unpopular bills are dumb ideas if they can be separated into 2-3 popular ones, each of which can be passed in ways to build momentum and political capital instead of destroy it.
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Finally, re: medicaid and the exchanges…
I really think you’re confused about medicaid, the exchanges and the pool. A medicaid expansion has very little to do with the actual exchange or the pool for the exchanges, and so doesn’t really belong that heavily in the conversation about the exchange’s pool.
If someone’s eligible for medicaid by income, they’re not ‘eligible’ for plans on the exchanges — and are thus in their own ‘pool.’
The mandate is needed for the exchange to keep the exchange’s prices down — certainly — but medicaid isn’t a part of that. It’s basically its own thing.
That’s a simplistic explanation, of course… but the point is that we could have had a medicaid expansion bill without the exchanges, and it would have worked fine. Creating the exchanges without the mandate wouldn’t, but it’s largely a separate issue from medicaid.
The system fails. Everyone knows that. Democrats know it. The Heritage Foundation knew it when it drew up the original blueprints for what became “Obamacare” and Republicans know it when they try to remove the mandate to destroy it.
It will be hard for the GOP to kill the beneficial aspects of the bill– like pre-existing conditions, etc. So if they kill the mandate, then the entire system will be financially unstable, and would probably collapse.
If everyone’s payroll deduction for their family health insurance suddenly goes from $250/week to $1250/week, and insurance companies are failing anyway, that could be what gets the public option or even single payer back in the game.
I agree that the ACA was not a great bill. But, given that it was the best available option after 70 YEARS of failed attempts, I think it will (either by design or happy accident) function as a table setting for future, better, reforms.
The pre-existing condition thing gripes me because it was 90% solved before the ACA. Kennedy-Kassebaum stopped this exclusion decades ago for all employee sponsored plans. It only applied to those purchasing a plan directly, about 2% of the overall market. All that had to be done was to extend the existing law to all policies. Problem solved with no grotesque market upheaval.
Markets are amoral and have little justification in health care.
And the reason those buying directly is so small is because (1) the pooling rules made that insanely expensive; and (ii) people with pre-existing conditions dropped out of the market altogether. The problem isn’t solved by driving people out of the market and then saying “see, the market works!” and so I consider this stat of yours to be horseshit.
I wasn’t Medicaid eligible and would’ve gone six months without health care under your scenario-the subsidized exchanges were a lifeline. Klein and Yglesias actually like the ACA as a preferred policy outcome-I don’t, never have, but I do not see how attacking ACA as weak gets us better health care or a public option. I don’t see endorsing Republican talking points on killing the mandate as doing anything other than killing Obamacare. It’s better than nothing, and it was dead on arrival on the hill thanks to Democrats like Baucus and Cantwell. The President could have done more, it wouldn’t have worked and it wouldn’t have stopped the opposition he had. There’d still be a tea party and we’d still lose the Congress regardless since the opposition was funded by millions of insurance dollars. Until we get money out of politics the special interests will find a way to kill single payer, just ask Vermont.
Republicans in office
.
…bailout of Walll Street in the fall of 2008, whil Barack Obama was still in the Senate.
The scale of the Democratic losses in 2010 and 2014 I attribute to President Obama’s inability to get his message across and to manage public expectations. The Republican propaganda machine has been hard at work almost from the day he was inaugurated, and the Obama administration has rarely been able to challenge it effectively.
was compromised after Bush and with the election of Obama and is now more like the KKK than anything.
I went to the “Tea Party Platform” and was wondering how you equate them with the KKK?
To the extent that they are so opposed to government spending, they only oppose it when Democrats do it, and not when Republicans do it (Medicare Part D).
That said, the opposition to Obama was FAR more intense, organized and vituperative than anything that happened in the 90s, even during impeachment. So I guess it at least plausible that the increased energy of the Tea Party is a result of one obvious difference between Presidents Clinton and Obama… Also, the “I hate this President” crap that exists all the time has on more than one occasion taken on a tone that is more like the KKK than, say, the Heritage Foundation.
All that said, I am not sure that the characterization is entirely fair, because the economic situation in 2009-10 was so very different than at any time in the 90s. A really bad economy freaks people the hell out. I don’t necessarily think that the Tea Party would be much more quiescent if “Obamacare” were instead called “Clintoncare.”
…by that guy (Rick Santelli or something like that?) who had a temper tantrum about Obama’s stimulus on the floor of the Chicago Exchange in front of CNBC cameras. There was legitimate frustration about the 2008 bailout, but if that were the tea party they would have been a movement of the left.
Yep, that’s what Duncan Hunter thought too.
I guess that means he ain’t a joke after all?
…but it remains to be seen if Warren herself will. My money’s on HRC.
… as usual.
n/t