Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Hillary Clinton wins Nevada…

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MSNBC and CNN have just projected Hillary Clinton as the winner of the Nevada caucus over Bernie Sanders — 52%  to  47%.

We are so happy for you, Secretary Clinton.  You go, girl !  SCORE !

Fred Rich LaRiccia

 

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  1. The “neutral” Harry Reid told the “neutral” Culinary Union to get its people out over these four-hour farcical exercises in “democracy”. The hotel industry was happy to pitch in, and paid workers to attend the caucus in Hilary territory. Your boss knew if you were voting the right way as he paid you to go exercise your supposed right.

    The more democratic the exercise, the better Bernie Sanders does. The easier it is to manipulate and limit participation, the better it is for Hillary Clinton. If this is the type of victory you’re proud of, well, more power to you.

    • …a long time Senator is good at GOTV! In a related story I am shocked, shocked I say, to discover that there is gambling going on in those establishments! Can you back up your accusations of what sounds like political bribery which I can’t imagine is legal? That sounds like quite the scandal the way you describe it. Anecdotally at least it sounds like Nevada Dems might prefer a primary, but thrashing it out with your neighbors in a caucus has its charms too.

      • A long time Senator is good at using her connections to manipulate a process, regardless of what voters might want. The news that you decide to characterize as “accusations” are available to anyone watching television. The facts are not in dispute…casino managers told workers to stay until the end of the caucus:

        http://www.wtma.com/news/nevada-culinary-workers-encouraged-to-stay-for-full-caucuses/

        Maybe you find your boss ad your union leadership tracking your vote “charming”. I find it the antithesis of democracy. Win at all costs might keep you from losing, but considering the anemic turnout numbers thus far, someone caring about the long-term health of the party might wonder about the true cost.

        • The candidates knew what they were and should know how to “manipulate” the process to use your term. Tonight is a bit late to complain about them; you just try your best to follow them and benefit from them. The accusation I pushed back on is not on encouraging them to stay; a good GOTV operation does that. You made it sound like the workers were being bribed specifically to the tune of, “We’ll slip you $100 bucks under the table if you vote for Hillary,” or something like that.

          • Eight years ago, I was annoyed when Obama won a greater number of delegates even though Hillary had more supporters. For similar reasons, I’m annoyed today when Hillary is given the “victory” because she knows the right people who know the right people. I never said that workers are being bribed; workers more likely to be pro-Hillary were paid by large corporations to participate in a democratic exercise where their vote was public knowledge while those in other industries and locations were not.

          • so, you want to defend a process that has people stand up for a candidate for 2-3 hours at their own work premises, declaring their votes publicly, in front of their bosses and union leadership?

            A lot of rules are morally bankrupt. Only in 2016 do we seem to be teaching people that “rules are rules.” Bad rules shouldn’t be obeyed, they should be erased from existence.

        • Political organizers and casino managers encouraged their workers to stay at Nevada’s Democratic caucuses until they finish in order to accommodate long lines at caucus sites.

          But your comment upthread says:

          The more democratic the exercise, the better Bernie Sanders does.

          So which is it? This was an undemocratic exercise, or one with long lines?

          • It’s not democratic if everyone knows how you vote, including those whose goodwill you need to eat and have a home.

              • and they said they were going to establish a process like our caucuses here… we’d be sending strongly worded letters filled with questions about the legitimacy of that process.

                Let’s just put it this way: if our soldiers serving overseas, the sick and people who can’t have the chance to vote in the type of ‘election’ employed, it’s not a democratic election.

                And it’s embarrassing that Republicans are actually fixing this process (making voting anonymous, quick and in some states shifting to a primary system), while Democrats grasp onto outdated and unfair caucus practices with ever more might.

                • It is a party nomination process, though if I had to guess now NV is likely to try a primary in 2020.

    • Hell, the very fact that people know who you’re voting for is not something we’d tolerate anywhere.

      End all caucuses, yesterday. Any state party that refuses to do so should have its delegates forfeited by the DNC.

        • I meant anywhere outside the country.

          but, yes, Iowa, Nevada, Minnesota and any other caucus state I can’t think of off the top of my head.

          Caucuses may have made sense in 1816, but not in 2016.

      • this is not the time to be whining about the caucus rules that ALL the candidates agreed to play by.

        Fred Rich LaRiccia

        • Sanders could refuse to play by these rules? No. Granted, the Nevada Democrats did try to get a primary, and the Republicans refused. I’ve been against caucuses for quite some time now — they screwed Hillary eight years ago. Just because they benefited her at the moment is no reason to support these contests.

          I get that some supporters will back anything that benefits their candidates. That’s fine, but it isn’t me.

          • tonight Bernie supporters should be congratulating Hillary supporters just as Senator Sanders did when he called Secretary Clinton to concede.

            And just as I did when Senator Sanders won the New Hampshire primary.

            Fred Rich LaRiccia

          • …so long as they don’t actively discriminate a la the “White primary”. As far as I can tell these are processes that everyone was given equal opportunity to participate in if they make it a priority. For the same reasons I defend our own state caucus/convention process with a 15% threshold to make the ballot.

            • Caucuses don’t give everyone an equal opportunity to participate. The problem is that you generally have to be present for a substantial fraction of the caucus time and that the total caucus time is much shorter than a primary. If your shift conflicts with the caucus, it is hard to justify getting fired in order to vote. And how do you expect all parents to vote without leaving their children unattended for several hours? Any process that doesn’t work for people with little control over their working hours is not truly democratic. Any process that requires children to be either left unattended or watched by people who can’t vote is not truly democratic.

                • I suspect a community with a large constituency of that nature would avoid holding its caucus on a Saturday.

                • This process disenfranchises them.

                  Primaries don’t. In primaries, you have:

                  -All day to vote (which would have enabled observant Jews the opportunity to vote in Nevada — because their Sabbath ends on sundowns on Saturdays).
                  -Absentee ballots or early ballots, which would enable parents, soldiers serving abroad, the sick or elderly, and people who work or people who have children the ability to vote.

                  Primaries enable everyone to vote. Caucuses exclude almost everyone the reasonable opportunity to vote — and that’s born out in voter turnout totals, where in contested Presidential nomination contests caucuses have voter turnout around 10-15%, compared to primaries with turnouts around 50-60%.

                  Caucuses just don’t have legitimacy as a process. Period.

                • ..or rather my pixels. The process by which parties (as opposed to states) choose their candidates is NOT a democracy, but neither are they the smoke-filled rooms of say, 1816 to use a year you mentioned elsewhere. In 1816 it was ONLY the party poohbahs, mostly elected officials themselves or the otherwise well-connected who had ANY say in who became the candidate. Conventions with delegates chosen more broadly were still IIRC a few decades off. If there were a way to introduce proxy voting that might help. Personally, I prefer primaries for many of the reasons cited, but I will also defend the right of state parties to caucus and the legitimacy of the results.

              • Nobody is automatically barred from participating on the basis of a demographic feature that happens to apply to them. In the case of the Mass Dems we even have add-on delegates to ensure diversity. I didn’t say there were not inconveniences; I said there were no legal barriers. Every eligible voter has the right to register as a Dem by 1/31 and every registered Dem has the right to attend caucus in their town or ward.

                • I never thought I’d see Christopher implying that religious observance was an “inconvenience.” Live and learn.

                • …but what I was pushing back on was the idea that the party had rules expressly barring participation by certain religious or ethnic groups.

      • …that follow different principles. In our New England towns an open Town Meeting is arguably the purist form of democracy where the whole body of the people comes together to deliberate and decide. Yes, that means getting up and saying what you think if you wish and most votes are public. I have often said I’m not a fan of direct democracy for other reasons, but caucuses don’t meet that standard. This is not a public election, but a partisan nominating process.

        • that disenfranchises huge swaths of society.

          Caucuses do that, and there is no defending them as democratic, and I think there’s no view of the democratic party that can be defended in which one thinks the party should try to be inherently anti-democratic.

          (I get why someone who wishes we could return to the British monarchy could think that, but not most else.)

          • …I can now only refer my honourable friend to comments I have made previously on this matter (though FWIW I never have advocated a monarchy for the US though I’m open to being a member of the Commonwealth of Nations).

    • The more democratic the exercise, the better Bernie Sanders does.

      You’ve made a testable prediction that I think is likely to be proved wrong when we get to a bunch of primaries in a week or so.

    • our downraters can contradict Sabutai’s story here?

      Or is this just the typical silly season downrating game where we downrate comments made by supporters of the other candidate?

      It would be more interesting to get facts — or at least evidence.

    • He came out publicly for Clinton today so it sounds like he comes down on the side of lets see how my constituents vote first.

  2. Dean was already out of the race at this point in that cycle. Dean, a Hillary supporter, was a centrist Governor that Joe Trippi successfully turned into a progressive insurgent for a brief period of time. I was a Dean supporter and I remember him bragging about opposing gun control, welcoming confederate flag truck drivers into the party, and supporting civil unions and not gay marriage. Bernie has been ahead of the curve, and ahead of the Clinton’s, on all those issues. It’s not an apt comparison.

    Bernie lost Iowa by literally a few voters, Dean got third when it looked like he was going to win, and he then lost NH which Bernie won by double digits in all demographics. He was supposed to lose Nevada by 20 points and was neck and neck at 70% reporting yesterday until Clinton began to get a lead.

    Where they are similar is the media turning on them and spinning things to favor their rivals. The scream, incredibly tame compared to anything the Republican frontrunner has said this cycle, was overhyped to stall his joke run. Similarly his close finish in Nevada, arguably a loss for Hillary in the expectations game, has been spun by MSNBC and CNN as a crippling loss. I hate to think what a close finish in SC will be spun as, seeing as how she’s been projected to have it in the bag by 20 points all year.

    Can Bernie go to the distance and win? Probably not, I’m still a realist and I’m not expecting him to be the nomine. But he has done better than Dean did, and would make an excellent choice for DNC chair himself.

    • OK, I like Bernie. I am glad he is running in this primary. I think it’s important that Hillary Clinton feels pressure from the left and I agree with his assessment of how big money in politics is poisoning our country.

      That said, he would be a terrible choice for DNC chair. He has shown no inclination to strengthen the Democratic party in all his time in politics. He has no interest in party building and not much of a history of helping downballot Democratic races that I am aware of.

      • I think he’d make an amazing choice for President, but like sco, not a good choice for the DNC chair. Mind you, better than DWS. But we could abolish the DNC chair and let software run the party, and it would be better than DWS (substantially better, IMO).

        • One of my best friends is a computer scientist and he made the valid point over dinner the other day that you could program AIs to do the job of most of our elected officials. You could remove all sentience from the Senate and just have AIs playing their partisan parts and it wouldn’t change the nomination fight in the slightest.

    • Bernie is only the second coming of Dean if he’s the favorite and blows it with a timeless (and largely unfair) meme. He is not and never has been the favorite. All he’s really done is greatly overperform any expectations – the exact opposite of what Dean did once it got down to actually voting.

      I disagree on the DNC chair role. I think he’d be bad at that – although maybe good as a mentor to mobilize strong progressives to run. Unfortunately, the party apparatus is not much about building a truly progressive party.

      What happens after this race on both sides in terms of party strength is going to be fascinating.

      • Both are realists who offer more profound reform of the status quo than their primary opponents. Both face the full weight of attacks from the corporate media as a result. Both burned bright and then faded: that’s Dean’s history and my prediction for Sanders. I agree that Sanders has done better than Dean ever did — perhaps the Internet’s ability to empower the grassroots is having a greater effect this time around as the technology has become more powerful and widespread? — but I think the broad narrative will be similar in the end. History, some say, doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

  3. After seeing the results, I honestly think he could have pulled off an upset, if he had prepped his people better and run better GOTV.

    But he didn’t and, while he did not do too badly, he lost. Its all on him and his campaign, not on Harry Reid etc etc.

    Congrats to Mrs. Clinton and her people.

  4. changes in the politics of the Democratic Party. Regardless of the nomination, he’s changed and revealed changes that are taking place.

    (See my diary wallowing in Recent User Posts).

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