…and is favored in Hawai’i, which starts its caucuses in a few minutes. Between 2008 and 2016 it seems HRC can’t organize a caucus ground game to save her life. In many of these caucus states I’ve heard what’s left of the Dems is a very liberal rump, but Sanders does well in caucus states that are generally more blue too. Even though I’m very enthusiastic for her and will be crushed if she is denied the nomination I guess I just have to admit she is not the type of candidate people get emotional about. For me that’s fine. I hardly look at how a campaign is going, but rather how good a President one would be. Hence Kerry over Dean, Clinton over Obama, and Clinton over Sanders. HRC would do better in the days when candidates “stood” for President rather than “ran” for President, except for the pesky irony that in those days women need not apply.
I do also wonder where HRC has been. Sanders emails have pointed out that she has spent time with big donors, with the obvious goal of pointing out the different modi operandi of the campaigns. However, I’ve hardly heard of any Clinton rallies in states that voted today or Tuesday and lots of Sanders rallies. As I type this, Sanders is speaking is Wisconsin; not sure where Clinton is today. I’m sure she will maintain both her popular and delegate lead, but in the most recent states she should have been able to hold Sanders under 2/3 with minimal effort.
almost assured. Washington is a very white state and it’s also a caucus state. Sanders runs well in states with those two factors. Alaska is also a caucus.
What is more interesting is the margin. Right now, 75% to 25%.
..but as you allude to, the margin is “interesting”. I think it’s inexcusable. On our side all states are proportional so win or lose, the Clinton campaign should still have been trying to get as many delegates as possible.
surprisingly inept.
I ask this sincerely. I have to think that at this level, each side knows how much each state is worth, and they don’t participate in places due to limited resources. I mean, Sanders must have just given up on Alabama, and Clinton on Washington, right? I don’t know much about campaigns, but it’s hard for me to imagine in a presidential campaign one side “forgetting” about a major state. Is it ineptitude, or limited resources?
These are all proportional contests. None are winner take all.
Now it could be that both campaigns have in fact calculated the cost of the marginal delegate in each congressional district and (for caucus states) caucus down to a fare-thee-well.
It’s kind of an odd coincidence, however, if that calculus corresponds with the conventional wisdom about Washington and Alabama. Diminishing returns would suggest otherwise.
Quite apart from that, I am disappointed in the Sanders campaign effort in one respect, for all that he has exceeded expectations. I see no evidence that he is using this opportunity to build the organization that will be needed to make a “political revolution” of any sort a reality.
Of course electoral campaigns notoriously have trouble doing that, but they are aimed solely at electing the candidate. An honest-to-gosh political movement would be a lasting legacy with the potential for a great deal of influence to do good.
There’s tons of reason to give up in some places, both mathematical and narrative based. From a technical perspective, if the dollars and staff time necessary to gain one more delegate is large, it may not be worth it — you might get an incremental delegate in an upcoming state with fewer resources. From a narrative based perspective, it doesn’t matter if your candidate loses 27-73 or 31-69. It’s still a blowout.
If the money is more efficiently spent elsewhere and you can’t change the narrative, it makes sense to go elsewhere.
I’m not going to repeat what I said about this exact topic in the post you responded to upthread except to say it seems unlikely either campaign performed any such calculation.
Your own argument, that its about the narrative and delegates don’t count, may turn out to be true, but it could be a squeaker, and there is no way to know in this election.
A campaign that does not fight for every delegate is guilty of strategic malpractice.
Sanders in particular would make a huge change in the narrative, and possibly the math, were he to grow his appeal to minority voters and start electing delegates with those votes. (How? Well, not by not campaigning.)
He skipped the entire south and got killed there, which is how Clinton ran up an insurmountable lead in the first place. Which is also exactly how Obama won in 2008. He skipped them completely, and lost by huge margins, instead spending his resources on northern “wins” that got him one or two more delegates in those states than Clinton.
Sanders put a lot of resources into the South; for example he spent more money into South Carolina and had more paid staff than Clinton..
Alas, Sanders efforts tend to reinforce his negatives among black voters, as also happened in Illinois and Ohio.
Rachel Maddow did a bit on that tonight as well. What has he done to reinforce negatives among black voters, and given his history on civil rights, why does he have those negatives to begin with?
Why do you think that? Why do you think that experienced, savvy campaign folks wouldn’t consider the marginal value of delegates when deciding where to invest their limited resources of money and time?
and already in the calculations where Clinton is assured a victory with an insurmountable lead. This is done, it’s been done for a while even with these states included. Atlantic states are heavy on Clinton, always have been and still are, CA is a 10 pt win for Clinton, maybe a little closer. That where the delegates are and will take her over the top.
I’m waiting on the false, momentum posts, or why the media isn’t covering these wins baloney. To stunt those ahead of time, it’s because they are narrative the actual story.
with the Guardian.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/after-a-night-of-sweeping-victories-bernie-is-back/
At PEC, Sam Wang says that Sanders will have to start cutting into Hillary’s core support to catch up. He gives Bernie a 5% chance of catching Clinton:
He actually does the math. At this point, I’m mostly interested in Bernie’s effect on Clinton and the Democratic Party. I think it’s positive.
…is here.
In the diary I did say that Clinton will almost certainly maintain her lead, but Sanders is pushing the momentum narrative so far as to challenge her to a debate in New York of all places, which she of course represented in the Senate.
Bernie can’t make up the delegate gap. He crushed her in the Washington state caucuses but for his trouble earned a grand total of 5 more delegates than she did. There’s just not enough time on the calendar or states left on the map for him to catch her. Bernie’s inability to capitalize on the Michigan momentum the following Tuesday essentially ended this fight. She and her campaign know this and they are, correctly I would argue, focused on building the war chest they believe will be needed for the general election. Trump is doing the same so for the presumptive Democratic nominee to NOT match that would be negligence.
Permit me to correct the delegate math here. Winning all 3 contests yesterday by approximately 3 to 1 margins in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, Bernie won a total of 104 pledged delegates to Hillary’s 38 so he picked up 66 delegates on her lead for about a 23% cut into her pledged delegate lead. This is substantial and has been under-reported by the mainstream media.
Along with the 3 contests that Sanders won last week starting with the Primary Abroad, he has won 6 out of the last 7 and the 7th, Arizona is in question as it was a mess and is being investigated for voter suppression seemingly against Democrats. This doesn’t just look and feel like momentum — it is momentum! And yes it is still a long shot to overtake Hillary, but it could happen.
Continuing the race draws attention to the serious focus of our democratic candidates as compared with the sophomoric jibes and tweets of the other party. Let’s not forget, that in 2008 the HRC campaign continued the fight not only all the way through the last of the primaries, but up to and including the DNC’s rules committee — that’s politics.
received all the free press Bernie deserved. He’s received millions of dollars worth of coverage for nothing. Trump is a legitimate story, but typical of American politics, the right-wing wacko gets the attention while the lefty gets bupkis.
LOL @ Bob’s comment at the top. Clinton won by losing! Just like they planned! This is not at all exactly like 2008 where Clinton has only one plan and if it doesn’t work her team of overpaid consultants can’t think on their feet!
Even if you can’t come around on really complex ideas like climate change and evolution and gravity, surely you can get behind math and probability.
The order of the 55ish elections has a huge impact on this so-called “momentum.” If we swap the dates of Washington & Georgia and Arkansas & Utah, there’d be no difference in the outcome or the total number of delegates, and no so-called momentum.
Why no difference in the outcome? Because Mr. Sander’s popularity in Washington and Utah has been steady and obvious throughout, as has Ms. Clinton’s popularity in Georgia and Arkansas. Why no momentum? Because had the dates of those two pairs of states been swapped, Mr. Sanders would have “won” roughly 44 percent of the delegates in the seven consecutive contests rather than 66 percent.
2,026 pledged delegates give a candidate the majority. All 2,026 count the same, and the counting isn’t done until June 14th. The arbitrary order of the contests doesn’t change that reality. Nor does the fact that the next two contests, Wisconsin and Wyoming, will also likely go toward Mr. Sanders, Wyoming overwhelmingly so. That’ll be 386 delegates over 9 contests, with about 66% going to Mr. Sanders. Momentum? Nope. Know what the next six states are after that: NY, MD, DE, PA, CT, and RI — where Clinton is likely to win all six, taking a majority of the 631 delegates. My bet is that, by number of delegates, Ms. Clinton wins those Northeast six by more than Mr. Sanders will win the past seven plus WI plus WY. On April 27, we’ll look back at the past 15 contests worth 1,017 delegates and observe (1) that the aggregate outcome of those 15 contests is close to 50-50, (2) that Ms. Clinton is still winning pledged delegates by about 230+, and that (3) Mr. Sanders will have to win about 3/4ths of the delegates of California to win the race, something he simply can’t do given Ms. Clinton’s strength in primary states, populous states, states with brown skinned voters, and states with urban populations. I ain’t saying Mr. Clinton will win the majority of California’s delegates, but I am saying that she’ll win enough that Mr. Sanders simply doesn’t have the numbers.
And that’s the point of this diatribe. Momentum is nonsense. It’s not like 55 laps around a racetrack, each lap the same. You can’t meaningfully compare the outcome of specific elections when the set of 55 elections are so heterogeneous. Instead, the correct way to interpret the results is in the context of the big picture — how is the candidate doing not compared to the opponent, but compared to how well that candidate must do in that state given equally optimistic outcomes in the remaining states for that candidate to reach 2,026. Ms. Clinton doesn’t need a majority of votes in Abroad, UT, AZ, ID, AK, HI, and WA, precisely because she’s got NY, MD, PA, DE, CT, RI coming up.
I have a different take on why she’s not campaigning where she isn’t certain to do well. She doesn’t want to be asked, let alone answer, questions that are non-adoring.
She’s limiting her exposure to pre-digested places. And it will be interesting to see how much enthusiasm she has in the general in places she has obviously written off. But, as Clinton always does, she has a ready made scapegoat ready to roll in Bernie so it won’t be her fault. Heck, I remember when the health care plan was beginning to tank, it was because of Hugh Rodamy passing away, so she wasn’the able to give it enough of her time.
do with not throwing away money or wasting time where it is unnecessary or anything like that.
Or aren’t you saying.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
…but if momentum were completely meaningless IA and NH wouldn’t fight tooth and nail every cycle to maintained their valued early positions. They want to have influence over the choices the other states have and who seems to be winning. Ditto the strategy the South has long had of voting as a bloc on mostly one date. I’ve sometimes wished there were a way to seal results until they are opened on the floor of convention so that later states could not know how earlier states voted, but I see no practical way of doing that.
Because, if nothing else, we just don’t know where things stand. We also have a much larger field, so you get into three body problems of unpredictability. But at this point in the game, with just two candidates, I just don’t buy momentum in the 50%+1 sense. If a candidate is consistently outperforming polls or other rational expectations, then that may indicate something is going on. But winning roughly the percent of delegates expected in the middle of the campaign? In my mind, the only information there is that the rational expectations were pretty on point, and we should continue to expect those predictions to come true going forward.
materializes. Momentum is an abstraction from physics. If it is to be applied to politics, it has to materialize in something. Like press and votes. It won’t generate much press because The Donald is still sucking all that up.
In terms of votes this weekend, it should be said that Bernie outperformed his targets, according to FiveThirtyEight; however, the basic math, a Stomv points out, hasn’t changed. We know he tends to do well in white states and states with caucuses. He needs to eat into Hillary’s support to a significant degree. There’s no sign he’s going to do that. If he does, life will get very interesting.
I normally don’t correct, but will correct this one:
Rubio won just MN and PR if I recall, and was never ahead in either popular vote or the delegate count.
If Bernie’s momentum and “home state” status in New York gives him a YUGE win in New York State, how does this change things, if things change at all?
Some call New York Hillary’s home state, but I’d call it a toss up.
Yes, Hillary has lived in New York and Bill has an office in Harlem and they do vacation in the Hamptons, but Bernie was born in Brooklyn (where he worked as a carpenter) and still has that wonderful Brooklyn accent.
So I think this will be interesting.
based on the tracking polls, same for PA and NJ, plus 30 in MD. There are a lot of people and delegates in those states. Nothing like the 18,000 total D voters in ID. Sander will need to win YUGE in NY to change anything and that’s not by winning by 2%. Can’t blame Sanders for trying but the last week was already known and factored in to the math.
Clinton losing NY by any amount is an unmitigated disaster.
Home state. 20-30+ point polling lead. Race already decided. It likely won’t be (and shouldn’t be) close.
Having this race of the most qualified and well-known candidate to ever run be anywhere near close against a little known, old socialist from Vermont is already pretty disturbing. If Clinton loses New York, Democrats need to disabuse themselves of the notion that she can win a national general election. Her campaign is lousy. Losing NY would show that it’s dangerously lousy.
…but still wouldn’t change that she makes a better President.
I know we disagree on that point. 🙂
From a campaign perspective, however, I think it’s clear Bernie has done much better given what the campaign has to work with. He has vastly overperformed. She has underperformed. Some of that is the nature of a two-person race, but this should not have been close and she should have pulled away faster once the math (on committed delegates, at least) became clear. Clinton has never shown an ability to go up, if she lost NY, the campaign would demonstrate it can’t even defend huge leads. I don’t expect that to happen.
That said, Tad Devine (and others) better be offered a top job on her campaign for the general.
…that being President and being a candidate are really two very different skill sets.
but as I have said, the best for me is Bernie. I’m just a working man who wants security and a fair deal.
If Ms. Clinton wins 50%-1 or fewer votes in NY, there is no question that she dramatically under performed. If it were an isolated incident, she’d still be on track to win the majority of the elected delegates.
If this hypothetical comes true, it’s for a reason. What happened? And what does it mean for PA, MD, CT, DE, and RI coming up? Playing what-if without an explanation for the significant deviation from expectations isn’t helpful without the why. For example, if Ms. Clinton said something really offensive and awful just before the NY primary, she could lose NY and then go on to lose other states. But in that case performing poorly in NY isn’t the cause of the downfall, it’s the canary in the coal mine.
…in a political context home is considered where the person has political history. Sanders has only been elected from Vermont, and Clinton from NY (though AR is arguable since she was their First Lady). Frankly, I think you’re reaching.