2020 Democratic Presidential Nominees

Strickland33 said:

Who outside of this Mankini parody is claiming that the caucus was rigged exactly?

You would think the claim would be widespread given how much birdman talks about it!

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TownieDeac said:

Saw a few kingfishers, they’re really cool looking.

As to the rest, I’ve pretty repeatedly posted the Iowa caucus wasn’t rigged. That’s never been my contention. That was definitely embarrassing though. I’m talking about looking at the committees for the convention.

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birdman said:

S2M is pushing the "the caucuses and the counting were rigged against Bernie" line pretty hard on this thread, and that's after he joined the tunnels convo pushing the "Pelosi held back the articles of impeachment in a deliberate attempt to hurt Bernie's chances in Iowa" theory. That's why your previous statement "I agree with a lot of what he posts but you gotta know your audience man" was pretty perplexing to me.

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TownieDeac said:

I mean his actual analysis not the articles/tweets he posts. One thing I rarely see reflected here is a diagnosis of 2016 that places blame on the party as a whole instead of Sanders or Clinton. I definitely get that Clinton supporters were sour about Sanders not endorsing soon or hard enough and for some of his supporters defecting or staying home. What I think is missed in that analysis is that Clinton (and a lot of her surrogates since) have leaned really heavily on identity politics in their pitch to America. But it’s a really hollow pitch, it favors “representation” over policy. It supports candidates with awful records in vulnerable communities and then scoffs at that claim. That alternative view is what I see reflected in S2M’s voice that I don’t see a lot of other places here. But as I also said earlier, the more you push claims of conspiracy the more people are likely to stay home, and we can’t afford that.

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Strickland33 said:

Who outside of this Mankini parody is claiming that the caucus was rigged exactly?

You would think the claim would be widespread given how much birdman talks about it!

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ImTheCaptain said:

brasky

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DeaconSig said:

Brasky mainly, and the M&M bros less so.

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PhDeac said:

Are Bernie supporters trying to get on those committees?

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ImTheCaptain said:

to be fair, i did start a thread in 2016 called "Ongoing Dem Debacle"

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Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.

If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong.

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The classic view is that the pool of American voters is basically fixed: About 55 percent of eligible voters are likely to go to the polls, and the winner is determined by the 15 percent or so of “swing voters” who flit between the parties. So a general election campaign amounts to a long effort to pull those voters in to your side.

Bitecofer has a nickname for this view. She calls it, with disdain, the “Chuck Todd theory of American politics”: “The idea that there is this informed, engaged American population that is watching these political events and watching their elected leaders and assessing their behavior and making a judgment.”

“And it is just not true.”

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In 2016, the pollsters had the race largely wrong, but the academic forecasters got it mostly right, even though many ended up doubting their formulas after they spat out a likely victory for Trump, since such an outcome seemed impossible.

But even the more academic forecasts, like the polling models, are based on longstanding assumptions about why and how candidates win elections. And sometimes an event occurs that blows up those assumptions.

In Bitecofer’s experience, that event wasn’t Trump; it was the Tea Party. She was still a graduate student in 2010 when a wave of conservative populism returned the Republicans to power in the House. According to any conventional theory of politics, that wave made no sense. Two years prior the GOP had run the economy into the ground; under a Democratic president and a fully Democratic Congress, the economy had stopped its slide and begun to recover. How could the Democrats lose 63 seats in a brutal shellacking two years after totally routing the Republicans?

The prevailing analysis was that Democrats had overreached on policy: After Obamacare, the stimulus, the bank and auto bailouts, the center just revolted. But when Americans picked a president in 2012, they didn’t seem so appalled; Obama won again. The 2014 midterms confounded the polls; the generic ballot heading into Election Day had the two parties basically tied in the national generic ballot, but when the votes came in, the Republicans added seats to their House majority and routed the Democrats in the Senate, picking up nine seats.

For most election forecasters, these results meant more data, and they went back and tweaked their models. For Bitecofer, at the beginning of her career, they became the foundation of her thinking.

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As she delved further into the data on 2016, Bitecofer noticed something else. As much as the media had harped on the narrative that a majority of white women had voted for Trump, the election also signaled the first time that a majority of college-educated white men had voted for the Democratic Party. There was a long-term-realignment happening in America, and 2016 had accelerated it.

Part of Bitecofer’s job involved polling Virginia, and she saw a Democratic counterwave building there in 2017. She noted to Democrats in the state that they should spend resources in areas that had traditionally been off limits. Had they done so, Bitecofer says, they could have flipped the Legislature that year. (Instead it flipped in 2019.)

When 2018 rolled around, she saw what was coming: “College educated white men, and especially college educated white women,” she said, “were going to be on fucking fire.”

It didn’t matter who was running; it mattered who was voting. From there, the model followed. She put out her forecast for the general election when there were still candidates battling it out in primaries.

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Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven, in part, by a new way to think about why Americans vote the way they do. She counts as an intellectual mentor Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who popularized the concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than by any particular policy goals.

In a piece explaining his work in POLITICO Magazine, Abramowitz wrote: “Over the past few decades, American politics has become like a bitter sports rivalry, in which the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump.”

Bitecofer took this insight and mapped it across the country. As she sees it, it isn’t quite right to refer to a Democratic or Republican “base.” Rather, there are Democratic and Republican coalitions, the first made of people of color, college-educated whites and people in metropolitan areas; the second, mostly noncollege whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties.

“In the polarized era, the outcome isn’t really about the candidates. What matters is what percentage of the electorate is Republican and Republican leaners, and what percentage is Democratic and Democratic leaners, and how they get activated,” she said.

Accordingly, she believed that whom the Democrats nominated didn’t matter much, and while the rest of the country focused on the districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump, she thought those were already mostly in the bag, and so focused instead on the 20 or so districts where Trump performed worse than Mitt Romney had in 2012. Those were places with latent Democratic possibility, and had the national party recognized it earlier, they could have flipped even more seats.

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TownieDeac said:

Here’s a good example, with Sanders perhaps the closest thing the party has to a front runner right now, this Clinton trash tour seems more damaging than anything Sanders did in 2016

I suppose in general we all spend a lot of time relititating 2016

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ImTheCaptain said:

to be fair, i did start a thread in 2016 called "Ongoing Dem Debacle"

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JuiceCrewAllStar said:

I think about this, and even more so about the scenario where Bernie gets elected and is unable to advance his agenda at all -- I wonder what it does to the movement

it can get you cynical, but ultimately I settle on the idea that you can't play scared or else you'll never really get anywhere


but at the end of the day, you have to stick with your ideology -- history has shown time and time again that the popular thing isn't necessarily the right thing

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ImTheCaptain said:

i guess we all forget that Hillary Clinton is the head of the DNC and representative of all registered dems, even literally every one here who says she should GTFO

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Louis Gossett Jr said:

I mostly agree with the Strickland article, I mean who the fuck is a swing voter these days and if that is the case our elected leaders fates depend on what amounts to the dumbest of citizens.

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