The 2016 US Election (Part I)

[The Romulan Republic]

Anyone want to make Super Tuesday predictions?

My worst case scenario: Bernie wins Vermont by a narrower margin than expected and loses everywhere else by more than five points. In that case, he should probably drop out on Wednesday.

My best case scenario: The Bern wins at least Vermont, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado (based on some polling and reports of endorsements), and comes fairly close in a few others, including Texas.

In that case, I think this'll continue well into March, maybe longer, with a small but not ridiculous chance of Sanders being the nominee.

[Soontir C'boath]

Damn, wish I was in Colorado right now.

I'm registered as an overseas voter from Colorado, but I called and apparently (presuming the person I talked to knew their job) their's no way to participate in the caucus unless you're actually in the state.

Pity, because I'd love to be voting for the Bern in a close state.

Wait a second, if you are registered to vote overseas, how do you not have had a ballot to mail back?

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, as I understand it from what I recall being told over the phone, there's no way to vote in the Caucus unless you actually live in the state. Don't ask me, I don't write the caucus rules.

I can vote in pretty much any other election in Colorado by mailing in a ballot, yes, right down to the level of the county where I last lived in Colorado. They're actually very accommodating of overseas voters.

[Gaidin]

Caucuses they literally put you in a room, shut the doors, candidate reps shout at you for a few minutes and you make a decision and you do a little dance around the room and they count who has more and people are bound to represent certain candidates to the next stage of the caucus.

If you can't be in the room because you're overseas, well...it's probably one of those moments you wish they did a primary. I imagine they have ways then.

[The Romulan Republic]

Apparently Democrats living overseas can vote in the Democratic Primary via Democrats Abroad, an organization which, according to their home page, "...is recognized as a "state" Party by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and is represented on the DNC by eight voting members, as well as at the quadrennial Democratic National Convention."

http://www.democratsabroad.org

[Omega18]

and comes fairly close in a few others, including Texas.

The problem with this assumption is the polling strongly contradicts it at this point, with Fivethirtyeight giving Hillary a projected 28% edge in the recent Texas polling averages.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ele ... emocratic/

The reason why this is the case is virtually all the reasonably recent polling has Hillary with huge leads, with the closest thing to an exception also being the most dated poll still from the month of February at this point. (And also contradicted by a more recent poll from the same firm along with suffering from too tiny a sample size in the first place.)

Another ominous sign with regards to Sander's general prospects March 1st is that the two most recent polls in Tennessee have Hillary with a 26% lead (with older ones having even larger margins for the record).
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ele ... emocratic/

The problem is that the Fivethirtyeight projections of how Sanders needed to do in order to at least tie the race in delegates by the convention had Sanders actually winning the state by 2%. (Basically presumably due to the demographics of only about 17% of the state being African American among other issues.)
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ber ... se-states/

While the recent polling results suggest this element of the results model was wrong with regards to Tennessee, this means as a matter of mathematics with regards to convention delegates Sanders has to do better in all the other states he was supposed to win in that projection such as for example managing to win in Massachusetts by actually more than 11 percent. (Which obviously is not at all likely to happen given the recent polling numbers.)

Note these calculations with respect to polling are not even factoring in any impact from the South Carolina results on voter behavior at all.

While I'm not ruling out Sanders still conceivably winning 5 states on Tuesday, the problem is delegate distribution means even that scenario those results mostly are going to be narrow wins which don't remotely compensate for how Hillary is going to do in the Southern states. (Vermont is the likely exception for Sanders but it simply doesn't represent nearly enough delegates.) While the wins may be what Sanders uses to argue he is still effectively in the race, after Super Tuesday any path to the nomination in terms of delegates is going to be realistically extremely dubious.

Sanders also has to worry about states such as Louisiana and Mississippi coming up soon, and unless he dramatically turns things around before March 15 when North Carolina and Florida are on the calendar among others, basically any remotely plausible scenario where Sanders ends up the nominee at the convention no longer exists. (The only exception would be a scenario where Hillary really does get indicted or something similar and drop out, and there still would be a potential question if the convention would actually go with Sanders or actually pick Joe Biden instead in that situation since that would remain an option.)

[The Romulan Republic]

If the convention picked someone who didn't even run (in the hypothetical scenario of Clinton dropping out/being forced out by circumstances) over Sanders, the backlash from Sanders supporters would not be pleasant.

I'd pretty much anticipate President Trump in that scenario.

[Omega18]

If the convention picked someone who didn't even run (in the hypothetical scenario of Clinton dropping out/being forced out by circumstances) over Sanders, the backlash from Sanders supporters would not be pleasant.

I'd pretty much anticipate President Trump in that scenario.

If its a scenario where Sanders was unable to beat Hillary in the first place, or potentially not even come remotely close with regards to delegates, that's a different scenario than some of the ones where super delegates simply basically hand the nomination to Hillary. (Biden also doesn't have all the issues that some Sanders supporters seem to have with Hillary.) Having said this, I will admit its possible Sanders ends up the nominee in that sort of situation which is why I chose to mention it in the first place even though I view it as increasingly implausible that such a thing would actually occur especially before the November election given long established behavior by the Department of Justice.

[The Romulan Republic]

Fair enough, I guess.

However, it would still, I think, offend a lot of Sanders supporters (with reason) to see the nomination handed to someone who never even ran over the guy who came in second.

Of course, for now this is all merely hypothetical.

[Elheru Aran]

Caucuses they literally put you in a room, shut the doors, candidate reps shout at you for a few minutes and you make a decision and you do a little dance around the room and they count who has more and people are bound to represent certain candidates to the next stage of the caucus.

If you can't be in the room because you're overseas, well...it's probably one of those moments you wish they did a primary. I imagine they have ways then.

Depends on the state. Here in Georgia my wife was able to just walk into the polling place, cast a vote, and walk out.

[Simon_Jester]

The mere fact that Sanders' candidacy is netting double-digit support even in his most disadvantageous states should be enough to send a fairly clear message to the Democratic party that there is a significant fraction of American voters who want the Democrats to be, oh, somewhere left of the 1992 Republican platform.

Those voters are only relevant if they are seriously threatening to abstein from voting (or vote for a minor party which is effectively the same thing in the US). As per Hotelling's law, if the base can be taken for granted then the major parties will end up almost next to each other on the issues, close to the median point where the most voters are attracted. If left wing voters always voted Democrat and right wing voters always voted Republican then this point would track the median political view of the population fairly closely (at least in the historical view, obviously your view may differ if you are on the ground at the time, emotionally comitted to the issues and full of perception biases)...

Despite being on the ground I'd actually agree with this, with one caveat: the major parties will end up close to the median point of politically participating voters. As a result, certain groups (like the elderly) are overrepresented in the weighting that determines this median, while other groups (like the unemployed and the young) are underrepresented.

The Republicans appearing to be significantly right of center strongly suggests that they are more worried about far-right voters giving up on the Republicans than the Democrats are of losing their base. This is a pretty common observation; what is less often said is that it is a rational strategy for extremists (of any stripe) to sit out one election and have their major party lose, if it forces a movement in their direction to regain their favour in the next election. Assuming of course that they still capture enough of the population for an outright win, and that the opposing party cannot move towards the center without losing their own base.

Personally I think the smartest strategy for the Democrats is to keep electing centrists for a few more cycles while the far right disintegrates and splinters, with parts calving off into la-la land while other parts age into irrelevance. It's fairly clear to me that this is where the current Republican Party is headed, comparing where they are and what they were in 1986, to 1996, to 2006, to now.

However, at the same time I am concerned that continuing to play this 'long game' may lead to disaster, because the long term viability of the US as an economic powerhouse and a functional democracy is deeply threatened by the status quo. We're essentially living in the aftermath of a class war won by the rich some time in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and the excesses resulting from the upper class enjoying the fruits of their victory are threatening to kill off the economic goose that lays the golden eggs. At least, the type of golden eggs the average American has been accustomed to enjoying their share of since 1945.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

In the end, Sanders dramatically under-performed his polling data; so Clinton wins roughly 74% to 26%. As usual, Bernie Sanders fails to exceed expectations (by a whopping 20 points too.) While Massachusetts polling data has either Clinton or Sanders up by about five points (i.e. it's a toss-up,) he's expected to lose by 25+ point margins across the entire South. And if the South turns out to be like South Carolina, then the polls are being exceedingly optimistic about Sanders' chances.

There are 1004 Democratic delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday. Clinton currently has 542 to Sanders' 83 (including superdelegates, and we can moan about how bad it looks if they put Clinton over the top, but they are part of the Democrats' nominating process, so deal with it.) Of the 1004 Super Tuesday delegates, 652 of them come from states where recent polls suggest Clinton has 20+ point victory margins. Of the remaining states, Vermont is expected to go to Sanders, Massachusetts might be in play, as might Oklahoma, and there isn't enough recent polling data to say much about Minnesota or Colorado. So if we assume that the 353 delegates in states where Sanders might be competitive break 50/50 for them overall, and go to Clinton by 30 point margins (again, Sanders is either performing to expectations, or underperforming them, so a 30 point loss in the South might be optimistic,) Clinton ends Super Tuesday with 1174 delegates to Sanders's 455, and only needs a minimum of 1209 more to secure the nomination. Sanders would have to first dig himself out of a 719 delegate hole, and there's nothing in the demographics or extant polling data that would suggest he can do that. The only way Sanders becomes the Democratic nominee is if Clinton A) dies from a heart attack, B) gets abducted by aliens, or C) gets indicted for her e-mails and is thrown into jail.

So, I think it's completely safe to write off Sanders at this point (but I've kinda been writing him off since about Iowa, so I might be biased here.) The drama of this nomination isn't going to be if Clinton is in danger from Bernie Sanders, it's how long until she gets enough delegates to put him to bed, or until he decides to stop being a spoiler and drop out. And, I now really hope he does so quickly, as it's also clear that Clinton has some electability issues of her own that she's going to have to fix; which will be harder for her to do if she's burning through resources fighting Sanders.

What bothers me is people treating it like it means the election is effectively over tonight.

Its a good night for her, but its still just one bloody state.

But it is. Sanders was only expected to lose South Carolina by about thirty points, not by nearly fifty! Clinton's figured out that the best way to appeal to black and other minority voters is to run as Obama's successor, and they turned out for her in numbers comparable to what Obama managed. And Sanders' proposals, while clearly exciting for about a third of the Democratic electorate, have proven to be a distinct turn-off for older, pragmatic, Democratic voters.

[Terralthra]

I've got an idea. How about we don't "write off" a candidate after 3% of the population votes? I know this may seem like a crazy idea, but maybe wait for like, 25% of the population to vote before deciding the election is over? The primary has barely started and you're declaring the winner. South Carolina is certainly a huge setback, and the most distressing thing to me is that the Democratic Party is essentially satisfied with advocating for the status quo. That's a quintessentially conservative position, and I'm a progressive. If Sanders drops out, I simply have no one for whom to vote.

[General Zod]

Remember what happened the last time Hillary ran for office? She putzed out of steam after Super Tuesday and basically floundered around since she didn't expect Obama to last that long. I'm going to wait and see what happens after March 1st to declare Sanders dead in the water.

[Gaidin]

What's really interesting about Super Tuesday this year is the setup. It's got people literally calling it SEC Tuesday, making it a bunch of possible repeats of South Carolinas on a lesser scale while Bernie can have his few states in the North when you look at the polling trends. In 2008 Super Tuesday was literally everywhere. It's kinda hard to outright argue with Terwynn's prediction at least based on the numbers I've seen and the setup we've got. Apparently 66% of the delegates on Tuesday come from the SEC states. That's sort of harsh. If we for the moment assumed a proportional to polling trend spread, it's something like a 508 to 357 spread according to 538. Nevermind the headlines. Bernie's got to flip a table or three, not just win. Or he's going to be in the same position as Clinton was in 2008, struggling for two months to catch up from a deficit of Delegates(forget supers for the moment) but unable to do so regardless of victories thanks to the proportional methods they use.

[Omega18]

Remember what happened the last time Hillary ran for office? She putzed out of steam after Super Tuesday and basically floundered around since she didn't expect Obama to last that long. I'm going to wait and see what happens after March 1st to declare Sanders dead in the water.

That's completely missing that fact she did rather badly on Super Tuesday in a variety of areas, with the polling that was available in advance not actually making it that huge a shock for those really carefully paying attention to the race. (She also simply screwed up strategically and let Obama rack up huge margins in for instance Idaho, Alaska, and Georgia by not properly contesting the states which helped Obama massively in terms of actual delegates. Nothing remotely equivalent is going to occur this time of around with the only state Hillary might not be contesting anymore being Vermont, and fewer states to worry about in the first place and the states in play being mostly better polled.) You also have upcoming states after Super Tuesday such as Mississippi, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida in particular looking extremely favorable for Hillary.

It was also with Obama winning South Carolina decisively which was the last contested primary before Super Tuesday, with it still being a lower margin for that matter although John Edwards being in the race was a factor there.

The difference is at this point the polls are going to all have to be massively incredibly wrong, especially in the Southern states for Sanders to avoid coming out of Super Tuesday without a huge delegate deficit given the realities of proportional voting. You also now have effective confirmation of the polling in the South with the South Carolina results just days ahead of Super Tuesday suggesting as previously noted the polling could be too optimistic if anything. Anything other than Super Tuesday being an extremely ugly day for Sanders would be a complete shocker.

[The Romulan Republic]

What's really interesting about Super Tuesday this year is the setup. It's got people literally calling it SEC Tuesday, making it a bunch of possible repeats of South Carolinas on a lesser scale while Bernie can have his few states in the North when you look at the polling trends. In 2008 Super Tuesday was literally everywhere. It's kinda hard to outright argue with Terwynn's prediction at least based on the numbers I've seen and the setup we've got. Apparently 66% of the delegates on Tuesday come from the SEC states. That's sort of harsh. If we for the moment assumed a proportional to polling trend spread, it's something like a 508 to 357 spread according to 538. Nevermind the headlines. Bernie's got to flip a table or three, not just win. Or he's going to be in the same position as Clinton was in 2008, struggling for two months to catch up from a deficit of Delegates(forget supers for the moment) but unable to do so regardless of victories thanks to the proportional methods they use.

Well, if Bernie can do as well as Clinton in 2008, I'll be impressed, and I wouldn't rule him out as the nominee if he can rally better than she did later on. That was a fairly close primary as I recall.

Though granted, it got a bit ridiculous at some point. Clinton dragged it out longer than she should have, I think.

Barring a complete "everything but Vermont" blowout, I'd support Sanders staying in past Super Tuesday. But if he's way behind at the end of March, it might be time to think about stepping down for the sake of party unity in the general election.

However, some of the fairly late states are supposed to be more favourable for him, and more delegates gives him more clout, so I can see him wanting to stay in.

[Simon_Jester]

I've got an idea. How about we don't "write off" a candidate after 3% of the population votes? I know this may seem like a crazy idea, but maybe wait for like, 25% of the population to vote before deciding the election is over? The primary has barely started and you're declaring the winner. South Carolina is certainly a huge setback, and the most distressing thing to me is that the Democratic Party is essentially satisfied with advocating for the status quo. That's a quintessentially conservative position, and I'm a progressive. If Sanders drops out, I simply have no one for whom to vote.

You may, however, wind up with someone to vote against.

More seriously, it's a real pity that we wound up with only two credible candidates in the running in 2016. The field would have amply supported one or two more, in my opinion.

[SCRawl]

More seriously, it's a real pity that we wound up with only two credible candidates in the running in 2016. The field would have amply supported one or two more, in my opinion.

What's the upside for an opponent, though? If Hilary Clinton is in the race, then unless your name is Joe Biden you're nowhere near as qualified or popular, and running will just piss off the next POTUS. Bernie Sanders is a relative outsider with a different message, so he's not running on the same brand, and if he loses, well, he can still serve and run as an independent as the senior senator from Vermont.

Anyone with presidential aspirations had to wait four or eight years. And if they couldn't wait, well, they never really had a chance.

[TimothyC]

More seriously, it's a real pity that we wound up with only two credible candidates in the running in 2016. The field would have amply supported one or two more, in my opinion.

Who? At the start of the cycle there had been 6+ years of Obama, and by definition, any candidates would have had to fit into one of three categories:

• Obama was wrong because he was to far to the left
• Obama was right where he should have been
• Obama wasn't leftist enough

The first was a non-starter for democrats this time around (witness Jim Webb), and the illustrious former secretary of state started out as the second. The third is the Sanders/Warren (O'Malley was here, but he was a non-starter as his hand-picked successor couldn't win on a platform of being an O'Malley third term) wing of the democrats, and have succeeded in pulling Hillary to the left. So, you can't run to the right of Obama, and running as a third term for the prior president tends to not work. You're running up-hill against what looked like a very strong republican field (pre-Trump).

The democrat's farm system has just taken a major beating over the last 5 years. 10 Governors Mansions, 14 senate seats, & 69 House Seats (net) switched from the Dems to the Republicans.

Heck, Republicans won the governor's mansions in Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland.

When you combine this with the 'Inevitability' of said Secretary of State, there was a move in the party to simply let her have the nomination (that and the fact that Clinton-aligned people basically took back over the DNC from the Obama people).

[The Romulan Republic]

I've got an idea. How about we don't "write off" a candidate after 3% of the population votes? I know this may seem like a crazy idea, but maybe wait for like, 25% of the population to vote before deciding the election is over? The primary has barely started and you're declaring the winner. South Carolina is certainly a huge setback, and the most distressing thing to me is that the Democratic Party is essentially satisfied with advocating for the status quo. That's a quintessentially conservative position, and I'm a progressive. If Sanders drops out, I simply have no one for whom to vote.

Agreed that it is too soon to call a winner.

Disagree with the idea that its Sanders or nobody.

If its Clinton vs. someone like Trump or Cruz, my conscience will compel me to support Hillary Clinton, because at that point its not about getting everything we want. Its about damage control.

[Terralthra]

I live in California. The chances that the Democratic nominee won't win this state are nil. I feel free to register my displeasure with a protest vote, should Secretary Clinton be the nominee.

[The Romulan Republic]

I live in California. The chances that the Democratic nominee won't win this state are nil. I feel free to register my displeasure with a protest vote, should Secretary Clinton be the nominee.

Well, I suppose that's reasonable.

Me, I'll be registered to vote in a swing state, so I don't have that luxury.

[Simon_Jester]

Acknowledging the point that this election cycle was a lousy time for anyone who wasn't Clinton, with the sole exception of relatively far-left candidates like Sanders. I do not dispute this.

And yet... still, I wish we had more than two viable choices, or that one of them were someone I felt more confident about than Sanders, and more faith in than Clinton.

[The Romulan Republic]

I quite liked Martin O'Malley on the whole and wish he'd done better. Hell, I might have supported him over Bernie if I'd though he had a real chance.

But with Clinton dominating the establishment and Sanders capturing the enthusiasm of young progressives, this really wasn't his year.

I kind of hope he runs again in eight years, and/or gets the VP spot.