People devoting their attention to things that don’t matter while neglecting things that do has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. My complaint about Chris Cillizza’s column and Ana Marie Cox’s frivolous question to Sanders is just the latest in a series. Last month a DTC member shared a post by pollster/political scientist Larry Sabato, Democrats 2016: Not Feeling the Bern. An excerpt from Sabato’s post:
The Buzz about Bernie has taken hold on the Democratic side of the 2016 campaign, and it’s easy to see why. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is drawing huge crowds and great poll numbers in the first two states to vote, Iowa and New Hampshire.
It isn’t just that he’s speaking his mind, saying exactly what he thinks, and stressing the issues of greed and income inequality — which Democrats care about as much as anything else this cycle. It’s really the contrast between Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Sanders ought to adopt a new campaign slogan, “Send Her a Message,” because he has become the messenger for party activists’ concerns about Clinton. It’s clear from his rising poll numbers that Sanders has become Clinton’s top challenger at the moment, so we’re moving him up to the second tier in our rankings of the Democratic contenders (see the full Table 1 at the bottom of this article). Sanders has clearly moved way ahead of the other Democratic candidates: recently announced former Sen. Jim Webb (VA) and former Govs. Martin O’Malley (MD) and Lincoln Chafee (RI). Maybe one of them (O’Malley?) will have a turn as the anti-Clinton at some point, but Sanders is clearly that person right now.
You hear the comments about Clinton everywhere: She’s uptight, inaccessible, weighed down by decades of Clinton baggage and mired in old and new scandals. Like her husband (and Jeb Bush), she’s cashed in big-time on her family name and public positions. Clinton may once have been middle class, but today she looks to all the world like a pampered member of the top one-tenth of the one percent.
The protected, even sheltered Clinton is known to take polite questions from a handful of prescreened supporters, or her staff is pictured roping off the press in a New Hampshire July 4th parade (one of the most absurd images of the campaign so far). In contrast, when the news programs do their campaign roundups, Sanders is shown basking in the adulation of thousands — you can feel the energy.
Still: We’re always brutally honest with our Crystal Ball readers, so let’s get right down to it. Despite what we’ve just said, Hillary Clinton is very, very likely to be the Democratic nominee, not Bernie Sanders. That’s true even if Sanders manages to upset Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The fact is, the key constituencies of the Democratic Party are likely to back Clinton, and big Sanders audiences aren’t going to change that.
There are several factors that continue to suggest Clinton is the dominant favorite for the Democratic nomination.
The party has chosen
We’ve often cited political science research, most notably from the book The Party Decides, about how endorsements from sitting party leaders can be predictive of which candidate will get the presidential nomination. Generally speaking, a candidate needs establishment support to win a nomination. This establishment has a powerful, formal role in the Democratic nominating process: about one-sixth of the convention delegates will be “superdelegates.” Remember them from 2008? They are the elected officials and party leaders that have a say in who gets the Democratic nomination. On both sides, the path to the nomination involves winning the establishment primary. And in this contest Clinton is polling light years ahead of her competitors.
He continues. You can follow the link about and read the rest of it for yourself. As you may have picked up from my previous post, I feel a lot contempt towards those who treat election campaigns as horse races while neglecting the probable consequences of electing Candidate A as opposed to Candidate B.
[begin of my post to the DTC listserv]
I’m just impressed that Sabato gets paid for puking up commentary like that. Can I get in on that? It sure looks like it would be easier than working for a living. It’s not that his bottom line conclusion isn’t probably right. It probably is. It’s that he’s so @#$%ing lazy. From his Crystal Ball:
“The protected, even sheltered Clinton is known to take polite questions from a handful of prescreened supporters, or her staff is pictured roping off the press in a New Hampshire July 4th parade (one of the most absurd images of the campaign so far).”
Gee, Larry, what questions won’t she take and why won’t she take them? Who are the approved reporters and who’s on the blacklist? Why do you suppose the approved reporters got approved? Which reporters have been turned away? Of the reporters who have been turned away, how many are serious journalists and how many are right-wing hacks working a propaganda angle? Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me, but I’d like to believe that individuals with at least a passing interest in representative democracy would be curious about the answers to those questions. Sabato and company? Apparently not so much. They got their stats and conventional wisdom to puke up.
Another thing to beat them up over:
“An emerging storyline in the last few weeks has been the sizable crowds that have shown up to hear from Sanders. In Minneapolis, over 3,000 people listened to Sanders at a mass meeting; in Denver, almost 5,000 people; in Madison, WI, nearly 10,000; and, most recently, around 8,000 in Portland, ME.
However, it’s important to remember that crowd size fundamentally doesn’t matter much. Comparisons between how large one candidate’s crowd is compared to another’s are ripe for misunderstanding. Just think back to 2012, when press reports and GOP partisans frequently mentioned the large numbers that Mitt Romney was drawing on the campaign trail. Did this end up mattering? Obama won the popular vote by about 5 million votes. The history of “crowdsmanship” is long, and as Louisiana politico Robert Mann noted back in 2012, full of anecdotal evidence that wound up meaning nothing.”
Of course, clicking through to Mann’s post one finds that a main thread of his discussion is the fraudulent reporting of crowd size. Do Sabato et al. mean to imply that Sanders’ team is reporting fraudulent numbers? (My guess is probably not. My bet is that they figured no one would bother to read Mann’s piece or, if they did, not care that it was off-topic.)
There are all sorts of good, tough questions to ask about the Sanders campaign, e.g., He’s only got a handful of staffers. How does he plan to turn large crowd into votes? What’s his plan for winning support from Blacks and Hispanics? He’s running a populist campaign. While his ideas are more liberal than Clinton’s his natural constituency includes more culturally-conservative populists. He seems to do well with that demographic in VT but what about nationally? Is he making any inroads? Is he going to convince people who are disgusted with politics to turn out and cast a vote for him in the Democratic primary? Why or why not?
Like I said, there all sorts of good, tough questions to ask about the Sanders campaign. Unfortunately, Sabato and co don’t appear interested in asking any of them. They’re content to read tea leaves. That’s just really lame.
[end of my post to the listserv]
I followed up shortly thereafter with another post:
This commentary [by Mike the Mad Biologist] pretty well captures my complaint with Sabato and his ilk:
“In thinking more about this post as well as this post by Paul Krugman, it seems to me that the political press, whether it’s covering various trade agreements or the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, is incapable of realizing that voters and political activists might actually possess agency (as limited as it might be).
Rather than just being sheep to be moved along and manipulated through ‘clever’ political stratagems by Our Benevolent ‘Centrist’ Overlords, ‘regular folks’, not to mention rank-and-file party supporters, might attempt to exert control over the people and organizations which purport to represent them. Occasionally, they (we) might even succeed.
One reason the media can’t handle electorate agency is class-bias: a lot of them think they’re ‘better than people’, the evidence not withstanding. But the other reason is that an active polity with agency threatens their status and self-image. If the electorate is largely lumpen proles to manipulated with clever ad campaigns, then a journalist, especially those fixated on these tactics, can feel like an insider: he knows the real story. On the other hand, if voters have considerable control over political outcomes, then the political press corps is reduced to a bunch of stenographers, and idiot ones at that.
Unfortunately, we enter campaign season with the political reporters we have, not the ones we wish we had.”
[end of my post to the listserv]