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.
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