NYT: Do Sanders Supporters Favor His Policies?

Bernie Sanders is widely credited with pulling Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to the left on major issues like health care, trade, financial regulation and the minimum wage. Now he says he will battle all the way to the convention on behalf of “people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change.” But the premise animating that battle — that Mr. Sanders’s surprising success in the primary race is because of his liberal policy positions — may be familiar and comforting, but it is greatly exaggerated.

(snip)

Mr. Sanders did just nine points better, on average, among liberals than he did among moderates. By comparison, he did 11 points worse among women than among men, 18 points worse among nonwhites than among whites and 28 points worse among those who identified as Democrats than among independents.

It is very hard to point to differences between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders’s proposed policies that could plausibly account for such substantial cleavages. They are reflections of social identities, symbolic commitments and partisan loyalties.

Yet commentators who have been ready and willing to attribute Donald Trump’s success to anger, authoritarianism, or racism rather than policy issues have taken little note of the extent to which Mr. Sanders’s support is concentrated not among liberal ideologues but among disaffected white men.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opinion/campaign-stops/do-sanders-supporters-favor-his-policies.html

Maybe Hillary is just as bad as Trump after all.

Let's see. Hillary wants to protect the right to choose, Trump wants to punish women. Hillary wants to raise the minimum wage, Trump says workers are paid too much. Hillary wants to extend Obamacare, Trump wants to get rid of it and throw millions off insurance. Hillary wants a path to citizenship, Trump wants walls and deportations. Hillary wants more taxes on the rich, Trump wants less. Hillary wants more clean energy, Trump thinks global warming is a myth.

But if you don't care about any of that, I can see how maybe you think they are the same.

Voting should be done online. No more conspiracy theories.

The software that runs the vote server(s) is open source. People from the press and any campaign can examine the server to make sure that the right software is running.

The internet traffic to the server is all logged, the press and all candidates can get tech people to examine every packet.

You still have voting booths, but those are just computers hooked up to the internet. But you can also vote from home or from your phone or whatever.

Yeah there are blanks to be filled in, but how about it?

In college, we had a ranked voting system for student government.

I know, it's student government, means nothing, but hear me out, the voting system was good. You rank who you want from first to last. Whoever had the least number 1 votes gets bumped out. All the people who voted them number one, their votes go to the person they ranked number two.

Then you do that again, knock out the person with the least number of number one votes (including the new number one votes that used to be number two votes). And you bump up the number two votes of the knocked out person to number one again. You keep going like that until there are two people left, and then again the person with more votes wins like usual.

But the good thing is, you don't have the "spoiler" thing. Say it's Hillary, Trump, Bernie, and Bloomberg. I would vote Hillary>Bernie>Bloomberg>Trump. That way if it came down to anyone versus Trump, I would still be doing everything I could to stop Trump.

I think a lot of Bernie people who don't want to vote for Hillary would still vote Bernie>Hillary>Bloomberg>Trump. And it wouldn't be choosing the lesser of two evils, it would be choosing Bernie, but ranking the evils in order of how evil they are, which maybe some would find more palatable.

#berniesobroke. $6M cash on hand. No wonder he's laying people off left and right.

Looks like the fundraising is starting to dry up. People see the writing on the wall.

Trump called Bernie a Communist.

Personally, I don't care what Trump says, and see no reason why his words should be cheered on here on a Democratic website. But the Bernie people here seem to think differently, celebrating every new attack from Trump against Hillary.

Just so you know, he's not on your side, Bernie people. He's pretending to be on your side because he wants your votes. And you're falling for it.

"I'll never vote for Hillary EVER!" "Why isn't Hillary trying to win my vote?"

Do the Bernie or Bust people realize how conflicting those two complaints are?

You don't have to vote for Hillary in November. You can vote Green, you can vote Trump, you can write in Vlad the Impaler if you want, do what you like. But don't be surprised that if you're in the "nevereverHill" camp, that she doesn't waste any resources trying to sway your vote, and instead looks towards more reasonable people.

Did any Bernie people complain about open primaries before the voters rejected him?

It's predictable that they complain after the fact, but before they realizef which format would result in their candidate losing not quite as badly, had they made up their minds? Or is this purely sore loserhood?

I'm pretty sure they had no idea, and if open primaries had favored Hillary, they'd be complaining that all primaries should be closed. After all, they don't seem to have any problem with caucuses, which are by far the least democratic.

Can you imagine the wails of Bernie people if the caucuses had favored Hillary instead of Bernie? Close your eyes for a second and picture it. Yeah. Serious wailing.

I guess there are #13millionoligarchs in this country. Proud to be one of them!

I have an idea how we can decide who the candidate for "the people" really is.

It goes like this. We vote, and whoever gets more votes wins.

Do Bernie supporters like that idea? If we did this and Hillary got, let's pick a number, how about 3 million more votes and, I don't know, 270 more elected delegates, would they then agree that "the people" had spoken?

As for my part, if Bernie got 3 million more votes in this totally hypothetical scenario, I would happily accept that the people had spoken and the candidate of the people was Bernie.