2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: 12.8%. That's the margin Hillary won CA by. Remember those suspect polls that were [View all]onenote
(42,700 posts)Reporting is funny that way. It tells people things and then they make decisions based on the information received. Did the AP story impact the results? Entirely possible. If it did, by how much? I've seen nothing to tell us. But let's assume that instead of Clinton winning, Sanders would have won -- an assumption for which there is no real support according to the polling reported by RealClearPolitics. And even if you accept the polls most favorable to Sanders (47%) and then bump up his total by 10 percent (to 51.7) -- an arbitrary number without any factual basis -- you end up with Sanders winning by a relatively narrow margin -- not enough to deny Clinton a majority of the pledged delegates, not enough to significantly cut into here popular vote margin and not enough, in all likelihood, to cause any SD to change his or her support to the outsider candidate who has been very critical of the Democratic establishment -- the very people who make up the SDs.
And sitting out the election when you know that the bigger the vote for Sanders the better for him is just cutting off one's nose to spite one's face -- the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy as it were. No one made them sit it out. They decided to do so to prove a point although what they were proving escapes me.