Usually a question in the title of a diary is meant to setup the conclusion that the author has already prepared to write. But I don’t have the answer. The question mark is a real question mark.
Is Sanders really out of the race? Is he , as Eric trump the man-child idiot would say, mathematically AND statistically out of the race ?
Alan Grayson doesn’t think so. He separates the voting states into the Old South (states that have very little chance of going blue) and the non-Old South states that Sanders has dominated. He claims that if Sanders can win the remaining contests, which favor him, at the same margins he won the non-Old South states, then he’s got a path forward.
www.huffingtonpost.com/…
Democratic presidential primary 2.0 elects a total of 2033 pledged delegates. If Bernie Sanders wins those races (and delegates) by the same 60-40 margin that he has amassed in primaries and caucuses outside the "Old South" to date, then that will give him an advantage of 407 pledged delegates. That is more -- far more -- than the current Clinton margin of 223.
The main critique that pops into my mind of Grayson’s article is Ohio. It’s not “Old South”, though there’s plenty of racists and low-info voters there, no doubt. It’s also kind of tough to imagine Sanders winning CA by a 60-40 margin and getting a much larger proportion of delegates there.
It’s also interesting watching members of the pundit class express surprise that American voters care about the issues that Bernie talks about.
But his campaign greatly exceeded expectations and showed that the kind of politics he represents is considerably more viable and mainstream than most of us in the press realized.
www.vox.com/…
The author goes on to say that Sanders needs to help down ballot, which is probably a polite way of saying “please, bernie, get your people to donate more $$ because that’s where the grassroots cash is at.” The 50-state strategy and grassroots politics were what started the ‘netroots’ over a decade ago, but here we sit in 2016 with even less power in Congress than we had back then! We beat Lieberman and so many Blue Dog Dems in primaries only to sit here now with a gerrymandered, gridlocked Congress.
So how much help would it be for Sanders to try to do what Hillary can’t— generate excitement in the grassroots and throw more $$ at the toilet that is Congress? Maybe it can help, if done strategically. But I wonder if we’re so sucked into the presidential race that we’ve neglected to do real analytics on swing states, vulnerable R congressRats, and toss-up races. It now feels top-down more than bottom-up. That’s what happens when Congress stops functioning, and state legislatures turn redder and redder under Wasserman-Schultz’s tenure.
The meme that Sanders is pushing Clinton to the left is quite a bit of a stretch. There’s no reason to think she won’t pivot right back to the “center” before the main, and she might pivot beyond that to some pretty conservative policies after the election. A GOP congress is an excuse-in-waiting for triangulation and dangerous deals made in the name of “ necessary compromise.”
How can the Sanders’ movement influence all of this potential outcomes? If Clinton is elected, how would campaign finance reform move forward? Very hard to imagine how that might happen. In a worst case scenario we might see Hillary punish the left wing for its lack of support.
But someone much smarter than me can make sense of all this.