I’ve been away from my keyboard for most of the last 10 days. In that time, Donald Trump has won a couple more primaries, and the Republican establishment, or what remains of it, has suddenly got the idea that Trump would be a disaster, both for the Republican Party, but also for America. They are worried that Trump wouldn’t listen to them, or be willing to be controlled by those invested in the Republican Party, and when I say invested, I really mean invested, as in billions of dollars invested in owning politicians in every state in the union, plus most Republicans in Congress and a fair number of Democrats in Congress as well. But I really don’t want to talk about Donald or Republicans.
I want to talk about Hillary’s win over Bernie in the Nevada Caucus, and the media meme that Hillary had a BIG win there and now has MOMENTUM, or the BIG ‘MO. I have not seen a single media quantification of the voting numbers, other than 53% to 47% as the victory margin. Has anyone looked at the number of votes in Media? Here they are. Hillary Clinton received 6,316 votes, and Bernie Sanders received 5679 votes in the most recent numbers I have seen; www.nbcnews.com/…
So Hillary won a tiny subset of Nevada Democratic political activists by a total of 637 votes. Had 319 voters switched to Bernie, he would have won the Nevada Caucus. The Hillary Clinton political apparatus, known as big, organized and six months ahead of any Bernie Sanders organizing activity in Nevada AVERAGED 53 votes per month over Bernie’s organizing efforts. This hardly is a groundswell of momentum for Hillary’s campaign, nor a BIG victory. If anything, where Bernie was at least 30 per cent behind before his Nevada campaign and likely as much as 50 per cent behind, so if one looks at that measure, Bernie Sanders had, and has the momentum in this primary campaign. So in three contests, the Iowa caucus, the New Hampshire primary, and the Nevada caucus, Hillary Clinton’s campaign who had massive leads a few months ago, managed to eke out two narrow caucus wins, by a total of a few hundred votes, and a massive 21 point loss in the only real primary to date.
Let’s look at some more numbers. Nevada has 595,890 registered Democratic Voters. In the Caucus, a total of 12,002, including 8 who voted Uncommitted, voted in the Democratic caucus. This represents 2% of all Nevada Democrats. It represents 0.8 per cent of all registered voters in Nevada, including all the independents (295,319), Republicans (493,612), Libertarians (12,400) and American Independent (a party) (70,323). www.nvsos.gov/…
I fail to see how a big political machine that eked out a win by a total of 53 votes per month of organizational advantage has the BIG ‘MO. I just don’t.
Full Disclosure, I am a Bernie Sanders supporter, but please look at the numbers and judge for your self.
While we are at it, we should be asking media including all the big national print and web publications, all the national broadcast and cable outlets (including MSNBC) why they haven’t done even a cursory evaluation of the numbers, as I have done here, and if by an examination of the numbers, how can any honest observer/pundit get a BIG WIN out of a contest that would have gone the other way if 637 318 people had voted the other way. I think it is a fair question.
Another fair question is how much value in kind has the national media (MSNBC included) been GIVEN to the Donald Trump campaign. I heard this morning, Donald Trump is spending NOTHING on the Super Tuesday advertising because, in reality HE DOESN’T HAVE TO, he has been given $2 Billion in in-kind advertising by all media. I think this should be reported to the FEC as an In-Kind contribution. Not that the FEC has any power to do anything, but we should question why the Media is so set on giving free access and publicity to Donald J. Trump.
Update, changed 45% to 53% in Hillary’s vote percent. Typo.
Update 2. Changes 637 to 318 2 paragraphs above. Typ.