The primary election touchscreen Steve Kornacki uses on MSNBC showing the importance of California.
Now that the results of the Tuesday primaries in Oregon and Kentucky are in, nothing significant in the mathematical path to victory for Bernie has changed. These numbers haven’t changed in weeks. Those of us liberals whose news TV station of choice is MSNBC are familiar with the role Steve Kornacki has taken on as the numbers man. He has been using his big touch-screen computer to track the primary numbers.
Kronacki aways makes the best case for Bernie to win all the pledged delegates in each state, district, or territory. Taking into consideration the polls in the smaller states Kornacki adds up the numbers should Bernie do far better than expected in those states. If he does, this doesn’t put him in shouting distance of the nomination.
This picture says it all.
Kornacki explains that only way Bernie can clinch the nomination with pledged delegates is to win an overwhelming California victory on June 7th. He must win by some 15 points, or about 70%. He needs to reach the not-so-magic number of 274 more delegates. He speculates that Bernie may hope to get so many popular votes leading up to the convention that super- delegates decide to vote for him rather than Hillary. My own hunch is that he is also hoping that the national polls show that he is beating Trump by double digits as Trump has narrowed the gap with Hillary, and that this will convince super-delates to vote for him.
Last night at his rally Bernie made it clear that the road to winning the nomination would be a hard fought battle. I watched the 12 or so twenty-somethings standing behind him carefully for the hour the rally was televised on MSNBC. When he said this about how difficult for him it would be to win the nomination it didn’t seem to register with half of them, and the rest showed negative reactions. My impression is that many in this younger group are in denial. If they even look at the math their rational mind turns off and their emotional brain takes over.
On denial
Sometimes people automatically don’t hear things that are very upsetting to them.
Last night, until MSNBC cut away from it to announce Bernie had won, I watched the Bernie rally in California. As he delivered lines I’ve heard before I watched the reactions of those who stood behind him.
The strongest boos came when Bernie said that some were saying he should drop out.
He got the usual cheers for the usual lines, and lots of boos and thumbs down when he talked about the DNC and the Democratic Party establishment in negative terms.
While Bernie doesn’t attack Hillary directly, when he attacked the DNC for favoring Hillary he was essentially attacking her. These attacks got stronger boos than when he attacked Donald Trump.
My hunch is that when he attacked Trump the crowd sensed that he was giving them a preview of what he’d be saying if or when Hillary wins the nomination. They just don’t want to hear “if” and they certainly don’t want to hear “when.” They resist - and I mean in many instances unconsciously - even entertaining the notion of his losing to Hillary who some have come to have visceral negative feelings about.
I feel I need to emphasize, that by definition unconscious denial is not a deliberate attempt to avoid seeing the truth.
I wonder if Bernie is not-so-tacitly encouraging some of his supporters to hold onto what is likely to be a belief which is unrealistic. This will be an important life lesson for most, a painful letdown which hopefully will lead to personal growth. Bernie is a father figure to some of his younger supporters. I worry that a few may react with clinical depression if they are deeply psychologically invested.
Afterword on emotions and the general election
I have never seen an election where so many people have such strong emotions about two candidates, Trump and Bernie, that they actually love the person they support and hate the one they oppose. Trump has already won so it’s a moot point about who his supporters will vote for. However, I am deeply concerned that some of Bernie’s supporters hate Hillary so much they won’t vote for her.
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I am a clinical social worker, psychotherapist, marriage counselor, and former director of a community mental health center who often writes from a psychologically informed perspective.
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