Election 2016

[Mechalich]

The count at 99% votes tallied, according to CNN, is 56.4 to 43.2, for Sanders.

So he won that one.

Well, he did and he didn't. Both Fivethirtyeight and Polichart put Sander's total at just under what he needed to manage to stay on target for victory, and those predictions assume wins in New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey.

The real question is the momentum question: can this string of victories move the needle in New York and Pennsylvania later this month. New York is the critical state. It Bernie can win it, even in a squeaker, he'll have taken a state of critical importance to Clinton with a significant minority population and assembled a massive string of wins with vast narrative power. If he can't win New York he's almost certain to lose Pennsylvania and the other states voting on 4/26. If he does win New York he probably can win Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island and leave Hillary scrambling.

[Josh_Kablack]

Note that enough of the votes have already been cast that Bernie Sanders needs to win 56% of all remaining delegates to win the pledged delegate count. Any further states that he "wins" by 56% or less leave him in the same hole or even dig him deeper. Every remaining 55% victory is a loss.

-Username17

You might want to doublecheck those numbers.

[Username17]

Note that enough of the votes have already been cast that Bernie Sanders needs to win 56% of all remaining delegates to win the pledged delegate count. Any further states that he "wins" by 56% or less leave him in the same hole or even dig him deeper. Every remaining 55% victory is a loss.

-Username17

You might want to doublecheck those numbers.

Fair enough. According to Google at the moment, there are 1721 pledged delegates still up for grabs and Sanders is behind by 249. So he needs to get 250 more than Clinton in the apportionment of the remaining 1721, which means holding her to 735 or less pledged delegates from the remaining contests and past contests that haven't doled out all their delegates yet. So Sanders needs to get 57.3% of all remaining delegates. The thing where some of the pledged delegates are doled out over a series of events taking months to decide is total bullshit and needs to stop.

Anyway, the Wisconsin primary is currently listed at 56.5% Sanders, which would be a minor setback for Sanders. But if all future contests were about in that ballpark, it would be a nail biter. It is certainly my impression that Wisconsin is more favorable country for Bernie than New York is. I think that if Bernie can barely/almost get the double-digit win he needs in Wisconsin, that he is very unlikely to put up similar numbers in California and New York. And if Hillary can get half or even nearly half of the 722 delegates up for grabs in those two big states, Bernie's path to the nomination does not exist. So far, no polls have been showing Sanders with any lead in New York or California, let alone the double digit lead he would need to make this even competitive.

But yes, good news for Bernie will continue until New York votes. Bernie will doubtless get most of Wyoming's 14 delegates this weekend. New York doesn't vote until a week from next Tuesday.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

I don't know if it updated overnight, but I am not seeing quite the same delegate totals that you are...and I see slightly different counts on different sites (all of which claim to have updated this morning) - which is rather disturbing.

But I still think your math setup ignoring superdelegates is being too generous to Bernie.

Total Delegates 4765
Superdelegates 714

Clintion 1748 (1279 pledged + 469 super)
Sanders 1058 (1027 pledged + 31 super)

Still available 1959 (1745 + 214 super)
Needed to win 2383

So to win, Sanders needs to pick up another 1325 delegates on top of those he has now. 1325 is roughly 68% of 1959.

If somehow Bernie picks up ALL of the undeclared superdelegates (or manages to flip an equivalent number of previously declared superdelegates to get to 214 more) then he only needs to win 1111 more reg'lar delegates, out of the 1745 up for grabs -- which is roughly 64% of those remaining. I personally think it unlikely that Bernie can pick up quite that much of superdelegate support.

If instead we totally ignore all superdelegates and just assume that their current declarations are worthless and they'll flip to mirror the results of the regular delegate distribution, then we get a contest involving a total of 4051 delegates and 2026 needed to win. Hillary is ahead 1279 to Bernie's 1027 then we get the scenario where Bernie only needs to win 999 of the remaining 1745 to come out ahead. And that works out to the ~57% you claim.

So for Bernie to win, with your floor of 56-57% of pledged delegates, he would ALSO need a total of 357 superdelegates - and that means not only winning ALL of the remaining undeclared superdelegates but ALSO flipping a minimum of 112 of have currently declared for Hillary.

[Ancient History]

Y'know, the painful thing is that we're not even to the actual election yet.

[Chamomile]

Y'know, the painful thing is that we're not even to the actual election yet.

I do wonder whether the election proper is going to be this interesting. The Republican party's weakness means that regardless of which candidate they pick, they aren't likely to turn things around.

[Josh_Kablack]

The math in the general is going to be simpler. There are fewer electoral votes and the only weird parts are what happens in the event of a tie or a 3-way split.

Whether the Republicans actually have a chance is going to depend on what the economy does from August through October.

[Mechalich]

I don't know if it updated overnight, but I am not seeing quite the same delegate totals that you are...and I see slightly different counts on different sites (all of which claim to have updated this morning) - which is rather disturbing.

Several states, notably Washington state, have long, drawn-out multi-stage processes to determine officially who gets all the delegates. So some sites are protecting based on the caucus results and others are not.

[Username17]

So for Bernie to win, with your floor of 56-57% of pledged delegates, he would ALSO need a total of 357 superdelegates - and that means not only winning ALL of the remaining undeclared superdelegates but ALSO flipping a minimum of 112 of have currently declared for Hillary.

Well, the Bernie Sanders campaign is banking on the idea that the unpledged delegates will not vote against what the pledged delegates do. And there's reason to believe they might be right. The unpledged delegates have never overturned the pledged delegate result since the modern system was put in place. Not even in 2008 when they might have overruled Obama. Lots of places, including DailyKos and 538 are treating the race as one of pledged delegates only, with a target of 2026 to win.

Lately though, the Sanders campaign has been pretending that they can go to a contested convention and try to win superdelegates if Clinton has more than 2026 pledged delegates but less than 2383. That's either delusional or dishonest. If the superdelegates do anything this cycle, it would be to hand victory to Hillary despite her being narrowly behind in pledged delegates. I genuinely don't know if they would do that, but it's certainly possible. Handing Bernie a victory despite a narrow loss in pledged delegates is not in the realms of possibility. If Hillary Clinton gets to 2026 pledged delegates, the election is actually over rather than "pretty much decided" or whatever the fuck you want to call it now. Having Bernie's campaign say otherwise puts them outside the reality based community.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

The case for the superdelegates overturning the pledged delegate result would probably rest on both a tiny margin and a discrepancy in the popular vote versus the delegate count. What happens if Clinton is down 5 pledged delegates to Sanders but has two million more total votes? That's a frightening scenario.

[Username17]

The case for the superdelegates overturning the pledged delegate result would probably rest on both a tiny margin and a discrepancy in the popular vote versus the delegate count. What happens if Clinton is down 5 pledged delegates to Sanders but has two million more total votes? That's a frightening scenario.

Considering how many pledged delegates that Sanders has gotten out of bullshit tiny caucuses (he has won all but 2 of the caucuses, which have the highest delegate to popular votes payoff by an order of magnitude), that would almost certainly be the case. If the pledged delegate counts are very close, Hillary will be ahead in popular votes by over a million, and have the longtime loyalty of a lot of the unpledged delegates.

The only certainty is that if Hillary Clinton gets 2026 pledged delegates she wins outright and that if Bernie Sanders gets 2383 pledged delegates he wins outright. If the results are between those numbers, it becomes a question, with "maybe Sanders?" going to "almost certainly Sanders" depending on how close to 2383 pledged delegates he gets.

The most likely result is still that Hillary gets more than 2026 pledged delegates and we move the fuck on with our lives. She only has to pick up 43% of the remaining delegates to get there and there are some big Hillary-leaning states left on the map. But if Sanders holds her to like 2024 or some fucking thing, it's a nightmare scenario and there's lots of confusion and bad blood regardless of who wins in the end. It's why I'm actually getting pretty annoyed with the Sanders campaign. They are actually threatening to keep fighting even if Hillary gets to 2026, meaning that she would have won both the delegate count and the popular vote. That's just dickery. It's one thing to say that you want everyone's vote to count and you intend to hang on as long as you have a chance to win, it's quite another to threaten to tear the party apart and flip the board over if you lose.

I'm not at all convinced the Sanders campaign hasn't outlived its usefulness. They aren't successfully agitating for down ballot candidates. They aren't getting their supporters to work in all the other channels we need to fight in. In Wisconsin, 15% of Bernie Sanders voters either did not know who they voted for in the Wisconsin Supreme Court ballot, or voted for Scott Walker's evil homophobic puppet. On the Hillary side, that number was only 4%. The end result was close enough that if Sanders supporters had voted correctly at the rate that Clinton supporters did, the progressive candidate might have won. Bernie's campaign is simply failing to direct their supporters to doing things they actually need to do to fight the overt fascism that the other party is flirting with. The stakes are simply too high to blow off downballot elections and the judiciary.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I'm sorry, do you really think the Dem judge would've won, if Sanders weren't actively campaigning? It's true that he takes more non-Democratic support than Clinton does ( nothing in the evidence is consistent with a story that significant numbers of Republicans are acting as spoilers, although many of them hate Clinton's guts which has a similar effect:
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pol ... ble-rating
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pol ... ble-rating
) But pro-Sanders turnout, even if it only went to Kloppenburg by 80-10, cut her margin of defeat by hundreds of thousands of votes. Without Sanders in the race she would've been slaughtered.

It's true that voters, especially low-information voters, are disenchanted with the Democratic party, including quality people like Judge Kloppenburg. However, this is the fault of mainstream Democrats for being crooked, not of Bernie Sanders for failing to radiate sufficient enlightenment in six months.

the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

[Username17]

The Republican primary is bigger and crazier than the democratic primary, and as such turnout on the Republican side is much higher. This is in no way predictive for the general election, but it means that we're getting creamed on by-elections scheduled to happen on primary days.

Bernie Sanders, by making it any kind of race at all, boosts our primary turnout. But if he doesn't reach out and get the people he's bringing to the polls to vote for our down-ballot interests it doesn't fucking matter. If he's not going to get out the word to support Kloppenburg, there's no point in him even running and he should fold tent.

-Username17

[Username17]

Wyoming only has 14 delegates and doesn't matter. The entire state has the population of Stanislaus County, California. We were expecting this state to be the last vestige of really good news for the Sanders campaign before New York. Instead, while it is a Sanders "win," the fact that there are only 14 delegates meant that you had to get more than 56% of the vote to get an 8/6 split. Instead, Sanders won with less than 56% of the vote and the delegates are split 7/7. That's less than Bernie's path to the nomination and less than his demographic target. This caucus was supposed to close the race by a trivial amount, but instead Bernie Sanders underperformed and it widened the race by a trivial amount. If all future races are split evenly, Hillary Clinton wins with 250 more pledged delegates than Bernie Sanders. So really, Wisconsin was the last good news before New York.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Bernie is definitely winning my corner of Pennsylvania - but this state is such a parchwork of politics, I have no idea if that translates to anything meaningful. And since PA's primary is a week after New York's, it wouldn't help the momentum narrative even if Bernie does win PA by a meaningful margin.

[Dominicius]

So just a quick question here as an outsider, I know the policies Trump stands for. He wants to stop illegal immigration, which is a good thing. He want to repeal Obama care, which I also believe should be done. And he is pro torture which I think is a foolish position to hold.

But what positions does Bernie hold? I've been told that he want to have collage education as paid by the government but I know little beyond that. I would be interested in hearing what else he has in mind for America and where he wants to get the money to implement his ideas.

[angelfromanotherpin]

https://berniesanders.com/issues/

[Mechalich]

So just a quick question here as an outsider, I know the policies Trump stands for. He wants to stop illegal immigration, which is a good thing. He want to repeal Obama care, which I also believe should be done. And he is pro torture which I think is a foolish position to hold.

Please keep in mind that while Trump claims he desires to stop illegal immigration, his proposed solutions are utterly absurd, won't work, and may in fact make the problem worse. Triggering a trade war with Mexico, for example, could tank the Mexican economy and vastly increase illegal immigration from Mexico. Building a wall along the southern border is a giant waste of money, political capital, and time and will not significantly reduce illegal immigration since it won't prevent visa overstays and any EWI immigrants it does prevent will be compensated for by increased smuggling through existing POEs or via the Canadian border.

There is currently no major candidate from either party with a viable plan to significantly reduce ongoing illegal immigration or to present a viable solution to the large population of long-term illegal aliens currently present in the US. The corporate interests of the Republican establishment actually prefer having an illegal underclass to undercut workers and the anti-government zealotry of the Tea Party prevents any support for the necessary expenditures needed to significantly increase ICE operations or the immigration court system. The democratic party is beholden to pro-immigration advocacy groups that make it very difficult to take immigration enforcement steps without utilizing the umbrella of a comprehensive reform package, though Obama did take steps to majorly secure the southern border by vastly increasing border patrol staffing there.

Immigration policy is a complex issue with many facets that interact with each other in complex ways. There are at least three major interfacing policy concerns: the nature of US legal immigration policy and its objectives; enforcement efforts to prevent and minimize ongoing illegal immigration; and policies regarding the large standing population of long-term illegal immigrants already present in the country. All of these are influenced by both national interest issues and financial issues when it comes to developing policy. As a result, any significant immigration reform needs to be part of a comprehensive effort to revamp the entire system or it will almost inevitably create unexpected and unintended consequences that will just have to be cleaned up a decade down the road, just as numerous problems in the current immigration zone are the result of the Immigration Act of 1965.

[Dominicius]

I agree with you on those points. Trump is primarily a real estate guy so when his solution to problem involves a massive construction project it is safe to assume that it is his buisness background speaking.

[DSMatticus]

No. It is safe to assume that he is a substanceless idiot campaigning on bravado instead of policy. Building a wall is a symbolic gesture that resonates very well with the uneducated rural white southern men who are Donald Trump's primary demographic, but is in fact both implausible and pointless. It would cost a fuckton of money, it would never actually get finished, and in the end it would do absolutely nothing.

As for the ACA... People who are poor and uninsured still get sick. Do you know what happens when you dump tens of thousand of dollars of medical bills into the lap of someone who can't afford to pay them? Their life gets turned upside down, they file for medical bankruptcy, and the hospital loses a bunch of money (just because the patient can't pay the hospital doesn't mean the hospital doesn't have to pay the staff who treated them). Do you know what happens when the hospital loses a bunch of money? They have to charge the patients who can pay more to make up the difference. Not having insurance is literally gambling on your health with other people's money. When you get sick, it will be other people footing the bill.

There are a lot of solutions to that. The most obvious is to just let hospitals turn the sick and dying away. "No insurance? Can't pay upfront? Could you kindly finish bleeding to death from that car accident in the dumpster out back?" The most reasonable is to just socialize the fuck out of healthcare like every other developed nation in the world and let the government foot the bill for the ills of its citizens. We have decided on mandatory insurance with government subsidies. And while that's strictly speaking inferior to socialized healthcare, it is the minimum amount necessary to solve the freerider problem that is the poor and uninsured having a heart attack or whatever and being rushed to the ER.

And the only real problem we've run into with this compromise is that the Supreme Court gave individual governors the power to nullify half the law, so now a bunch of people who were intended to receive subsidies aren't getting them and they are paying an absolute fuckton for their healthcare compared to the rest of the country. To which the solution is "stop electing Republican asshats to run your state; if it hasn't gone well at any point in the past forty years, maybe you should stop."

[Username17]

Trump's vision of repealing the ACA and replacing it with better deal making is pure fantasy. It's not even good fantasy, it's like bad self-insert fanfic.

In order for the president to "make a deal" the government has to have skin in the game. If the government isn't subsidizing and mandating and regulating healthcare and insurance contracts, then the government can't make any deals at all.

Interestingly, both Clinton and Trump have said they would improve the healthcare system by demanding a better deal. The difference is that Hillary has found some wonkish parts of the existing ACA that empower the president to do that, while Donald claims he's going to scrap the legal authority to do anything of the sort and get it all done with pure willpower.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

And the only real problem we've run into with this compromise is that the Supreme Court gave individual governors the power to nullify half the law, so now a bunch of people who were intended to receive subsidies aren't getting them and they are paying an absolute fuckton for their healthcare compared to the rest of the country. To which the solution is "stop electing Republican asshats to run your state; if it hasn't gone well at any point in the past forty years, maybe you should stop."

Of course, the people who keep electing these Republican asshats lack the ability to look far enough back at the process to actually see the problem. They'll look at their increased costs and decide the solution is "stop the Democrats and repeal the ACA!".

Then, we either go back to the uninsured gambling with other people's money or the uninsured not getting coverage. Given the nature of conservatives to fap to the just world hypothesis, they probably see letting the uninsured die as a good thing.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Given the nature of conservatives to fap to the just world hypothesis, they probably see letting the uninsured die as a good thing.

Oh, it's well beyond 'probable.'

[Koumei]

Trump is primarily a real estate guy

Trump is primarily an ass-hat who was loaned a huge amount from his dad at good rates and has ended up poorer than if he just put it all in an account and let it build interest. He has gone bankrupt multiple times, and every time it's the people around him who pay for it - businesses going under, many people becoming unemployed, a lot of people left unable to receive payment for services already rendered or goods already delivered and spent. And then he just hits up a friend for a loan and uses his reputation and name to get a spot on TV where he can make some noises and somehow get money again (fuck the people who worked for him and are left with nothing to show for it).

Don't think of any of his ideas as part of a great clever scheme. It's all off-the-cuff bullshit from a madman who is incompetent at his current level of responsibility, let alone being elevated to run a country.

If you start with the position of him being in any way business-savvy or intelligent or competent, your premise is flawed and any result it leads to will be wrong.

[Ancient History]

http://gawker.com/now-you-have-to-think ... 1770726473

I'd feel bad, but Cruz of all people should know the gloves are off in this election.