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Democratic Presidential Primaries & Caucuses |March OT| Last Tuesday was 1000 years ago, old news no one cares about (Discussion Guidelines in OP)
- Thread starter Poodlestrike
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This is an important issue. Of course in a perfect world this wouldn't matter to people, but we don't live in a perfect world. People do take into account how they're treated when deciding if they want to politically engage in something. One of the big problems here is that not enough people want to engage of our political project. I'm not saying that this is the sole reason, but it is a reason. It is a problem. And like I keep saying we can't keep brushing away the fact that the biggest voices of the left online are acting in some of the worst ways, propagating this stereotype.
How do you figure it's the people he has been railing against? The chart just says 30% of his support came from people making above $58.4K. That's certainly not rich territory or anywhere near the 1%
Anecdotally a ton of people I know working in IT support Bernie or Warren. And these people are still not rich, but they have incomes of >80K
It's from the top 25% of counties by wealth, more specifically. Which to say, 58.4k is not an average, just a minimum average of those counties.
I posted the charts earlier, but it's more than just the wealthy, and regardless Biden did by far the best among the poorer groups:
Take a look (Let's be clear, there's no margin of error here, this is straight demographics vs vote location data):
Sanders best counties by income? The richest ones:
Sanders best counties by percent with health insurance? The ones most likely to have health insurance:
Sanders best counties in college vs non-college? The most educated:
Now, to preface, Bernie did very well with latin@ voters, and I really respect that. So, I'm not dismissing that by saying Biden actually did worse by the percentage of the white population in a county, the whitest counties that voted actually preferred Sanders:
Biden Outperforming Sanders In Counties With Lower Incomes, More Voters Of Color
An NPR analysis of 1,200 counties across five key demographics offers a first look at how a diverse swath of the country is voting so far in the Democratic presidential primary race.www.npr.org
Bernie's best demographic is not the working class. That was Biden's best demographic. Bernie's best demo was college educated people that are financially secure that have healthcare.
Does this say anything about how good a candidate is? No. Bloomberg's vote was weighted working class and went down with better conditions, too.
Even once extremely safe Washington is trending Biden's way.
Lots of idiots like me put their ballot in the mail a couple weeks ago for candidates who aren't even in the race any more. I'm still glad I put in my vote for Warren. Now I'd be tempted to vote Biden just to get this shit over with.
I'm glad I was a procrastinator. I hope most people did the same. We were getting Bloomberg Ads around the clock here
1) How is it fair to single out Bernie supporters if you either can't really prove they deserve being singled out or data proves there's nothing unique about them (as the CompSci grad student's work shows)? How is it fair to lump them all together with a reductionist derogatory phrase that also happens to erase the gender and racial diversity of Sanders's base? Or are we gonna say that "Bernie Bro" is a state of mind? If we're gonna say that, we're once again saying that there's something uniquely toxic about Bernie supporters. And once again, I'm forced to ask that it be explained how and why. Otherwise it's just a shady, meaningless blanket accusation with dubious implications.
2) I reject the notion that it's important in the grand scheme of things. At best, it's "important" in the Twitter world, and everyone outside that bubble either doesn't know or doesn't care. On the list of things to talk about when it comes to any candidate, how their supporters behave online is pretty far down the list. Yet some people make it out to be this disease that must be condemned harshly all day every day.
3) You say it's a problem that we can't keep brushing away... But we keep hearing about it! People can't shut up about the so-called Bernie Bros. You'd think it's an existential threat or something. Besides, what would you propose we do? Condemn it officially? Done. Bernie's done it, Liz has done it. Take measures to prevent it from happening? Okay, what measures? What could we do in concrete terms? Change the rules of Twitter? Okay, how? Or should we call out people every time they're mean? Impossible and unproductive, Twitter moves way too fast, it's a neverending torrent of millions of tweets by thousands of accounts. There's literally nothing you can do to stop it or even curb it. You cannot do anything short of forcing Twitter to make their rules stricter. I guess we could try to do that, but to that I say: be careful what you wish for. Platforms like Twitter and YouTube have shown time and time again that they suck at creating fair rules, and when they enforce them, the ones who end up suffering are, more often than not, minorities and progressive voices. Alt-right shitlords and alt-right enablers somehow manage to get away scot-free.
The internet isn't a perfect happy place of civil discourse 100% of the time. And the last place we should expect it to be the case is political discourse. It's always been like that, and it will always be like that. People should just get over it and focus on things that matter instead. Policy. Ideology. Getting the economy in shape. Helping the poor and the oppressed. Saving the planet. The rest is chickenshit.
I'm not sure if using counties as a source/evidence of demographics is all that useful. Exit polls are significantly better(which do show the same thing but a way less gap) It's good when talking about what locations trended like the South.
For example California has 8x the population yet only 9 more counties compare to South Carolina.
We've gotten a few Bloomberg flyers in the mail after he dropped out. Money well spent, lol.
IT workers support him because we're basically the auto workers of the 21st century without any of the union protections this industry so sorely needs. Ever work crunch? Burn yourself out doing an 80 hour week only to get laid off the next?
When you're working the pay is good but forces outside your control can turn that into unemployment real quick and it doesn't take a very long time for workers in tech to realize that.
I bailed on this thread because it got pretty... rough on all sides after Super Tuesday, but I'm popping in to say that I just vote early for Bernie in Florida. It may be a long shot, but it ain't over until it's over. Even if there's the tiniest chance of a win, we gotta keep up the energy. Maybe we don't win, but we can still get some concessions.
if "Abusive Boss" is the worst they got on Klobb I expect she'll be back for the general next time
I mean physically abusive, and there's more too like her terrible record on minority issues or needlessly confirming Trump's judges.
Klob could unfortunately judo flip her abuse into saying she's very tough and passionate about her work and yada yada yada. She'll be back!
I'm pretty sure one outlet actually did that for her already, it was wild how the media handwaved her abuse entirely and endorsed her anyway.
The NYT, yeah. They said it was a weakness because she'd have trouble with staff turnover
Related:
This pattern of unhappy very-much-not-working class kids of upper middle class+ households trying to lead a "working class" revolution has been around for eons.
Problem is exit polls, while they show very similar trends, have pretty massive MoE's and there's no MoE's involved in location demographic data laid on top of vote data. That being said, I think 50 to 30 margins in the poorest counties kinda do speak for themselves.
As for your California point, I'm not getting you. Are you thinking this is averaging number of counties? If so, no, this is putting together vote location data with the demos of the county each vote came from.
Smh embarrassing. I don't see a "physically abusive boss" angle tanking anyone unless it crossed racial or gender lines.
It's not uncommon for the media to treat female abusers this way. The list of examples is a mile long.
Thanks for voting! I'm planning on voting Sanders in Ohio on the 17th. No reason not to.
Early mail voting is great except it needs to be ranked choice in a primary.
So many votes thrown away.
So many votes thrown away.
Just to outline my position in case you're confused (which is understandable because a lot of people are talking about this in this thread) I don't believe in "Bernie Bros" as an idea. I don't think being a Bernie fan makes you bad. I think the term "Bernie bro" is bad and people shouldn't use it. However, I believe that people online talking about politics are more likely to be attacked by Bernie fans (we've both acknowledged this, due to total numbers) and I believe that big figures on the online left with the biggest voices can be especially toxic in a way that makes Bernie fans look even worse than usual. This is a real thing that people are experiencing, they're not making it up. We can think up excuses of why this is the case, but this doesn't stop the problem. This is new in our online space, random fans of political candidates weren't getting doxxed before.
You may keep hearing about this issue, but that's because nothing changes, and all the time, even right now we have people saying that it is not a real issue that should be talked about.
You can't separate policy issues from the ability to put those policy issues into power. Bernie is losing right now, progressives do not have enough support to enact the change we want. We are not in a position to tell people who might be interested in our movement to just "get over it". If there's something that's hurting our ability to spread our message and convince people then why wouldn't we take action or at least speak out about it? To say you don't care about this, to me, is ultimately like saying that you don't care about passing progressive legislation.
Warren spoke about this stuff in her exit interview on TV. It affects real life, we can't just call it some random internet drama.
It's a strawman to act like people are requesting that no Bernie fan ever act bad on the internet. A very basic thing we can do is speak out more against huge voices of the online left trying to dox people or just acting incredibly toxic.
My California point is that each country is roughly 7.5x population as a country in SC meaning that if someone won one California county that was in 1st quartile in income and someone won 5 SC counties it still very plausible(and likely) that the person who won the one California has more people under the income level than the SC person.
Also after reading the article more I'm not sure where/if the NPR even said the conclusions people came to.
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Yeah, Biden having the "working class coalition" in the election is hilariously ironic. It's not actually surprising though, he was running the Bill Clinton '92 coalition playbook from day 1. Both the Obama/Hillary coalitions and the Biden/Bill one can work.
More than shown, maybe, but it'd still tilt in the direction of the county that the vote came from. Regardless, exit polls also show that Biden won the working class overall and whites were one of his worst demos, which is kinda the bottom line.
Which is what I said earlier. Exit polls show the same but smaller.
I just don't like it when people take conclusions that aren't present in the source. NPR never made the claim about national population demographics with that source that people did.
To be fair, it WAS an extremely effective strategy in terms of results all the way until SC. What made the Democratic primary fairly unique was not just how ludicrously large the field was, but also how non-committed the voters seemed to be. 2016 was so traumatizing to Democrats that they entered the primary with only one condition for their nominee: get the spray-tanned authoritarian out of the White House at all costs. Platform seemed to barely matter. Only the vague notion of "electability" was. Which resulted in an interesting pattern where a candidate would poll well, gain some scrutiny that came with vulnerabilities being unearthed followed by the nervous electorate moving on to the next candidate who might now be more "electable".
The big exception was Sanders. Kind of like Trump, he seemed to have a ceiling, but unlike most other players on the field he also had a devoted following that wanted him and only him, giving him a floor that was higher than all the other candidates the nervous electorate was continously swapping between. As long as he could maintain that devoted base, by maintaining ideological purity, he could ride things out (even through a heart attack), maintain a steady rate of donations and polling from his base and maybe even pick up some stragglers from candidates who dropped out. He didn't really need to grow his coalition as long as the other 70% kept jumping from candidate to candidate. (and many were undecided up until election day) Even Bloomberg, who entered the race to stop Sanders, ironically enabled this strategy by diluting the vote further.
You can say it wasn't a winning campaign, but it came within a few inches of actually succeeding. If the votes among SC had been more evenly distributed, Pete and Amy might have been tempted to ride things out until after ST at which point Sanders probably would have gotten a lead that'd be impossible for anyone else to catch up with. The only reason that didn't happen was because SC was so ludicrously lopsided that moderate Voltron came together before ST. That's not something many people anticipated though.
In a way, playing defense, staying pure and sticking with a hard-core base that'll stick with you to the end as long as you commit no heresies, assuming that base has a high enough floor, is extremely effective in a crowded primary field, moreso than trying to be opportunistic and pivoting. In another way, though, the approach is also deeply troubling. If a candidate arrives at the convention with a 30% plurality without ever having done any outreach to grow beyond that, it's likely that the other 70% isn't really on board just handing him the nomination just like that. But if that 70% is divided into 25-20-15-10, you can still make the claim that as the one with the largest number of votes, you should have the nomination and candidates with less votes combining their delegates would still be denying the will of the people by cutting out the leader of the race. (this argument was made very loudly after Nevada) Theoretically this also meant it was possible for the nominee to have only 30% support and 70% wasn't okay with it. (given Sanders' personal popularity those numbers probably wouldn't have been that bad)
That means the plurality-strategy is horrible for party unity and would almost certainly depress turnout under normal circumstances if not for the fact that Trump's re-election was considered a cataclysmic event that had to be prevented at all costs and Sanders' followers made the argument that the other 70% would vote no matter what and only their 30% would walk away if the nomination was "stolen" from him.
Primaries with large fields, combined with the relatively new advance of online fundraising through small donations, means that such primaries in the future will be inevitably dominated by candidates with "fan followings" (which applied to both Trump and Sanders) who can afford to stick around and using the turtling strategy. I'm quite curious if the parties consider this a good thing and if not if they'll take any measures to avoid this and what.
Was rewatching the second Dole-Clinton debate earlier. Dole was knocked back then as kooky and old but damn if he didn't sound a million times more lucid than Biden and Trump. These debates are gonna be must watch TV.
Good news members of Era who suffer from mental health issues! Your struggles are our entertainment!
I'm so embarrassed for this community.
Reading this, it really seems like Bernie was trying the luigi strategy, in that his plan required everyone else to lose, rather then him playing to win.
You just don't get it. Bernie's actual diagnosis of a heart attack is immaterial, but people's made up diagnosis of Biden's dementia is totes serious.
The only time this has ever worked is Kerry in '04, and even that was an accident.
Yeah it took those who failed to rally around a guy last minute.
Plus, what happened after SC was the results of 40+ years of making alliances, and contributing to the democratic party. Amy and Pete didn't drop out just because their path was over (they easily could've stayed through ST), but because of the alliances Biden's made. Bernie hasn't done shit for the Democratic party, and so when time came....Warren, the person closest to him, ideologically, didn't endorse him. And now his supporters aren't asking why things happened they way they did, they just screamed "RIGGED!" as if somehow Pete and Amy were obligated to stay in till after ST. It's bonkers that they think that anyone's obligated to help Bernie win.
You have to ask yourself why Amy and Pete dropping out did more than everything bernie's done since 2016 to win states the way Biden has. (also, see what I mean about supporters screaming rigged!)
Nothing says "I didn't click the link" more than this delicious take
I mean, technically neither campaign did nothing, but it's not like Biden went to South Carolina that much more than anyone else. I think his biggest move was securing Clyburn's endorsement which wasn't exactly a massively hard move for him. More of a default based on relationships already made.
South Carolina was before Klob and Butt dropped.
Edit: I missed that Kirblar was referring to post-SC. Which... yeah there wasn't that much done other than well-timed endorsements.
Which could easily have not happened at all. Pete/Amy dropping out, getting Beto's endorsement last minute- none of that was expected the night of SC- everyone expected all the candidates to ride it out. The morning after Pete was intending to maintain his campaign. They had an opportunity and leveraged it to create a comeback in literal days which could have easily not happened.
All I know, is if/when I throw down and vote for Biden, like I did with Hillary, the next time the moderates better choke it down and vote for AOC. I don't want to hear fuck all about she's too young, or inexperienced when Mayo Pete almost made it.
I think Biden's a disaster candidate and want Bernie to win, but this is 100% true. Bernie's revolution isn't coming, but Biden is seeing record turnout, at least in the primaries. If Bernie continues to underperform, one of the key arguments to his candidacy will be moot.
User banned (1 week): Trolling. Ignoring discussion guidelines.
What era members are a nominee for president and what era members are in their late 70s? I would like to apologize to those people.
I clicked the link fam. Bernie has struggled to resonate with the people his message has been catered to. Thats on him.
It's also amazing Bernie keeps talking about turnout. He's historically done best in the format with the least turnout - caucuses. I don't think high turnout benefits him. Biden getting in a dig about turnout is honestly pretty funny.
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