It is one of the conceits of many on the left that their ideological enemies refuse to accept the products of science and math. I've gone into that conceit more than a few times here.
Reading around the net, there are a few of the Bernie or Busters, many of whom mistake themselves as the definition of the left, whining about a bit of analysis of the results in Indiana last night. Especially that of Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight. The part that set them pouting was this.
The Democratic race remains fundamentally unchanged after tonight’s win by Sanders. Yes, his victory was somewhat surprising, given that all of the polls had Clinton winning and by an average of 7 percentage points. And yes, Sanders has promised to fight on in the primary until perhaps the convention. The problem for the Sanders campaign remains delegate math and demographics.
Right now, Sanders looks like he’ll earn about five to 10 more delegates than Clinton in Indiana. That means Clinton will have an elected delegate lead by the end of the evening of around 280 to 285 delegates. In order to catch Clinton in the elected delegate count, Sanders would need to win over 65 percent of the remaining elected delegates. That’s actually higher than it was before Indiana voted.
To repeat a point I've made before, I don't buy FiveThrityEight's predictive function based on polls but I don't think there is any source which does a better job of analyzing the numerical facts that are established.
Apparently some of Saunders supporters don't understand that under the rules, Democrats don't do winner-takes-all as the Republicans do and, at this point, Sanders has to not only win but has to win by an increasingly high percentage and gain an increasing percentage of the remaining delegates to just catch up with Hillary Clinton's lead. He failed to do that in Indiana. That's not surprising, what he needs to do would be something he's only managed to do in a few caucuses and he's run out of those. The percentage of the remaining delegates he must win grows, making that a more daunting problem for him than it had been.
I noted the other day that the Sanders campaign seems to want to change the rules to a "winner-takes-all" system for super delegates but it now seems that some of his supporters want to change that rule for the pledged delegates too.
The problem isn't that the math is crooked, it's that it's too complex for a lot of people on that left. I know that isn't everyone who has and still supports what Bernie Sanders is doing, I've read some of them facing the fact that he is not going to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.
The problem is that from now on everything he does against Hillary Clinton is that he is attacking the presumptive Democratic nominee, which is, in effect, campaigning for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the only alternative to Hillary Clinton, today. One or the other will be sworn in as president in January and will be president for four or, more likely, eight years. As Reagan and Bush II have shown, a Republican will be supported by the media no matter how criminal, no matter how incompetent, no matter how dangerous they are. We really don't need someone who is asking for the Democratic nomination helping them.
If it had ever been "winner take all," Bernie would be so far behind now he'd have had to drop out. It's the proportional allocation that's kept him in the race this long. Perhaps that gave his die-hard supporters false hope but, again, that was the system when this started.
ReplyDeleteAs for 538's predictive power, even they say their estimates are based on polls, not on precognition. Clinton barely campaigned in Indiana, spent very little on TV ads there (this per 538.com), because she's so far ahead in the delegate count there wasn't much point in spending money there. I've no doubt they will campaign to win in California, and probably will.
I don't really have a passion for Clinton, so much as a clear-headed view of this, and Sanders, for many reasons, is disappointing. Now that he's pledged to fight to a "contested convention," when it seems clear even the GOP won't have one of those, he's become simply annoying, and almost troublesome.