Democrats and Drama Queens on Super Tuesday
Super Tuesday wasn’t the blowout that the media is making it out to be. According to the New York Times, Joe Biden walked away with 433 delegates to Bernie Sanders 388, a difference of 45 pledged delegates. with 17 states in the bag so far. That isn’t even close to an insurmountable lead.
(Source: New York Times)
The biggest losers on Super Tuesday weren’t any of the candidates. The biggest losers were quite obviously Medicare for All and The Green New Deal. If the voters wanted to see those ideas become law, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would have swept the field. The reality is very different from the theory. The reality is that ideas don’t win elections. Emotions win elections, and the opponents of those ideas waged a very effective emotional campaign against them. Sanders relative failure at the polls, and Warren’s absolute failure is a clear indication that the majority of the Democratic party has not been convinced by the progressive rhetoric. Platforms don’t win elections. Platforms lose elections.
The problem that progressives have is that they only talk to each other…and they don’t pay attention to the numbers. The numbers that Bernie Sanders racked up in the 2016 primaries told a very clear story. Sanders picked up 13.2 million votes during the 2016 primaries, less than 20 percent of the total number of votes that Hillary Clinton earned during the general election, which indicates that approximately 20 percent of the Democratic voters will vote for a progressive regime. That’s the handwriting on the wall that everyone wants to ignore. The votes simply aren’t there.
Job One for the Democrats isn’t to pass Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. Job One for the Democrats is to evict Donald Trump from the White House and kick the Republican whores out of the Senate…and the platform for those goals was simple: protect Social Security, protect Medicare, and expand the safety net. Simple, clear, clean and completely unstoppable but the Democrats don’t want to win this election. They want to win the argument about socialism, which is why they are on the verge of losing.
Grouchy Bernie Sanders is still a contender, but he’s already on the ropes, having failed to deliver the knock blow that the media was predicting for him, while Joltin’ Joe Biden was obviously the biggest winner Tuesday night because he surprised us and embarrassed the pundits, but the headline should have been something like, “Joe Biden: Staying Alive” because Super Tuesday was his make or break moment.
The second biggest loser on Super Tuesday was either Elizabeth Warren or Mike Bloomberg.
Elizabeth Warren, who came in THIRD in Massachusetts, her adopted home state, ending up at 0 for 14, having picked up just 36 delegates. Now she had to figure out how to make a graceful exit while trying to avoid becoming another Hillary Clinton, no longer relevant.
Mike Bloomberg made a big bet and lost half a billion dollars, having won a total of 12 delegates at an average cost of $41,666,666 PER DELEGATE. It’s easy to see why he decided to go home. At that rate, it would have cost him $82,541,665,346 to buy the 1981 delegates he needed to win the nomination, and not even Michael Bloomberg has that much money to spend on a presidential ambition. He doesn’t even HAVE $82 billion. (He actually has a reported $55 billion, but not all of it is liquid.)
Some idiots out there (at The New York Times, of course) have decided that Mike Bloomberg’s quixotic campaign has demonstrated that, with a better product (meaning a better candidate) it is now possible to buy an election.
What Bloomberg actually proved was the exact opposite: you can’t buy a presidential election. His experiment proved that it would cost $82 billion to buy the presidency. That would be the height of stupidity because you could buy the entire Senate – all 100 seats – for the bargain-basement price of just $20 billion for the whole kit and kaboodle (at an average cost of $20 million each; New York, California, Florida and Texas, slightly higher.)
Thirteen of the 14 states that voted on Super Tuesday are “open primary” states, with Maine being the only “closed” primary state in this group. Joe Biden was the top vote-getter in 10 of those 14 states. Some of these states, like Massachusetts, are open primary states only if you have not declared a party preference, but in 13 out of 14 cases, it was perfectly possible for REPUBLICAN voters to have crossed over to vote for Biden.
Among the ten states where Biden was the top vote-getter, six (Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas) are nominal Republican states. Two additional states, Maine (the closed primary state in this group) and Minnesota are swing states.
Three of the four states where Bernie Sanders “won” – California, Colorado, and Vermont – are nominal Democratic states. Utah is, of course, nominally a Republican state but Utah also has the lowest median age of any state. California ranks 45th in terms of median age. Colorado ranks 42nd. Vermont has the third-highest median, but it is also Bernie Sanders home state. So, yeah, if you can turn out the kids, you can win delegates and it is possible to win enough delegates to earn a seat at the table even if you NEVER come in first in any of those campaigns.
When you put these facts together, it is much less surprising that Joe Biden did as well as he did on Super Tuesday.
While there is no clear evidence that Republican voters crossed over to vote for Biden over Sanders, it is an interesting question to mull over. Why are the members of other political parties allowed to vote in another party’s primary, and who made that obviously stupid decision?
It is so absurdly easy to change political party affiliations that any party could easily manipulate the primaries of another party if, for example, their own candidate was the incumbent and running without serious opposition, as happens to be the case this year. Allowing voters to cross over and vote in the other party’s primaries makes that even easier because it leaves no paper trail behind, no evidence of a sudden movement of voters from one party to another.
The question for Democratic voters over the next few weeks is really very simple: Can you beat Donald Trump with any of these candidates? If not, it’s time to draft someone who can and, no, I have no idea who that might be.
03/05/2020 @ 1:35 am
Making dramatic pronouncements sells newspapers.
Bernie won New Hampshire. It’s over.
Bloomberg will spend a billion dollars to buy the election. It’s over.
Biden won South Carolina. It’s over.
There are two potential differences between 2016 and 2020.
1. We don’t have to guess how bad Trump might be. We know, and he’s worse than anyone imagined, which is significant given exactly what we imagined.
2. There’s no guarantee the DNC would be stupid enough this time to tilt a primary election, though I wouldn’t put it past them.
Hillary won decisively in 2016 but she did not win cleanly. The contest was, probably unnecessarily, rigged. It had to be. When a candidate who blatantly has no respect for Democratic Party affiliation faces an opponent who bailed out a broken DNC with campaign funds, obviously Debbie Wasserman-Schultz would try to throw it to Hillary. I was offended not by the ideology but by the Party interfering with our voting rights as Democrats. If we wanted to choose Bernie, that was our right.
If Biden doesn’t use the DNC that way and so it is obvious to the entire party that he wins (if he wins) for the simple reason that more Democrats supported him than supported Bernie, If it becomes obvious that Biden wins a fair election without the DNC trying to tilt it, we may not be as decided because there comes a point at which Bernie’s followers can’t legitimately argue that his loss was rigged.
This all gets easier if Biden wins and offers Elizabeth the other spot on his ticket. If, on the other hand, Biden goes with a fuck you progressives running mate like Hillary did with Tom Kaine, the election could become problematic because the Left doesn’t understand the concept of the perfect being the enemy of the good.
03/05/2020 @ 2:46 am
“Bernie and his base must own up to the idea of party unity or risk throwing the election and being blamed for doing so…”
And yes, Warren is the smart choice for VP….
But none of this is about being smart…is it?
03/05/2020 @ 2:24 pm
Perhaps Biden will offer the 2nd spot to Buttigieg.
That would create the potential for electing 2 gay VP’s in a row from Indiana.
What are those odds?