We still don’t know the full results of the Iowa caucus.
Make all the excuses you want. I’m happy to agree that this result wasn’t planned, it wasn’t the result of interference by the Russians or Pete Buttigieg, there’s no evil mastermind somewhere chortling while stroking his white cat. It’s a fuck-up, pure and simple. The Iowa Democrats bungled everything.
They relied on an archaic mechanism to determine a ‘winner’ — it was so creaky and antiquated that you could predict confusion and flubbed results, yet they persist in sticking with it. Why? Because that’s the way they’ve always done it, and no one has the bones to insist on modernizing it.
It produced humiliating results. Individual caucuses don’t rely on reporting just the numbers, they have to put the results in rank order — so when there’s a tie, they can’t just accept it, they have to flip a coin to make a decision. A coin flip that gets onto the internet and makes the whole process look ridiculous.
In case twitter tries to take it down, here’s the coin flip #IowaCaucuses #IowaCaucuses2020 #IowaCaucusDisaster #Coinflip ps, notice how shocked and confused people are (and then they just go with it) pic.twitter.com/txKeGDvptL
— JustAnotherDeplorable (@AndrewBartunek) February 4, 2020
Sometimes, worse than ridiculous.
Watch Buttigieg's surrogate ‘randomly’ win this coin toss for a delegate. 👀 pic.twitter.com/1Magee4yTg
— ᏔმƦ𝔢ჳ💤 (@mooncult) February 4, 2020
Their only attempt to modernize was to use an app…an app that wasn’t adequately tested, and that people didn’t know how to use.
Shadow’s app seems to fit that definition. Reports suggest that the app was engineered in just the past two months. According to cybersecurity consultants and academics interviewed by the Times, the app was not tested at statewide scale or vetted by the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency. And even if the app was working just fine, reports suggest the roll out of the tool was bungled, to the point where those tasked with reporting via the app weren’t trained to know how to use it.
This is what the Democrats always do. They fuck it up. Best intentions in the world, but total bumblefuckery when it comes to execution. Bush v. Gore, anyone? For that matter, how did W get a second term after he screwed everything up? Because the Republicans are evil, but they’ve got the focus and determination and ideological fanaticism to plow ahead while the Democrats are still trying to puzzle out how to count votes. Also, because the Democrats don’t know what kind of party they are — they’re still spinning in circles trying to claim that centrist middle ground, while the electorate is standing way to the left, yelling at them to come this way.
Oh, except when the Democrats decide to change the debate rules to allow a billionaire to buy his way into the limelight. If that doesn’t tell you how they operate, I don’t know what does. It’s all about money, not principle.
That also explains why establishment Democrats are so hostile to Bernie Sanders. He’s going to shake up their blundering, failed system.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the Republican party must be destroyed, because it’s a malignant blight on democracy. But now this current debacle convinces me that the Democratic party must also be destroyed or radically transformed, because it’s a neoliberal nothingburger populated with incompetent chucklefucks who only care about the status quo…which isn’t working.
I love Elizabeth Warren as a brilliant, hardworking wonk, but I am so fed up with the Democrats that I’ve decided that, in the Minnesota primary, I’ll be voting for Bernie. It’s the only way to break the cycle of failure.
My biggest concern is that we could have a motivated electorate that turns out in droves on election day next November to boot out the boob at the top, but it won’t matter, because the Democrats will fumble the ball at the last moment. It’s not the Republican coup that should make us worry, it’s that the Democrats will botch it all and accidentally hand it all to the forces of evil.
I wish that there had been another motivator in your switch to Bernie, but I’m glad nonetheless. I’m not naively optimistic that he’ll fix everything, but he’s our best chance (along with The Squad and hopefully some new Progressive Dems) of instituting any meaningful change.
Bernie Sanders argued to keep the caucuses because they tend to favor him, and then supported the more extensive reporting requirements from the caucus sites, which he expected to also favor him.
A friend commented Monday that it was time to burn the DNC to the ground. I countered that it appears that the DNC is trying to burn themselves to the ground.
Sanders surrogate Ro Khanna last June…not exactly seeking to shake up the Iowa caucus system.
In contrast, current Warren surrogate Julián Castro.
I thought you might find the photo below funny.A bit off topic .
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/
” But Democrats keep doing it, because on some level they genuinely believe that, even when it accomplishes nothing, following the rules to the bitter end is the noble thing to do.”
Innuendo Studios – You go high, we go low
Politico last month – “The little-noticed change that could boost Biden and hurt Bernie in 2020”:
Hell yeah, great to hear you’re voting for Bernie!
Please, PZ, stop making this out to be worse than it is.
First and foremost, the app is not for the official results (or at least it’s not as far as I’m aware). Much like I noted yesterday, we were told it was just for getting unofficial information out to the media and campaigns. The paper records are still the official records. But that takes a while to process and since the majority of people are volunteers who have day jobs, that process can take a few days to complete during a workweek.
This is to say that the biggest screw-up here is caving into the demands of the media and campaigns that they get result information as quickly as possible instead of telling them they’ll just have to wait.
Second, I find your change of heart on coin flips from four years ago a bit disappointing.
So what are you saying here? You actually want that trial by combat now??? I’ll note that they trained us (whether or not these people followed the training or not is not clear) to take the raw delegate calculation to 4 decimal places. That should be more than enough places as no caucus location was going to have more than 1000 people and probably no more than 10 delegates. This was to ensure that a tie was really a tie before having a game of chance.
Now, that all said…if you think the whole delegate process should go away, I can agree we should have a discussion on that. But what would replace it? I’m not entirely sure if replacing it with a simple majority vote, for example, works well for a national election. A difficulty with that is different states may have different rules for voting. Some, for example, now have ranked choice while others do not. Would these states want to incorporate their typical rules for a primary? I don’t know.
I’m concerned, though, when people gripe about the current system when it seems rather clear they haven’t given a replacement system complete thought…or even much thought at all. Rather, I see victims of Dunning-Kruger — people who are overconfident in their abilities and whose incompetence prevents them from recognizing they are incompetent. Please don’t be one of those people, PZ.
The coin flipping seems doubly silly since we already have a good way to apportion delegates while accounting for rounding/fractional delegates: It’s called “Jefferson’s method”, invented by Thomas Jefferson in 1792, and we already use it to apportion our 435 representatives based on state populations.
In the Iowa coin flip videos I’ve seen, I calculated Jefferson’s method based on the counts in the video and it gives very sensible results.
Iowa, you’re 228 years behind the times!
I completely disagree with PZ. There were masterminds behind the debacle, the famed trio Curly, Larry and Moe.
And there most certainly a hack – whoever wrote and “tested” the app certainly qualifies as a hack and not the good kind that drives a taxi around.
Seriously, who else would deploy an untested app, with precisely zero training, for a caucus to determine one’s chosen candidate for POTUS?
Oh, Nevada was scheduled to use this app as well, but the stellar performance in pretending to be a hypernova was sufficient to switch to a (probably) different untested, untrained on app.
Likely named Rock Paper Scissors, assuming that they can master that game.
My feeling is that relying on Bernie to ‘shake up the system’ will go about as well for Minnesotans as electing Jesse Ventura did.
Adding/correcting what I said @9:
I will admit that, even if states as a whole would still need to send delegates to a national convention due to states having different rules for voting, we here in Iowa could get rid of this system where we elect delegates at the precinct level that dilutes up through what we send to the national convention. Delegates could instead be divided up based on the statewide votes. That would get rid of our system that resembles the Electoral College more than I am comfortable with where a candidate that wins by small margins in many locations can end up with a large delegate count. (Though at least they generally don’t get all of the delegates from a precinct even from winning by a small margin.)
That, and let’s face it, “liberals” love their money just as much as conservative Republicans do, especially after the Clinton’s hit the national scene. Also, it’s that blatant hostility that makes some Sander’s supporters to suspect skullduggery from the centrists who run the party.
Need I link again to that YouTube video from Innuendo Studios, “The Alt.Right Playbook: They Go Low, We Go High?” If any commentary encapsulates the strategic and philosophical problem within the Democratic Party and why they keep losing, it’s that one.
Independent – “Bernie Sanders is the reason Iowa went so wrong — and now his supporters are handing Trump ammunition”:
I’m waiting to see if Elizabeth Warren has a plan for an app now.
Geez, PZ, your reasons for switching to Bernie are quite selective and ignore a lot of contrary data. Bernie has enjoyed the cooperation of the Democratic Party for years as they elbowed any democrat out of an attempt to run against him in Vermont. He has no legislation to his name, after 30 years in congress. He supported caucuses. See comment above for how unprincipled he and his surrogate are vs the principled view Castro has taken on behalf of Warren. Who (Warren) I remind you, went against Obama and the democratic party leadership by nixing, through her own tireless efforts, the nominations he made to financial positions of influence and who stood up to bankers and Biden in testimony before congress and who created a whole new agency to protect the little guys and so ticked off Obama he wouldn’t let her run it. Bernie has just hot words. Bernie isn’t going to shake up anything. I am from Texas, my husband’s family is from south Texas and they are Mexican-American. It is shocking you trust a man to shake up our party who tried to send toxic waste from his white area to the small mostly hispanic poor town in south texas. That sounds like an expedient politician to me and I am furious that so many of his supporters let stuff like that that he did slide, though it contradicts their trust in his supposed principled stands. No, you confuse bad-mouthing the party he has depended on for his whole career as righteous protest. It isn’t. It is just hot words. Warren, on the other hand, took on Democratic leadership, succeeded in blocking bad nominations that infuriated Obama and created an agency that can protect the little guys from predatory capitalism. I am disappointed in your sloppy reasoning.
Sanders doesn’t want to fix anything, he wants to be president. If he wanted to fix the Democratic party he would’ve joined it any point in time before he decided he wanted to be president.
If he’s the nominee, he’ll lose the popular vote and the electoral college.
Do I hear the oinking of pigs of the capitalism/centrist breed?
Sure, there’s the adage about attributing to malice what could be more appropriately attributed to stupidity, but conversely when there is a consistent pattern of results that always seem to benefit the same people or only hurt the same people, it is really difficult to shake the feeling that there isn’t some sort of intention behind some of this (on top of, you know, the normal human desire to see patterns everywhere even when there aren’t any). At times like this, I try really hard to imagine what would need to be revealed for me to believe an active conspiracy versus the lower bar of what would need to be revealed for me to believe “mere” incompetence, and try to see which is closer to what I currently know about the situation.
So, while we know that powerful people do actively work to suppress anything that threatens their power/wealth – we’ve seen it with the tobacco industry and the oil industry, with numerous attempts (successful or not) at disenfranchisement and gerrymandering and so on – that alone isn’t sufficient to justify a default assumption of conspiracy. There has to be something else, of course, and it appears that different people have different standards before they’re willing to take seriously an allegation of intentional shenanigans. For me, at least, it would need to be at least some revealed communications (e-mails, texts, recorded phone calls, etc.) where people in positions of authority in the Democratic party are actively discussing, either among themselves or with donors, how to keep X from winning or how to ensure that Y wins.
@17 The stated reasons for supporting the relocation of low-level radioactive waste seem like pretty good reasons:
Source: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/1997/10/7/house-section/article/h8512-1?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22%5C%22all+that+Texas+and+Maine+and+Vermont+are+asking+for+today%5C%22%22%5D%7D&r=1
Given that background, what decision would you have made, knowing that this particular area was already going to receive this waste (from Texas, not Maine and Vermont)?
Hmmm…clicking PZ’s link to Raw Story about a billionaire buying into the limelight has this quote:
“ Let’s make one thing clear: @TheDemocrats decision to change the rules now to accommodate Mike Bloomberg and not changing them in the past to ensure a more diverse debate stage is just plain wrong.https://t.co/BoCVpahWpx
— Tom Steyer (@TomSteyer) January 31, 2020”
I am halfway through Ezra Klein’s podcast discussion with Steyer and Klein hits him hard on some stuff, but a Warren/Steyer ticket sounds cool to me right about now.
As for the Democrats always screwing it up–I mean, the party leadership is mostly white and mostly wealthy, and mostly unaccountable to voters thanks to an incredibly draconian set of state-level party regulations. Even when they “lose”, the Republican policies still benefit them just fine. That seems like a pretty good anti-incentive to performing well, politically.
#21, Please, really? You don’t notice what is not discussed in that lengthy quote? Environmental racism and its history in our country! Bernie, who has been notoriously unimpressed with what he calls “Identity Politics” was not the least bit interested in it either. Lots of environmental racism gets done under cover of so called good excuses. BTW–my last understanding was that the plant was never built. The community rose up against it. So much for the “if they are going to build it anyway who cares that only 10% comes from Vermont!”
Your comment just proves why I find Bernie and his supporters so frustrating–can never admit, oops, that was not a good thing he(I)did, but will explain it away, conspiracy invent it away, never noticing with any self awareness how uninterested they are in “Identity Politics” as they do it. That’s how he was able to wait so long to endorse Jessica Cisneros who is primarying the most conservative democrat in congress, after Warren had done so months before, and how he was able to endorse anti-choice candidates, unable to understand the economic injustice inherent in the roll back of women’s reproductive rights. Very short sighted. Ugh…Yeah, who stood up to democrats with that endorsement of Jessica Cisneros over Henry Cuellar? It was Warren leading the way months before Bernie finally followed along after her. Warren stood up early, when support mattered most.
@9
Or like, just have a runoff election, rather than some schoolyard softball team selection bullshit. We are deciding who will run for the most powerful political decision of the world, the time for cointosses ends with city council membership.
@17
Literally untrue
That said, I consider his refusal to push watered down bullshit legislation full of concessions to republicans a plus, not a minus.
Is him engaging in realpolitik supposed to be a negative? Lmao.
NIMBY bullshit doesn’t make toxic waste magically disappear. It has to go somewhere. Leaving the waste in the plant would lead to it spreading into the groundwater, whereas an area like south Texas with a lower level of rainfall vastly decreases the risk of pollution. There is nothing a priori wrong with dumping waste in any given area, as long as its done in an environmentally safe way, and this would be very clear if anyone making this inane claim (which, by the way, was pushed heavily by Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA) actually read the commentary on the bill.
Warren really took on Democratic leadership by supporting every major policy decision they do, pushing a pallatative do-nothing agency that doesn’t actually address any of the issues it pursues, and supporting watered down versions of Obama’s already milquetoast policies on the trail. Impressive.
Also lol imagine thinking there’s such thing as non-predatory capitalism. I’m just ethically stealing the excess value of workers!
What makes you think that this is “just” incompetence? When an organization keeps making stupid mistakes that benefit it and then just says: “Oh, I guess I’m just a doofus, well I’ll take the win anyway” at what point do you decide that they may in fact be doing it on purpose? They do not mind looking like idiots if they keep getting what they want. They do not lose their jobs and the money keeps pouring in.
#25
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/bernard_sanders/400357/report-card/2019
I guess the site I saw didn’t count his post office and local water contract bills as substantial. But yes, he has 7 bills to his name, as does Warren, only her bills include just a single post office one. And his bill count is 0 for last session, having almost the worst attendance record of all senators. He is near the bottom in leadership as well. That doesn’t describe to me a person who can be counted on to be a mover and a shaker.
From an outsider, it clear to me the US has become the shit hole country your vile orange two-legged vomit of a human being spews about… IOW all the verbal diarrhea just seems to be exactly what he has morphed your nation into. My condolences.
Here is the legislative score card for Warren, just to compare to Bernie. She has a significantly higher leadership score. She is who we can count on to shake up the democratic party.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/elizabeth_warren/412542/report-card/2019
SC, #15:
So … Bernie’s the reason it went so wrong? Typical headline. Not typical for you. You can’t seriously believe that the widespread, multifaceted bungling of the Iowa caucus, at what seems to be every level of its operation, was actually his fault. But you’re going to just quote that anyway, with no comment? Really?
No, it wasn’t. You have one list of totals to report, or three, or an actual paper trail, or insert whatever the fuck you want here…. no matter what, nothing like that “necessitates” the use of the app. It just doesn’t.
The person who needed to come up with that bullshit excuse also didn’t really “need” to come up with that bullshit excuse; it just happens to be a very convenient thing for that person to say.
I think many Iowans are to blame for sticking with this fucked up process that heavily privileges Iowa, particularly rural areas of Iowa, and particularly the kind of privileged people who have no trouble participating in such things. But it’s laughable to think that, were it not for Bernie, they would’ve chosen an ordinary primary which would take them out of their coveted first position (because of NH’s absurd law).
Is it helpful when others direct this vitriol at those people? Is there some reason why it’s specifically “Sanders supporters” who (1) are claimed to be doing this and (2) doing it in an unhelpful way? What I mean is anything other than having an axe to grind against Bernie. Is there a reason like that?
@28
For Republicans cheating isn’t cheating if a Republican wins. That didn’t start with Trump, but it sure has gotten worse.
@30
Both Sanders supporting the caucuses because that format benefits candidates like him and Iowans wanting to keep their first in the nation status can be true things. That app that was supposed to speed reporting by crashing and burning along with having a woefully inadequate phone back for precinct chairs to call results in totally crapped in the media’s punch bowl and ruined their whole night. Sad! It wasn’t like there was going to be a decisive winner anyway given how close it was between Buttigieg and Sanders, and it still wasn’t good news for Biden either.
As for privileged rural Iowa, it’s actually easier for people to caucus in urban areas given distances.
@27
Yeah so you did actually just say something that was literally false, and I don’t really care about your waffling on it. This is a disingenuous argument because sponsoring and signing bills is an infinitessimally small part of what senators do. Sanders’ main strategy is through processes like amendments rather than bills, because that circumvents the need to water down your legislation to please centrist dems and republicans.
One look at her proposed policies proves this is a lie. Abandoning single-payer healthcare is very iconoclastic!!1! It’s revolutionary to have a 50$k cap on student debt forgiveness!
I can’t wait for the absolute political tremors she’ll cause by pushing worse versions of obama-era legislation. I mean, hey, I’ll still have to pay 100k of my 150k student debt and still be one major illness from bankruptcy, but she’s such an epic slay kween that I can at least take comfort in that.
There are two ways to have a primary. In one, the candidates and their supporters spar over substantive issues and policies, challenge each other with facts and data, steal the best ideas of all their competitors and hone their messages. In the end, the winning candidate is the one who best stays on message and develops ways to communicate that message. The winner emerges stronger.
In the other way, the candidates and their supporters form a circular firing squad, attack each other personally, trash each other’s plans and ideas and deliver a blueprint for their defeat to the Rethugs in the general.
The absolute worst candidate among the Dems is lightyears ahead of the traitors currently in power. Pick the candidate that best represents your interests. Argue your ass off for them, but with positive arguments in favor of your candidate, not negative arguments attacking other candidates.
Make your cases, cast your votes, get more and more people to vote. But when the results are in, it’s vote blue, no matter who. And argue just as enthusiastically to defeat Trump as you did for your candidate.
It can be. But that article is claiming Bernie is “the reason” it went “so” wrong. (Not just some kind/amount of wrong, but that specific amount — just so.) This isn’t true. It’s false. Not even close to credible or plausible, but this doesn’t stop the anti-Sanders people, who I guess have nothing better to do.
I’m talking about how delegates are calculated. (Because one has to calculate this with a formula, as it’s not simply about counting voters.) It’s the same effect as in the electoral college, in which a rural person’s vote counts for more. They split up the state into so many tiny precincts that distances are not actually a very significant factor here, although I’m sure it’s true that they are somewhat shorter in more populated areas.
The former is the one that’s unnecessary and contrary to democracy, while the latter is an unfortunate and unavoidable fact about geography. (That’s not to say we couldn’t still address it in various ways, by allowing people to mail in their votes and so forth. But of course, a caucus by mail would not work.)
I’d say it was good news for Sanders. Buttigieg’s campaign is going nowhere, so getting a relatively tiny number of delegates here changes very little. (In total, Iowa only gets 41 delegates out of about 4000, or roughly 1%.) He doesn’t have the kind of support that Sanders does, especially among minority groups, because he’s a dirtbag and many people realize this.
I think Sanders has pretty decent odds now, and if the 71% of results that we currently have is representative, getting the popular vote in Iowa is nice. (And whatever the exact number of delegates is doesn’t matter here, because it’s tiny as I said.) It would’ve been more nice if attention weren’t focused on it being bungled, but still nice.
However, for Mayor Pete, all it means is that he’ll get to brag about it while his campaign goes down the toilet, which is not much of a consolation prize.
I don’t think Elizabeth Warren has a real chance of winning the nomination anymore. This race looks to be between Biden and Sanders. Hopefully fucking Bloomberg doesn’t buy his way in to replace Biden in which case for the next election, your choices will be “Republican” or “Insanely Deranged Republican”.
Lotharloo,
I disagree. Liz did better than expected in Iowa. She’s a smart politician, and she can connect with voters. I’ll be in her corner ’til the end, and then I’ll support the eventual nominee tooth and claw.
I can see moderates gravitating to Warren instead of Sanders if/when Biden falters. Bloomberg’s strategy is predicated on Biden dropping out and Buttigieg failing as well, leaving him as the alternative to Sanders. I wouldn’t count Klobuchar out quite yet either, but it would take something big to happen for her to have a chance and that’s not likely.
“best intentions in the world,” and yet their constant stream of incompetence, flops, mistakes, and aw-shucks-fuck-ups… always seem to favor the worst outcome with the most support from money, power, and entrenchment.
Weird, I mean, you’d think if it were just people messing the bed constantly you’d break about a rough 50% on either side of the outcome. But nope. That’s not what happens. it’s just such an odd circumstance that every error the party makes, is exclusively to the benefit of the party heads, their big donors, and substandard conservative politics in the party.
But sure, they have the best intentions in the world.
Even just recently, they published an update to the results that gave a handful of SDE’s from Bernie to Steyer when the location’s reporting showed the opposite, and only walked it back when this fact was pointed out on the reporting body’s social media. How many times did that happen where they didn’t get called out?
Regarding Sanders and his supposed better results with caucuses:
That’s only for open caucuses. Here are the caucus results for 2016:
Open Caucus, Sanders wins 4, Clinton wins 0.
Semi-open Caucus, Sanders 1, Clinton 1
Semi-closed Caucus, Sanders 1, Clinton 0
Closed Caucus, Sanders 6, Clinton 5
So yes, Sanders did better in caucuses than Clinton. But only in a very superficial way. He did much better in a specific caucus format.
And that doesn’t begin to get into the question of caucuses being the most undemocratic method. We don’t pick a nominee for president by playing Red Rover in the gym.
It’s way too early to get into the circular firing squad. At least wait till after March 3rd!
https://ballotpedia.org/Super_Tuesday_primaries,_2020
One monkey don’t stop no show. (I prefer the Animals version of the Joe Tex song, myself, but YMMV.)
Well given the Dems shat themselves in Iowa at least one Republican tugged at my heart strings and gained some admiration for displaying backbone and integrity cutting against the grain of his POTUS enabling party. Romney! Didn’t vote for him in 2012, but wow! Kinda choked up watching this:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/02/05/mitt-romney-trump-impeachment-trial-vote-announcement-full-vpx.cnn
hemidactylus:
Romney can go fuck himself. Evidently, his backbone was missing once again, when the time came to vote on the obstruction charge. And it was missing all of those times he didn’t get any other Republicans to vote along with him (who at least seem surprised that he did anything at all). And it was missing when he claimed in that bullshit speech of his that this was “the most difficult decision [he has] ever faced,” as if deciding Trump was guilty was not the easiest fucking thing in the world. It was an opportunity to say just how shameful and corrupt all of his Republican friends are, but he did not have the spine for that either.
His job there was to get on TV, serve you that weak fucking tea and watch you dilute it some more with your fake fucking tears. And he did that job to the best of his ability, but not the job of being a Senator or even a merely decent human being.
Porivil Sorrens @ #25:
Are you serious? I don’t know where to start…
First, I was responding to PZ’s and many others’ suggestion that Iowa shows they need to vote for Sanders because he’s the only one who can push the Democratic Party to modernize and reform and become more democratic. It’s not based in reality. Sanders is in fact among the forces responsible for preventing Iowa and Nevada from switching to primaries and going early in the lineup. The argument isn’t supported by the facts.
Here’s my attempt at a narrative:
The 2016 Dem caucuses, Nevada in particular, were often disasters. They were chaotic, non-inclusive, gave rise to acrimony, and allowed conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party (many of which were promoted by both the Kremlin and Sanders supporters) to take root and fester. Sanders did far better in caucuses, which generally have far lower participation rates than primaries.
In the ironically named unity commission that followed the 2016 election, the Sanders camp reportedly pushed to retain the Iowa caucus among others and to have the Iowa and Nevada caucuses early in the campaign. The centrists, in contrast, wanted to get rid of caucuses. Some caucuses were retained, while other states switched to primaries, which, again, was not favored by Sanders.
The Sanders camp also pushed for, and succeeded in getting, new caucus rules, for example the requirement that caucus sites report three numbers: initial preference, secondary preference, and delegates awarded. On the one hand, this is arguably in the interest of transparency, since the public has more information about the results. On the other, it rather undercuts the only points in favor of a caucus: that they’re deliberative and people can be persuaded to support another candidate if theirs isn’t viable. The first number can be misused if it’s presented as the equivalent of the popular vote, because caucuses are low turnout events precisely because they’re supposed to create conditions for persuasion and mind-changing.
Sanders’ representatives didn’t push for retaining the caucuses or having Iowa and Nevada go early publicly, making arguments that this was better for the party of for democracy, as would seem to be in the interest of transparency. Instead, they did so quietly and behind the scenes, knowing that this would aid Sanders’ campaign. If the low turnout caucuses geared toward the participation of students and the most enthusiastic supporters and tending to exclude many others and the bitterness and conspiracies surrounding the 2016 caucuses weren’t the reasons the Sanders camp wanted to retain and highlight the caucuses, they didn’t stop them from promoting them.
So the Iowa Democratic Party mucks up the 2020 caucuses. This is in part because they’re almost always confusing and chaotic, in part because the new reporting requirements added another level of complexity to the mix, and in part because they – probably a little freaked out because of the changes – went with a new and untested technology they didn’t really need in the first place and that failed.
At this point, the Sanders camp, rather than accepting any part of their role or responsibility in the fiasco, stand silent while the Trumpers, the Kremlin, and many online Sanders supporters spin conspiracy theories about how the Democratic Party (which Sanders is running to represent) is fully at fault, incompetent, and/or messing with results to screw Sanders. When Buttigieg appeared to be leading in delegates, many of them went along with the online campaign to accuse his campaign and the party of cheating.
And they’re furthering the idea of “rigging” with claims about the initial preference numbers vs. the delegate counts. Caucuses are caucuses, and they, like the other campaigns, knew the rules going in. I saw Katrina van den Heuvel on MSNBC a little while ago comparing the delegates to the electoral college and talking about “democratic failure.” And I’ve seen several Sanders surrogates referring to the initial preference numbers as the “popular vote” (which they now have many in the media doing as well). It’s ridiculous – they want to cherry-pick all of the aspects that are helpful to them. There was a guy from New Hampshire on talking about how they often get 50% turnout, whereas the Iowa caucus was like 16% turnout. 16%. That’s not a popular vote, by any means, and it’s misleading to present it as such, especially in the service of claiming that the delegates resulting from the caucuses – which Sanders wanted! – are an undemocratic rigging of the process by the party.
I don’t find this acceptable, and I’m unpleasantly surprised that Sanders supporters do. And yes, his “engaging in realpolitik” is a negative. The Sanders campaign relentlessly attacks other candidates for anything even hinting at political calculation or compromise, presenting themselves as innocent and above political maneuvring. They’re now portraying themselves as victims of the party, suffering once again from problems they themselves had a big role in creating and rules to which they’d agreed. I’m not anti-Sanders, but I don’t like what looks like a cult of personality which treats critics and the Democratic Party as enemies, refuses to acknowledge or take responsibility for self-interested actions, and misleads the public about the truth. It’s disturbing.
As I’ve said many times, I just wish the Sanders campaign would simply acknowledge that it’s a political campaign like any other and Sanders is a politician who can make mistakes, compromise, and maneuver, in addition to standing on principle and going against the grain. That he has normal politician strengths and weaknesses – that a weakness for everyone else doesn’t magically become a strength because he does it. That everyone who criticizes him or the behavior of some of his surrogates or supporters isn’t a hater or enemy or representative of the elites. It’s just a fucking political campaign.
More Bernie stuff, huh? Okay, I want to chuck in a few cents here, if I may. First, I don’t object to the idea of a President Bernie. All things being equal, I think it may even do some good in the long term. But, the president, any president, only has so much power and I wish that his more fervent would come to terms with that. Bernie’s not going to be the Magic Beatnik, floating into D.C. on a cloud of rainbow colored unicorn farts (and if anyone’s going to use that for the name of their anime-themed death metal band, I want royalties) to make everyone happy with a wave of his mystic joss-stick. President Bernie is the beginning, not the end and I’m concerned far too many Bros are going to dust off their hand and say “Welp, that’s that!”
And this Rogan endorsement still bothers me. I’m sorry but too many putative liberals have gone down the “beware the transgender ideology” rabbit-hole for me (and more than a few other trans activists) to just dismiss it as “big tent” politics. Whatever he may have said or done in the past as a pissant local politician or a cranky outsider and contrarian doesn’t matter. What matters is what he says and does now and in the next few months. I’m willing to keep an open mind, but not too open.
And, let’s face it. The country is well to the right of even progressive politicians and woefully misinformed about what socialism, democratic socialism or anything else to the left actually is. The public is woefully under-educated period (looks like we really did need that education, eh, Roger Waters?) and have been primed to conservative talking points for decades. Dismiss the concept of electability all you like, but if you’re not elected you can’t do anything, can you?
rrhain @ #41:
As I quoted @ #7 above, “Sanders won 12 of the 18 states and territories that caucused in 2016 — compared with 11 of 39 primaries.” He won two thirds of caucuses vs. about a fourth of primaries. Clinton didn’t win in any of those caucus categories. That’s not “very superficial.” Also, he’s opposed closed primaries and caucuses.
Sanders pushed for the continuation of this undemocratic method because it favors him.
-points at Susan Montgomery and feministhomemaker’s posts-
They both said what I wanted to say about Bernie and his supporters, just far better than I can.
Problem I have is Bernie’s supporters have a tendency to pull the “if our candidate doesn’t get the nomination, we’ll vote for the other guy/not vote at all, so there!” bullshit. It’s how Trump got so many votes.
And I forgot to close a tag. Sorry about that!
PZ, could you pop in and add a close-bold tag after feministhomemaker’s nym?
Thank you in advance!
OK, folks. Mittens today became the first Senator to vote to convict a President from his own party. EVER. That is something. He chose duty and country over party–and that is something I thought I’d never see from a Republican.
That was courageous. I can acknowledge that without losing the perspective that his policies still suck.
@48
I have zero respect for the US political system in any way, shape, or form and my ultimate political ideal would be the absolute dissolution of it (hence, y’know, being a socialist. Removing bourgeois power institutions is part of the bag.)
As such, you can’t sell me on any argument that hinges on the sanctity of a system I find inherently unjust. Want to try to get me support the US prison system or ICE next?
I will acknowledge that Bernie is not perfect. He’s far to the right of me on most of his positions. Unfortunately, he’s the best we have, so I’m willing to vote for him as a compromise. Hopefully, we can keep up the momentum and someday tear the system down by the roots.
Porivil Sorrens @ #51:
I’m an anarchist and specialist in this shit. I regret to inform you that a Bernie Sanders presidency would not in fact lead to the absolute dissolution of the US political system or bourgeois power institutions. He’s been in politics for 50 years. He’s not particularly radical by world standards. And just…reality.
Socialism is about building and not just tearing down. If your aim is merely destructive, it has nothing to do with socialism. If you have a productive vision, then you need to show how the actions of the candidate you support further it.
Your political position doesn’t excuse you from basic epistemic standards. Indeed, if you have a real interest in radical social change, you should want to acknowledge and contend with the facts. Moreover, being a radical adds a heightened responsibility to face reality and not engage in evasion or wishful thinking.
Evidence, SC. From what I know, the Sanders people were all calling to reform the caucuses and primaries, making them more transparent and accessible, removing superdelegates and other undemocratic elements from the process as much as possible. One of many ideas along those lines was to open up the closed primaries, although the DNC can’t do something like that all by itself. (You’d have to deal with state laws and Republicans.)
But where’s your evidence of some kind of concerted effort by Sanders to keep caucuses around? I’ll believe it when I see it. But I don’t see it.
Keeping the caucus (a reformed version of it) may have been the most viable option on the table that could be expected to happen for the next election (this one). Because Iowans control their own state, not Bernie, and caucuses are apparently fairly popular there (at least they were, but I have no idea about now).
Why would you think this type of approach indicates that they really wanted to keep it, were pushing for it, that this is who we should blame for it? I mean, instead of that just indicating that they settled for the most improvement that they could hope to get? Again, this is Sanders, not some all-powerful figure who has much clout in the DNC and/or the IDP, much less does he have it all in his iron grip. If you point at this “unity commission,” well, that’s not just Sanders or his supporters.
So why wouldn’t it make sense for him to just play the cards he has? And by that I do mean the ones he has in his hand, not the ones you wish he had. But it seems like you’re treating it as if he had all the cards here, and that’s why we should blame him. (For something, I know not what … the fact that it was a caucus, maybe, but I guess you’re backing off from blaming him for the fucked up way that it transpired). Anyway, just step back for a second — does that sound right to you? Since when does a guy like Sanders have all the power?
Also, we’ve actually been saying two different things in this thread. The way delegates are allocated does in fact benefit moderates like Buttigieg, Biden, as well as people like Clinton, who have stronger support in rural areas (which tend to be more moderate/conservative). That is also what most articles report when they discuss the horse race and declare who “won Iowa.” Those of course aren’t the numbers that make Bernie look good in the press, which is the main reason anyone cares about Iowa, nor are they the numbers he cares about in terms of gauging his campaign and his level of support.
So what exactly do you think his motivation here is supposed to be? I guess it’s true that statistically he had better results in them, in a single election with few data point, but that modest amount success could easily be explained by many other factors. So I don’t know whether I should be connecting those dots the way some are, nor is it obvious Sanders’ campaign would look at it that way either.
It’s a terrible thing to admit, but the Republican primary system is notably superior to the Democratic one, and has been for years.
In the Republican primaries, all states follow the same procedures, and although they do have proportional assignment of delegates, the rules are heavily slanted towards trying to mimic the Electoral College… you know, the thing which actually determines the outcome of a Presidential election?
And golly, the Iowa Democratic Party somehow keeps misreporting certified results from districts in ways which boost Buttigieg versus everybody, not just Sanders. Definitely just a coincidence that this has happened at least 3 times already. Also a total coincidence that their app was designed by a company owned by Acronym, which is funded by Republican Hedge Fund Managers and whose CEO is actually married to a Buttigieg campaign leader. Total coincidence. Not at all something which should have been widely reported from the start. No conflicts of interest there whatsoever.
You know what would help convince people not to vote for Trump? Not constantly doing things which look exactly as crooked as Trump. (Also, maybe, not taking enthusiastic youth voters and telling them “you’re a bunch of misogynist Russian trolls and you will vote for our horrifying pro-war pro-1% candidate who is literally the most-hated person in the party in nationwide polls, and like it”. But that ship sailed last time.)
cr @ #53:
The evidence is the reporting I linked to above. Clinton called caucuses “creatures of the parties’ extremes,” centrist organizations openly opposed them, and they obviously benefit Sanders. If Sanders wants to say/show that he didn’t push in the unity commission for the retention of caucuses or the early scheduling of the Iowa and Nevada caucuses, he’s welcome to do so. And he totally should, because his campaign and supporters are throwing a lot of blame around. I completely encourage his campaign to be transparent about what they supported and support, whatever that may be. I welcome being proved wrong.
Again, several states switched from caucuses to primaries, and this was openly predicted to hurt Sanders. No one’s arguing the IDP didn’t also push for keeping the caucus system or going early, but (as someone pointed out above) this and Sanders pushing for the same thing aren’t mutually exclusive.
I’m curious: is this something you genuinely believe?
Also I’ve discussed why I don’t think the reporting requirements in practice are necessarily an improvement, and in practice can be used (and I believe are being used) as a vehicle to mislead.
Correct. Although Sanders is the reason the unity commission existed in the first place. Again, do you honestly think the Sanders representatives were agnostic or silent on caucuses?
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I never claimed he had “all the power.” But more importantly, if you were convinced that his representatives did push for the things the reporting suggests they did, would that inform your view? Or would you just shift to a different tack?
“Republican Party of Iowa Chair Defends Iowa Democrats on Caucus Night”:
Well yeah, hence the last paragraph in my post. Bernie Sanders is a centrist compromise candidate.
Absolutely, and revolution against bourgeois “democracy” is a part of that process. I’m not going to pretend I have any respect for a system that I think is evil.
Yeah, it’s my not giving shit about the sanctity and longevity of bourgeois electoral politics that does it. Any argument that hinges on those having some inherent value will fail automatically.
Do people want Sanders to publicly describe what his position has been over the last five years on caucuses and the order of caucuses/primaries? Do they want him to openly make an argument pro or con and stand by it? I mean, I do.
Porivil Sorrens @ #57, that was pitiful. So it’s your “not giving shit about the sanctity and longevity of bourgeois electoral politics,” in a discussion of bourgeois electoral politics, that excuses you from basic epistemic standards. Very well, then.
On that note, goodnight, all.
@SC, #58:
You know what I want? I want Buttigieg to publicly explain why we should be okay with him retracting his policy proposals directly in response to campaign donations from the rich. (Seriously, he took a big bundle from a healthcare group and within 24 hours shut down his support for Medicare For All.) He is blatantly for sale — why would any Democrat be willing to support that?
…okay, I suppose the last 30 years have kind of led up to this in baby steps. If you could stomach the Clintons supporting the TPP in 2016 — a treaty written in secret by corporate representatives which would have granted corporations the ability to nullify national laws without any sort of citizen or judicial oversight at all, which did not have that removed when Hillary Clinton renewed her support for it post-convention — then Buttigieg won’t faze you.
I’d also like the candidates to explain what they intend to do about our ongoing wars, in light of the fact that the US military has the largest carbon footprint of any non-national entity in the world, beating out several entire industrialized nations. Electing another hawk will literally doom humanity, whether they pretend to support the Green New Deal (and let’s not beat around the bush: Buttigieg and Biden are both pretending to care about the issue) or not.
Maybe I missed something while skimming through it, but here’s what I see:
He didn’t complain after winning. Ha, right, okay…. So, that statement in a Vox editorial is supposed to be your evidence? I don’t know what to say. Maybe just give the guy a fucking break about not complaining about enough things, after a landslide victory.
This article was mainly about how the party establishment (not Sanders) wants to exclude certain people from primaries (but let’s all politely decide not to call that voter suppression) and to hurt “outsider candidates” like Sanders. I don’t know, but yours is definitely a weird takeaway.
When exactly is he supposed to casually bring this up? I know it’s not going in a campaign speech. So, people are definitely welcome to ask him about it, and then he can tell his side of the story. And then you can decide what to think about that. But you seem like you’ve already decided what to think about that.
About what? There’s a lot to go around.
I believe you haven’t given any tangible evidence for your claims, and I think that what I said is plausible.
So what? Unless you’re telling me I should’ve been totally satisfied with the way the 2016 election was run, and that I should be opposed to such a commission, this doesn’t matter.
I think they were trying to reform both caucuses and primaries as much as they could, and they probably didn’t have the ability to do all that much about them, no matter what any of Sanders’ campaign members may have personally believed. (Also, it sort of seemed like mere silence on the issue would be condemnatory all by itself, but that’s not clear anymore now.)
I’d like to know the truth, whatever form that may take. You should know by now that I try very hard to be an honest person.
I will honestly tell you now that, even if something about it does seem a little suspicious or disappointing or whatever, it almost certainly won’t be enough to change the fact that I’ll vote for Sanders in my state’s primary, instead of some other candidate. There are too many positives to outweigh it, and it’s hard to imagine it making a difference.
So yes, you could trust me to accept whatever it may be, since I have no special reason to worry much about it either way, assuming you do have something convincing.
@44 and @50-
Romney broke ranks. During a rather bleak day that heresy meant at least something to me. His act may have consequences…a harsh reality which could have weighed heavy on his heart during his decision process yet he still did it. That he was a lone dissenter amongst his own tribe should warrant at least a soft golf clap. Sure he sucks otherwise.
Romney is a creepy fucker looking for a back to plant a knife in to advance himself and to avenge his humiliation.
That’s it.
If Romney wanted to advance himself he wouldn’t vote to convict. This is a moment of bravery for the man.
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
But doing better than expected is not enough. She has to triple her support to beat Biden. People seem to forget Biden is still the leader and has the highest chance of winning. Let’s argue a bit more about Bernie vs Warren because apparently people forget Biden exists and he’s not going to drop out anytime soon.
Or maybe they didn’t forget. Some just weren’t so intent on believing the talking heads in the mainstream media, whenever they anointed Biden the leader, without evidence, for no good reason, because it suits their interests, etc.
The current model from 538 says these are the current odds that a candidate will get a majority of pledged delegates:
Sanders: 39%
Nobody: 27%
Biden: 19%
Warren: 9%
Buttigieg: 6%
All others: 0.6%
And if you look at the odds for a plurality (not a majority) of delegates, it’s currently this:
Sanders: 49%
Biden: 27%
Warren: 13%
Buttigieg: 10%
All others: 2%
This was temporarily paused after the Iowa crapfest, and then updated again to take the partial results into account (just a few hours ago actually). Silver also wrote an article discussing it, if you want to read that.
Now, yes, you can certainly have some kind of doubts about that model. That’s what you should do. But also, you should probably multiply all those doubts by a thousand, if you were just basing your impression on what random journalist X says about it for their column/TV show, or even results you may have seen in some random poll Y, or what you just feel deep down in your gut Z. Those sources are much less reliable than you might think.
Anyway, Biden is obviously not at the top of either of those lists.
So, “Bernie vs. Warren” …. I’m not too sure what purpose that question was supposed to serve, but I’ll bite. In that model at least (reality may be another matter), Bernie’s leading by 30 points, in the sense of who’s probably gettting a majority for the convention and settle this in a relatively quick and clean and painless fashion. What you want is a progressive candidate that many voters will back (and fuck the establishment goons who want to prevent that). Then we don’t get too bogged down with internal squabbles and can focus fire on Trump.
So, Sanders seems to be it, and Warren is not even in the same ballpark. I admit that he’s my preferred candidate anyway, but if we’re trying to strategize about it, to play this game with what little information we have now, then I think it’s going to be the same answer. Of course, things could change very dramatically in a few months, but that isn’t too likely.
But then people like a_ray are saying it’s “Warren to the end” but also “party unity” and whatever. That does worry me a bit. Not to pick on a_ray, but strategy has gone out the window with that, and there’s a decent chance that party unity goes out the window with it. (Seriously, “Nobody” is in second place in that model, above purported frontrunners who aren’t frontrunners, as well as the candidate you’re going to choose no matter what.)
You could’ve been convinced somehow that she (or Biden) was more electable, but that just seems to be false. It’s also not hard to diagnose how you soaked up that particular message from establishment types that are pushing it everywhere constantly. And generally, people may just confuse their own biases against a candidate whose views they don’t like with that candidate being “less electable” — of course, voters aren’t all like you, so shouldn’t mix those things up. Don’t cross the streams.
@consciousness razor
Okay fair enough. I know that Sandes has a serious chance of winning and maybe he’s starting to seem like a front runner but sticking to the polls, Biden is still in there. 538 model is a bit strange, I think it’s weird that after one caucus it makes a swing of around 25% despite the fact that the Iowa partial results are too surprising given the polls. They also do a lot of fidgeting with their parameters and to me it looks like their model is basically a mathematical representation of their gut feelings of what should be important. I still give them credit for giving Trump around 30% chance of winning in the previous election while most other places had him at around 1%.
The idea that “Sanders supporters are handing Trump ammunition” seems bizarre to me. The Democratic Party manufactured this ammunition, and is leaving it around in little piles like it’s a first-person shooter.
Sanders supporters ARE using it, in part to make the case that maybe people who oppose the GOP and what they’re doing shouldn’t be making ammo and leaving it lying around.
Complaining about that makes the assumption that the GOP wasn’t able to see that ammunition already, and wasn’t going to use it. Of course they were going to use it.
It’s like how establishment Dems are ranting about how Sanders is a scary socialist, and he wrote a creepy essay in college – are they “handing ammunition to Trump” by doing that? No. All of that information is out there. The GOP is either going to use it (which seems likely), or they’re not. The Dems aren’t handing it to them or making it by talking about it, and Sanders people aren’t handing the GOP ammunition by talking about the bullshit surrounding the Iowa caucuses.
No attacks that have been made in the primary are ones that would otherwise have been unavailable to the GOP in the general. That goes for every candidate and every campaign. Whining about it seems kinda childish.
cr @ #61:
What? I was referring primarily to the article to which I linked @ #15 above, which includes:
Caucuses are noninclusive, chaotic, and often lead to fights and bitterness (I honestly don’t know to what extent this last was the case prior to the involvement of Sanders); they also favor Sanders (see #7 above). There’s evidence that the centrist wing of the party wanted to scrap them, with perhaps pushback from Iowa Democrats in particular. Several caucuses were scrapped for this year, and reportedly the Sanders camp pushed for as many as possible to be retained.
The rules were also changed to require reporting of the first and second round raw numbers, which gives Sanders another edge to the extent that people accept the spin that the “initial preference” numbers are equivalent to a popular vote. I swear this is driving me to distraction. Sam Seder was on Chris Hayes last night, before Sanders saw a rise in delegate equivalents, saying the question was which metric you wanted to look at and that he prefers “the one least tainted by the process,” i.e., the initial preference numbers. Steve Kornacki was on this morning saying regardless of the delegate count Sanders had a victory in the “popular vote” – the initial preference numbers. This is ludicrous. Again, the trade-off for a caucus is low turnout which systematically favors a certain kind of candidate and voter and systematically disadvantages others in exchange for the possibility of deliberation and persuasion and the winnowing out of the weaker candidacies. The initial preference numbers here are totally tainted because they’re shaped by the noninclusive nature of caucuses. They are not a popular vote. You can only say you won a popular vote in a regular primary context. In the caucus context, it’s totally misleading.
Aside from the fact that it’s going down to the wire and there’s no landslide victory, his campaign complained about pretty much everything imaginable! When the reporting failure happened, they insinuated that another candidate was cheating, that the Democratic Party might be conspiring to rob Sanders of his win, that the delegate assignments were some sort of scheme to deny Sanders his “popular vote” victory, and that the Democratic Party was archaic and incompetent for retaining the caucuses that Sanders’ own team had reportedly pushed to retain. It’s one grievance, attack, and conspiracy theory after another. Now that Sanders might take the lead in delegates, some of the attacks will drop away, but they’ve injected a ton of poison and ill will into the process going forward, supported in this by the Trump camp and the Kremlin. This is not healthy. This is not good for the party. This is not good for democracy. Even if the plausible reporting about the Sanders camp pushing within the party to retain caucuses turned out to be inaccurate, if I were a Sanders supporter I’d find nothing in his campaign’s or online supporters’ response to the issues in Iowa over the past several days to be proud of.
I find the reports from the article @ #15 far more plausible. The unity commission was formed because of the complaints from the Sanders camp in 2016, and it included his representatives. We know the centrists wanted to get rid of caucuses, we know caucuses very much advantage Sanders, and we have reporting that the Sanders camp are the ones who pushed to retain caucuses. If they didn’t want caucuses, which would be surprising given their advantage in them, that would mean both wings were in agreement and the caucuses would have been (almost) entirely scrapped. The fact that they weren’t plainly suggests that one faction wanted to retain them.
I’ve presented what I have. I would very much like for someone to ask Sanders or his campaign what position his camp took within the unity commission and what his arguments have been and are regarding caucuses and the “reforms” he reportedly backed. In any case, that sounds generally reasonable. I’m glad you acknowledge that there could be something “suspicious or disappointing or whatever” which you’d honestly weigh against the positives. Even though you doubt that knowledge would change your choice, that’s treating Sanders like, well, a politician and political candidate. I have to say that’s rare to see amongst Sanders supporters. Far more typical is the cultish nonsense from the Vicar @ #60 – asked whether they want to know the facts about their candidate’s position and actions, they immediately go on the irrelevant attack, in this case against Buttigieg, “the Clintons,” and the TPP. Any tweet remotely critical of or questioning about Sanders or his supporters will produce a flood of “Now do Biden,” “Now do Buttigieg,” vicious attacks on the critic or questioner, and a long stream of invective against the enemy Democratic Party. It’s exhausting, and unsettling in how much it resembles Trumpers.
This from Greenwald is the sort of irresponsible and damaging rhetoric that does nothing positive. Just constant, exaggerated, and often false attacks on other campaigns and the Democratic Party, almost designed to get people to distrust everything about the process. Over and over. The only people who should support this are those who want above all else to “burn it all down,” which accomplishes nothing other than to help Trump and Putin.
If competence was your concern I’d think that would be even more in Warren’s favor. Sanders is a good advocate and organizer, but Warren knows how to actually make things work. Just yelling about it like Sanders isn’t enough.
The first and second votes (before and after realignment) are counting people. That’s simply all it takes to be equivalent to a popular vote. That’s what the term “popular vote” means, but you’re loading it up with additional baggage it doesn’t actually have in common usage.
The “state delegate equivalent” is not a measure of any such thing, and that is why it is not equivalent to a popular vote.
You know I think caucuses (and many other aspects of our elections) are awful, so I won’t bother to say anymore about it, except that I think we agree about most or all of those issues.
Okay. Think about what you would say about a general election for president. (Any election, past or future.). Suppose there’s some voter suppression. Or suppose that turnout is really bad. Or it’s really good! Or it’s really slanted toward one faction or another. Or it’s just weird somehow, for whatever reason. It doesn’t especially matter what is going on as far as I’m concerned, so I’ll just leave it to your imagination. Try imagining each of them in turn and ask when and how you think this distinction of yours starts to make a difference somehow. (Then explain to me if you can.)
Got one example in mind? So, you tell me that this election with those features doesn’t have a “popular vote”? Why? That doesn’t make any sense to me. It does have a popular vote. However, there’s also some (possibly many more than one) reason why you got that specific popular vote, giving you a count of how that specific population voted, instead of some other specific popular vote, reflecting a different population of voters.
Do you get how I’m using the term there? With it, I’m not making any special demands about how the voting population relates to the population at large. Bad things can happen when people vote. Good things can happen. Weird things can happen. There can be many reasons why people don’t or can’t vote. But there are people voting in all these cases, and we can count how many of them did.
Indeed, that may be exactly the information you need to demonstrate that there was voter suppression, for example. But you can’t really turn it around and say for that reason that it’s not a popular vote. What I mean is that this isn’t how people use that term, because they have other terms to describe things like low turnout or voter suppression or whatever kind of phenomenon it may be.
It’s just a measure of people, natural human beings, instead of a measure of legal/political constructs like “delegates” or “electors,” or for that matter a measure of other things like probabilities or cups of coffee or how many times Trump has made you angry. Is that clear?
Please try to clear your head. A caucus isn’t good for democracy, and a horribly botched and suspicious one is even worse. There are plenty of good reasons to complain about it. And if the party can’t handle that, then at least I’ll be pretty happy about it when a real progressive party eventually rises from the ashes.
I bet if we had to do it all over again, almost nobody would ask for a remake of the Democrats. So what’s good for the party? I think it would be good if they just listened and learned for a good long while, before it’s too late. It’s not completely out of the question that they could do this, and that’s got to be better for them than kicking the bucket.
Sorry I misinterpreted your reference to the other article. I hope you understand why I have good reason to be very suspicious of some unidentifiable person’s report, who was “close to the process,” given all of the malicious attacks against Sanders, his campaign and his supporters. Since you’re clearly not one of the alleged “Bernie bros,” like me and tons of women and all sorts of other people, you probably don’t understand what it’s been like for the past few years to deal with that unending pile of shit. I mean, unless you’ve been paying very close attention and trying hard to see things fairly from the perspective of a Sanders supporter (which I take it you’re not), I’m sure that you would have no fucking clue what I’m talking about. Even if you think you do, you probably don’t.
Anyway, some of Clinton’s people were definitely close to the process, and they (and other establishment Dems) have definitely been lying and distorting the facts non-stop since the last election. Really, it’s just very hard to know what to believe these days. I’m probably more cautious about it than I should be sometimes, but that’s about the best I can do.
Warren has fumbled the whole damn campaign up to now, and turned a very winnable fight into a death spiral. Competent? She failed the first test she had against trump massively.
That’s wonderful PZ! Strong Bernie supporter here.
I spent last week in Iowa volunteering, and while I very much like the idea of public discussions of candidates holy cow the caucuses are rife with subjectivity and potential for corruption. (Not to mention, issues of accessibility that many have noted and the wonky math.) It would be great if the DNC endorsed a national program of caucuslike local discussions prior to presidential elections – say, after each debate – but they should be followed up with primaries.
Looking at raw bill sponsorships and passages, when said bills a bunch of watered down neoliberal trash littered with massive concessions to republicans, seems very silly to me. Oh wow cool you helped pass a bill nominally helping fund treatment for opiate addicts – and also appropriated a signficiant amount of funds to the DEA to arrest more brown people. Oh rad, you passed a bill that authorizes 700$ billion dollars in war funds. Very progressive.
If candidate A passes 5 bills that are negligiblely important, and candidate B passes 5,000 bills that are all just resolutions to fund republican interests with tacked on do-nothing centrist causes, I think that candidate A has the much better record.
Nonsense. The “popular vote” is the vote in an election that doesn’t have a design that systematically suppresses participation and advantages some types of candidates and participants over others. The Sanders camp wants the caucus design because it favors them while suppressing and skewing the vote, and then to pretend that the initial preference numbers (which weren’t even reported in the past because that’s supposed to be the point of having a caucus – otherwise why have a caucus in the first place?) are the same as a popular vote in a regular and more inclusive higher-participation primary. They raged throughout 2016 and the Democratic Party set up the unity commission to change a number of rules to accommodate them, they knew the rules about delegate apportionment going in, and now comes the suggestion that the delegate apportionments aren’t the true or fair metric, in a contest already designed to favor Sanders (unless he gets the most delegates, in which case that argument will somewhat fade in this case but be retained for use in the future). It’s all so intellectually dishonest and galling. Just run your campaign like the other candidates and stop trying to obtain an advantage while claiming victimhood and attacking the party you want to lead.
@CR, Up to now, I have avoided any attempts to persuade others to my preffered candidate. However, since you are implying that I am merely being bloody-minded, I will take that as an invitation to state my reasons.
1) Of all the candidates, Warren has the most data-driven approach to crafting policy. It is how she, herself, moved from being a Republican to a progressive.
2) She is a woman, and when there are two equally qualified candidates, I tend to support the woman or minority. My initial choice was Kamala Harris.
3) Warren’s work to get the CFPB up and running and in competent hands was impressive.
4) She ran a good campaign against Scott Brown.
5) For the most part, she has stayed on message and done a good job raising funds while rejecting dirty money.
6) She does a good job connecting with voters.
7) She scares the hell out of the oligarchs and understands the importance of at least starting to redress the imbalance of the economy. It was in response to her rise back in November that the oligarchs started flowing money to here competitors and Bloomberg tossed in his hat.
8) Her climate plan is the most serious of any of the candidates still standing.
9) She is substantially younger than Biden or Bernie.
Of these, her data-driven approach is the most important to me, and no other candidate comes close.
Well, Sanders apparently disagrees. He prefers them despite (or in some cases possibly because of) the major flaws we’ve discussed (in addition to the fact that they’re very expensive, using money that would be better sent against the Republicans in the general). So there’s that.
No. A caucus isn’t the same thing as an election, in which people privately go in and vote. The Iowa caucus has two rounds, persuasion, and changing votes. If any number is more useful it would be the second alignment, because, again, that’s the whole point of the caucus. I don’t have any problem with both numbers being reported, in addition to reports on the ground in the caucuses, but it’s totally misleading to compare the initial preference numbers in a caucus to the popular vote in an election. The delegate assignments are complicated, but don’t seem to differ that substantially from the second-round numbers, and the process was known to all of the candidates going in; there’s no evidence of anything nefarious in the allotments. Not to mention that the small number of delegates from Iowa are awarded proportionately in any case.
++ to a_ray. Warren’s ability to grow is something extremely rare in politicians. Most of them are spineless noddle-guys like Clinton. A few, like Sanders, are hardened and never change, and that’s good for him because he has very good positions. But almost none are capable of consistently learning from their mistakes and doing better, and so Warren impresses me that she’ll be able to handle the many unexpected events and win the fights that will occur over her term.
She’s also demonstrated that she understands who the enemy is, having committed to staying off of Fox, as well as floating expanding the Supreme Court and ending the filibuster so that she can actually get her agenda passed.
Don’t condescend to me.
The centrist wing of the party (with the likely exception of the IDP) tried to get rid of caucuses after 2016; the Sanders camp fought behind the scenes to keep them. It seems very clear that they want the advantages of a caucus, don’t care particularly about the democratic or other disadvantages, and seek to exploit the problems that arise to gain further advantages at the expense of the party and unity.
They set up a fucking commission to better allow for the participation of the Sanders camp and to listen to their complaints (even those that were baseless and irresponsible and made in the heat of the 2016 campaign and helped Trump), changed a number of rules to accommodate them, retained the caucuses that advantage him, and the response from the Sanders campaign is never-ending attacks and conspiracy theories about the other candidates and the party. At this point, I don’t think the Sanders campaign (with one exception) is capable of just running a regular campaign.
Please.
Is this a joke? The attacks on Warren supporters, the tweeting of snake emojis at her and them, got so bad that Ro Khanna (who has been decent and compassionate throughout) had to try to step in and say that it was unacceptable. In response, he was flooded with similar attacks. It’s out of control.
Yes, vague insinuations and sweeping claims about the doings of “Clinton’s people,” one of many enemies, are totally helpful. Not at all irresponsible or needlessly divisive. I’m going to take my leave of this thread now.
The centrist wing wanting to get rid of caucuses seems like reason enough to want to keep them.
Further, if avoiding snake emojis is your aim, it might be a good idea to avoid blatant smear campaigns that your surrogates then use disingenuous appropriations of sexual assault terminology to defend (No, it is not ‘gas lighting’ to deny allegations made with zero proof or witnesses) a day before a major campaign event.
There was no contradiction. Really — you can go back and check if you don’t believe me.
I like you, SC, but fuck that noise. Actually explain what’s wrong with the simple and obvious formulation I gave, which comes literally and directly from the words themselves and fits with common usage. Do that, or don’t fucking bother.
You are just preaching, and I don’t respond well to that. What I said did not require commentary about Sanders or Warren or my agenda or yours or any other thing like that. Because none of it could possibly be relevant to a generic and widely applicable term like this.
Then there’s never been a “popular vote” in U.S. history. So what did we have instead? Are you going to coin this new term for us, or are we supposed to guess?
Try this one out: “Trump won the electoral college vote in 2016, but did not lose anything else, because the system did have a design that systematically suppresses participation and advantages some types of candidates and participants over others.”
Literally not a single person ever talks like that. That is not what people mean by “popular vote.” Even if we wish our elections satisfied that sort of standard, that does not make it so. And we still have to talk coherently about what does actually happen, even when we don’t like it.
Frankly, I think it is a mistake to look at the primary process as a zero-sum game. It is quite possible for a candidate to grow during the primaries–to shamelessly steal the good ideas of one’s opponents and try to do them one better. That is what we should be aiming for here. This should not be about personalities. It should be about ideas and policies and who articulates them best.
And in actuality, I think we should be looking to end the primary system all together. If we could get preferential voting instead of the canonical two-man contest, we could make the parties irrelevant. There would be no need for a primary–just one long list of candiates. It would require much more early voting to avoid long lines at the polling places, but these schemes have been shown to increase voter satisfaction with final winners. And best of all, someone like Darth Cheeto could never win in a system like this.
You know you’re progressive when you’re defending caucuses and harassment campaigns, of course
People like Porivil aren’t in this to make a better country or to help people. If they were, those are pretty easy and genuine principles to stand on. They wouldn’t even have to break their support of their candidate or anything. It’s all a performance of holier-than-thou rebellion; winning for the sake of winning. Exactly like the Trump cult. That they happened to be supporting a guy that is actually Pretty Good is a coincidence, but people like Porivil will stab the Progressive movement in the back just as surely as the Roganites or any other right-wing troll.
@85
Probably good that I never claimed to be a progressive, then. I’m a socialist, and those are mutually exclusive political ideologies. I already expressed my interest in violent government overthrows, so I don’t know why you think I’d care about twitter drama.
Yeah, that’s why I make crap money defending immigrants from ice. The 1/30 cases that I win are the big deal here.
That would require me to be part of the progressive movement, wouldn’t it? As mentioned, my sole and only interest here is supporting the left-most candidate in the farce that we call an electoral system.
Bernie Sanders is a centrist compromise candidate, but he’s still a bourgeois politician and I have no more loyalty to him than I do to any others. Irrespective of what democrat gets the nom, I’ll go right on back to trying to build up community organization as soon as the primary ends.
I’m really baffled by the discussion of caucuses. Is it really that big of a deal? Also, does the Sanders campaign have any real authority when it comes to deciding how do things, and isn’t it just the local committees that decide?
The total votes for the Iowa caucus are something around 1200. So, yeah, it’s kind of a big deal; that would barely pass muster as the sample size for a regular opinion poll.
Even those, you have to be skeptical of; regular polls skew towards demographics that answer landlines and mail polls, for instance. Caucus artifacts favor those who can spend an evening at a caucus. Hence why you get like 1200 people to show up in an entire state.
Sanders’ campaign apparently had a significant place on the committee to determine how to do this year’s primary elections, and they apparently favored fucking caucuses. It’s a complete cock-up and I don’t know who bears the most responsibility, though I think Sanders himself wants reforms that I support, so I still think he’s a good candidate.
@ porivil and yet you support caucuses which severely disenfranchise popular movements and make excuses for deep sexism that would turn off half of the electorate.
Here in Virginia, we elected a lot of Democrats in 2017, who extended the Obamacare subsidies to millions of people, including myself, with work requirements; this year, with their majority, they should be rid of those requirements completely. It’s called “progress”. We’ll get even further, as we fight for it. You and your kind attack our movements and hinder our progress. You even admit to it openly. You aren’t interested in building popular movements or “community organizations”. The moment any meaningful amount of people start agreeing with you, you’ll cast them aside as “not good enough”. The only thing you kinds of people are interested in is sneering at those you consider beneath you. I’ve seen plenty of you. You’re all the same. I used to think of you as my allies, until I realized what was really going on.
I support caucuses as a means to an end because I care more about realpolitik than bourgeois democracy. Calling someone who lies to the media in a desperate attempt to save a failing campaign a “snake” is not sexist in any manner whatsoever.
Oh, okay, so you don’t actually know what “progressivism” means in a political context, if you think it’s a synonym for “wants to progress”. It is a fundamentally bourgeois ideology that explicitly attempts to defend capitalism by offering surface level pallative cures to prevent the development of class consciousness.
Just like how the New Deal was a cynical attempt to crush the growing left of the time by offering minute benefits that helped very few people in practice, Obamacare is merely a terrible centrist concession that does nothing but obscure the fact that healthcare should not be for profit.
I’ll make sure to share this next time I’m at the DSA and SRA. It’d be news to them.
The moment a meaningful amount of people agree with me, it will proceed generally the way it did in the past (ie, bourgeois politicians will have a lot more to worry about than people sending them mean emojis over social media.)
You’d have to be profoundly fucking naive to believe this was just an accident.
From fivethirtyeight, with my emphasis:
Sanders’ campaign may have been smart enough, but I have no doubt that it cared enough about its own supporters, to ensure they understood that they can access the caucus in this alternative way and helped them to take advantage of a more convenient and less frustrating/alienating option like that. Mayor Pete has basically planted himself in Iowa for the last year, blew a ton of his fundraising money on that one state, had “captains” at every regular precinct, and so forth. But despite all that, Sanders got around 20 times as many delegates from the satellites, which help more people participate in an otherwise bonkers election system like Iowa’s.
I doubt the handful of extra delegates really mattered to Sanders, relative to the amount of work that must have gone into it. You can look at it cynically if you want, thinking he was just very greedy for that super-precious fraction of a percent of the total delegates that he could add to the top of the pile. I know people who volunteer for them and that’s definitely not how they operate, although you can try to think that if it makes you feel better. But then you can’t also tell me that Sanders doesn’t know how to run an impressive and strategically sound campaign which can get him elected, simply by playing the rules better than anyone else. Either way, this result is no accident.
And SC, this does not come from some mystery source, who I can’t just immediately assume is trustworthy, who may not be telling anything like the whole unvarnished story about what kinds of negotiations were happening after the mess we call the 2016 elections, etc., etc. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if Sanders’ campaign (or some people in it, if not all) did find itself having to make certain compromises and trade-offs, finding themselves with strange allies, etc. That’s because at the time wasn’t really influential enough, amid all of the other local/state/national/ideological/etc. factions involved, to have been responsible for the caucus all by itself. There is no way that could be right, and it is just dishonest to represent that way (and pointless, if you ask me).
Anyway, the results described above tell a very different story, from a source that everyone can be certain is not in Sanders’ own camp … nor are they trying to advocate for some other candidate. They’ve just got some facts to report, and there’s no disputing that we know them — do whatever the hell you want with that.
Bernie, on the Iowa caucus
Also, how much his supporters kicked ass at it.
Also, how much of a liar and fraud Trump is.
Also, how much the Dems suck, for letting Bloomberg break tons of rules and buy his way into the election.
Also, how bad it is when the media focus on this “state delegate equivalent” bullshit, instead of real voters.
Also, on the reforms he fought for, to make sure there was an actual record and transparency about the entire process used in Iowa, detecting exactly the kinds of errors/inconsistencies we saw this, where previously you could not even determine who got more actual human beings to show up and support them. He mentioned that he does not even know now whether that was the case last time versus Clinton, but he does know that he got more than Buttigieg.
Also, his opinion on a caucus in future elections, that “it depends on how you do it,” but that the way the Iowa one works is “much too complicated” and “will not happen again.”
Gotta love him.
A point made by Thomas Frank, “The Wrecking Crew”, which I think most of you miss, is that the establishment democrats of the democratic party don’t care if they lose! As long as they maintain their positions they are unconcerned.
jack16