Mega-Thread: Democratic 2020 Primaries

[Levelfive]

Also the idea that a majority, or even a plurality, of the electorate votes based on actual policy is absurd.

You edited this in after I responded, but I'll address it because I 100% agree with you that voters generally don't vote based on policy, which is actually the point, and a huge part of why it's a lie, or more politely, a false narrative to claim that voters preferred Sanders in those states in 2016 because they were hungry for progressive policies, or that that's why they turned to Trump.

[cordrann]

The data say otherwise.

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I keep people below a certain post count on ignore, so I can't see cardripal's posts but here's a poll from 8/28/19:

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaig...2020-democrats with Biden leading Bernie against Trump 16 to 14

10/8/19: https://www.newsweek.com/quinnipiac-...anders-1463946 with Biden leading Trump by 11, Bernie by 7

11/5/19: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/05/how-...ion-polls.html Biden beats Trump by 10.2; Bernie beats Trump by 7.9

Where are the "consistent" polls showing Bernie as the most popular nationally?

You're conflating a biased interpretation of data with the data itself. The data says Biden is doing better with a certain demographic than Clinton did. It says absolutely nothing as to why. This is like people asserting Buttigieg did poorly with African-Americans because he is gay and "black people are religious and homophobic". Him doing poorly is a fact based on data, but the assumption that comes after is just a blatantly biased interpretation of that data.

[Rukh]

I want to challenge this point: your assumption is that white people vote for a white guy because they think he will serve their interests.

I do not believe Sanders or left-wing candidates would serve my interests. I pay a lot of tax. A neoliberal like Obama is better for me personally. Sanders would mean my advantages as a white liberal are diminished since I would have to pay more tax, and compete with smart kids who at the moment can't escape the ghetto.

Your assumption is that a candidate would help people of the same race. In fact, in general the exact opposite happens, candidates tend to take their racial group for granted because their racial group will vote for them anyway.

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That is a foregone conclusion at the moment. That has no relevance as to whether Sanders is popular nationally, or whether his policies are popular nationally.

Sanders chance of winning the presidency is essentially zero-unless he takes the independent candidate route-however this is tactically problematic and I think he would consider it dishonorable.

Don't know why you assume every comment on a thread about the Democratic primaries has to be about what YOU are talking about. People have been worried that Sanders would continue to drag this out even though he's no longer competitive. Looks like it's not going to happen.

[Levelfive]

You're conflating a biased interpretation of data with the data itself. The data says Biden is doing better with a certain demographic than Clinton did. It says absolutely nothing as to why. This is like people asserting Buttigieg did poorly with African-Americans because he is gay and "black people are religious and homophobic". Him doing poorly is a fact based on data, but the assumption that comes after is just a blatantly biased interpretation of that data.

Sure, let's take a more in depth look at the data, which had predictive power for Democrats who scaled higher on sexism measures. Here's some:

Starlord is absolutely right, which the the data show:

"Roughly one-quarter of Sanders’s support in Democratic primaries and caucuses in 2016 came from #NeverHillary voters: people who didn’t vote for Clinton in the 2016 general election and who had no intention of doing so. (The #NeverHillary label is a little snarky, but it’s also quite literal: These are people who never voted for Clinton despite being given two opportunities to do so, in the primary and the general election.) This finding comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a poll of more than 50,000 voters conducted by YouGov in conjunction with Harvard University. The CCES asked voters who they voted for in both the primaries and the general election; it also asked voters who didn’t vote in the general election who they would have chosen if they had voted. Here’s the overall breakdown of what Sanders primary voters did in November 2016.2
What Bernie Sanders primary voters did in November 2016

Voted for Hillary Clinton 74.3%
–
Voted for Donald Trump 12.0
–
Voted for Gary Johnson 3.2
–
Voted for Jill Stein 4.5
–
Voted for other candidates or voted but didn’t recall 2.5
–
Didn’t vote but said they would have voted for Clinton 1.6
–
Didn’t vote and didn’t say they would have voted Clinton 1.9
–

Voters in shaded categories are #NeverHillary voters.

Source: COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY

About 74 percent of Sanders’s primary voters also voted for Clinton in November 2016. Another 2 percent didn’t vote but said on the CCES that they would have voted for Clinton if they had voted; it doesn’t seem fair to consider them anti-Clinton voters, so we won’t include them in the #NeverHillary camp. The remaining 24 percent of Sanders voters were #NeverHillary in the general election, however. Of these, about half voted for Trump, while the remaining half voted for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, another third-party candidate or didn’t vote.3

Overall, Sanders won 43 percent of the popular vote in Democratic primaries and caucuses in 2016. If 24 percent of that 43 percent were #NeverHillary voters, that means Sanders’s real base was more like 33 percent of the overall Democratic electorate. That isn’t nothing — it could easily carry the plurality in a divided field — and there were plenty of Clinton voters who liked Sanders, so he could pick up some of their votes too. But it does jibe with polls showing that Sanders and Warren together have around 30 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in 2020 and not the 43 percent that Sanders got in 2016.

You might be tempted to think that these #NeverHillary voters are leftists who thought Clinton was too much of pro-corporate, warmongering centrist. But relatively few of them were. Less than a fifth of them voted for Stein, for example. Instead, these voters were disproportionately likely to describe themselves as moderate or conservative. Among the 31 percent of self-described conservatives who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primaries, more than half were #NeverHillary voters, for example. A large minority of the independents and Republicans who supported Sanders were #NeverHillary voters as well.
#NeverHillary voters were conservative, not super liberal

(Chart here)

A more complicated way to characterize the #NeverHillary vote is via regression analysis. Using the CCES — which permits fairly intricate regression model designs because of its large sample size — I took all of Sanders’s primary voters in 2016 and evaluated a host of variables to see what predicted whether they were #NeverHillary in the general election.

The most significant variables were, first, whether the voter was a Democrat, and second and third, two policy questions that have proven to be highly predictive of voter preferences in the past: whether the voter thinks that white people benefit from their race and whether the voter wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Non-Democrats, voters who didn’t think whites benefited from their race, and voters who wanted to repeal the ACA were much more likely to be #NeverHillary voters. Voters who were rural, poor, who lived in the South or the Northeast, who were born-again Christians, who were conservatives, and who were military veterans were also somewhat more likely to be #NeverHillary, other factors held equal. Black people, Hispanics, women, liberals, millennials, union members and voters with four-year college degrees were less likely to be #NeverHillary voters."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...s-chances-now/

I would have attributed some small part of that to sexism until I read this and started get a real sense of its magnitude: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/o...sultPosition=2

Both of these are required reading if you want to have a better sense of what's driving Democratic voters.

ETA: Democrats have actually won 6 of the last 7 elections. The whole "people don't like moderates thing" doesn't really hold up.

"The departure from the Democratic electorate of conservatives deeply opposed to Clinton reduced the share of voters adverse to the nomination of a woman in the 2020 contests, but even without these voters, about a third of Democrats fit the category of “hostile sexism.” Schaffner, along with other political scientists, uses a “hostile sexism battery” of questions from the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory.

In an article published last week, “Sexism is probably one reason why Elizabeth Warren didn’t do better,” Schaffner and Jon Green, a political scientist at Ohio State wrote, “Warren received little-to-no support from the roughly one third of the Democratic primary electorate that does not reject these sentiments.” In contrast, support for Biden and Sanders rose in proportion to rising levels of agreement with those sentiments.

The pattern, especially the sharp drop in support for Warren, is shown in the accompanying chart:
Surprise, Surprise: The Most Sexist Democrats Were the Least Likely to Support Elizabeth Warren

Among Democratic primary voters, support for Warren strongly tracked responses to sexist statements.

...

While previous research indicates that Democrats are disproportionately supportive of female politicians, the findings here show that Democrats are three times more likely to express pro-male bias when they are responding to a modestly masked measure of the same prejudice."

[Theodarzna]

So you are just asserting based on other people's posts? from the news it's just Trump and Romney want to give checks to everyone but democrats want to make sure that we aren't sending checks to Bill Gates and the people that need it get it. I am not sure where you are getting everything else from.

Steve Mnuchin is talking about giving $1000 to every American, and Chuck Schumer's proposed policy is some mamby pamby let small business owners apply for a low-interest loans for short term boosts to small company’s cash flow. Like, dude, the GOP just outflanked the DNC to the Left.

Democrats could not be more comically inept. Every proposal other than the much hated Bernard Sander's proposal is a tax credit or low-interest loans and all of buried under fifty different levels of means-testing that ensures no one actually gets it.

And I really don't care if Bill Gates also gets a check, given we are all getting 1000 bucks, just cut the damn check and stop stalling.

[Levelfive]

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2...michael-bennet

"A family of 4 could get $18,000 this year under a cash bill by Senate Democrats

Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, and Sherrod Brown want as much as $4,500 per American, adult or child, paid out in 2020."

[kaelleria]

Steve Mnuchin is talking about giving $1000 to every American, and Chuck Schumer's proposed policy is some mamby pamby let small business owners apply for a low-interest loans for short term boosts to small company’s cash flow. Like, dude, the GOP just outflanked the DNC to the Left.

Democrats could not be more comically inept. Every proposal other than the much hated Bernard Sander's proposal is a tax credit or low-interest loans and all of buried under fifty different levels of means-testing that ensures no one actually gets it.

And I really don't care if Bill Gates also gets a check, given we are all getting 1000 bucks, just cut the damn check and stop stalling.

$1000 is a drop in the bucket and won't do much to stem the tide... We're looking at 6-9 million people out of work for the next few months. $1000 doesn't even cover rent in many areas of the company.

The $1000 check is a joke and won't help people long term.

[Lenonis]

You're like... not an good and honest person, aren't you?

The facts don't care about the way you want it to be, Rochana. You lose.

You are trying to engage in honest dialogue with someone who only uses YouTube as a source of info. Don't bother.

[Draco-Onis]

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2...michael-bennet

"A family of 4 could get $18,000 this year under a cash bill by Senate Democrats

Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, and Sherrod Brown want as much as $4,500 per American, adult or child, paid out in 2020."

So $1500 per month? guessing lower if you don't have children.

[Skroe]

You are trying to engage in honest dialogue with someone who only uses YouTube as a source of info. Don't bother.

Yeah I just threw them on ignore. Bad faith poster / forum performance artist.

[Draco-Onis]

Steve Mnuchin is talking about giving $1000 to every American, and Chuck Schumer's proposed policy is some mamby pamby let small business owners apply for a low-interest loans for short term boosts to small company’s cash flow. Like, dude, the GOP just outflanked the DNC to the Left.

Democrats could not be more comically inept. Every proposal other than the much hated Bernard Sander's proposal is a tax credit or low-interest loans and all of buried under fifty different levels of means-testing that ensures no one actually gets it.

And I really don't care if Bill Gates also gets a check, given we are all getting 1000 bucks, just cut the damn check and stop stalling.

You should care if Bill Gates get $1,000 check and what's in the bill the same goes for small businesses low interest loans. We are talking bailouts again just because there's short term free money for regular people doesn't mean you aren't getting fucked later learn from the last recession please.

[Lenonis]

There are numerous sources that suggest Sanders is the most popular candidate in the country, eg (genuinely at random)

With the way our system works being popular with people who don't end up voting for you is a meaningless metric.

It's very strange to keep posting about how overwhelming popular Sanders is when he's losing quite badly. Not all states have closed primaries...

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Yeah I just threw them on ignore. Bad faith poster / forum performance artist.

How anyone can accuse Pew of being a trash source is beyond hope. Unfortunately legit or not that person represents no small amount of society that only gets their info from social media. It's not a good look.

[Kasierith]

Yeah I just threw them on ignore. Bad faith poster / forum performance artist.

Should also point out that they see killing capitalists as not only acceptable, but necessary and desirable to implement a communist revolution.

[Draco-Onis]

Wanting to add bureaucracy as a restriction only adds cost and could end up being more worthless. We don't say Rich people can't call the Fire department and make sure they are poor, or check the bank account of people at libraries. Universal healthcare and college works because rich people would be under the same plan. All you end up doing is making the bills more restrictive and less likely to pass. who gives a shot if Bill gets $1000? He'd should be more than making up for that in how much he is taxed and it probably wouldn't cover his monthly expense.

Read the fine print stop focusing on the money which will be temporary that regular Americans will get. The focus needs to be paid sick leave, unemployment payments and small business loans you have to look at the big picture of what will help. Also Bill Gates didn't get taxed properly we have been giving people like him trillions of dollars in welfare payments already feel free advocating giving him more.

[cordrann]

Sure, let's take a more in depth look at the data, which had predictive power for Democrats who scaled higher on sexism measures. Here's some:



"The departure from the Democratic electorate of conservatives deeply opposed to Clinton reduced the share of voters adverse to the nomination of a woman in the 2020 contests, but even without these voters, about a third of Democrats fit the category of “hostile sexism.” Schaffner, along with other political scientists, uses a “hostile sexism battery” of questions from the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory.

In an article published last week, “Sexism is probably one reason why Elizabeth Warren didn’t do better,” Schaffner and Jon Green, a political scientist at Ohio State wrote, “Warren received little-to-no support from the roughly one third of the Democratic primary electorate that does not reject these sentiments.” In contrast, support for Biden and Sanders rose in proportion to rising levels of agreement with those sentiments.

The pattern, especially the sharp drop in support for Warren, is shown in the accompanying chart:
Surprise, Surprise: The Most Sexist Democrats Were the Least Likely to Support Elizabeth Warren

Among Democratic primary voters, support for Warren strongly tracked responses to sexist statements.

...

While previous research indicates that Democrats are disproportionately supportive of female politicians, the findings here show that Democrats are three times more likely to express pro-male bias when they are responding to a modestly masked measure of the same prejudice."

So you actually believe its just because she's a woman and not because conservative "democrats" have spent the last 20 years watching Fox "News" and think Hilary Clinton specifically is basically the most corrupt politician ever? Do you have any idea about the "but her emails" bullshit and the Benghazi stuff? That just seems like a vast over simplification of what actually happened. All of the studies that you linked are non representative studies which were designed to look for a specific out come. That is basically the anti-thesis of clean data.

[Skroe]

Skroe been on my ignore list for a long time because they do nothing but gas light and move goal post. Funny he gets upset at others for being dishonest.

Sure I did champ.

[Rukh]

Don't respond directly to someone if you want to make an observation on the thread topic. If you do, there is an assumption that you are in some way referring to something they said.

As for Sanders "dragging this out"-he is under no obligation to do anything. Certainly not give way to an unpleasant reactionary neoliberal with what appears to be the initial stages of senile dementia, so he can receive a coronation from the Democratic Party in what must be the lengthiest suicide in human history.

Or how about I just fucking do, because the first part was a response to you, and mmo-c auto combines posts which I have no control over, as you saw with the UPDATED tag right there. Jesus christ.

[Draco-Onis]

People need money now to pay bills for April. Isn't it like half the country can't handle a $400 emergency? Get a quick temp fix in for a month or two and iron out a comprehensive bill.

And that's exactly how lobbyists shove shit down the American people's throat a few days won't be an issue let them get it right.

[Levelfive]

So you actually believe its just because she's a woman and not because conservative "democrats" have spent the last 20 years watching Fox "News" and think Hilary Clinton specifically is basically the most corrupt politician ever? Do you have any idea about the "but her emails" bullshit and the Benghazi stuff? That just seems like a vast over simplification of what actually happened. All of the studies that you linked are non representative studies which were designed to look for a specific out come. That is basically the anti-thesis of clean data.

If that were the explanation, Elizabeth Warren wouldn't have experienced the same thing. I also think that the abuse that's been heaped on Hillary for the last 30 years is driven to a large degree by sexism. The studies were not looking for a "specific outcome," they were demonstrating pretty clearly that when people's real views are sussed out, you can closely predict how they'll vote, or how they won't vote. If you have something to the contrary, provide it for review, instead of trying to ignore what's in front of you for the sake of some other agenda.

[Theodarzna]

You should care if Bill Gates get $1,000 check and what's in the bill the same goes for small businesses low interest loans. We are talking bailouts again just because there's short term free money for regular people doesn't mean you aren't getting fucked later learn from the last recession please.

Currently that isn't even what the Democrats plan tried to stop, Schumer and Pelosi wanted low interest loans and layers of damn means testing.

And 1k a month for even one single month is better than 500 dollars at best if I can get through the means testing paper work hurdle, and wait for a tax credit.

This is an amazing timeline, avowed "Lefties" oppose universal social programs. I do not care if Bill Gates or the crack head at the 7/11 gets 1k in Trumpbux same as me, we all live in this country and should get these things.

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$1000 is a drop in the bucket and won't do much to stem the tide... We're looking at 6-9 million people out of work for the next few months. $1000 doesn't even cover rent in many areas of the company.

The $1000 check is a joke and won't help people long term.

Current;y 1000 dollars in Trumpbux free and clear is better than a tax credit of 200-500 dollars and a low interest loan in targeted means tested aid at some point.

Like, I know they say woman are bad at math but I am just good enough at it to recognize that someone offering to just hand me 1000 dollars of no string attached no paperwork needed money is better than someone wanting to give like a small number of businesses a low interest loan, so not even money, a loan, and maybe a tax credit. Hell even their paid sick leave bill basically exempted Amazon and Walmart. Like dude, you can't gaslight me on this.