a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

and grown men and women going to a hog castration fair

I'm not sure any state could be a reasonable proxy for the entire country.

California's conservative interior and liberal western edge seems pretty close.

https://twitter.com/Philip_Elliott/status/618830916450807808

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‏@Philip_Elliott

Donald Trump tells NBC that he will win the Latino vote, says he still doesn't think Obama released his real birth certificate.

as an example of how deluded and isolated our ruling oligarchs are, Chump is p perfect

i don't know, he seems like ... if not an outlier, then not exactly representative

his form of evil isn't sufficiently mundane

I don't mean his specific personality, just the level/degree of remove from daily reality of the rest of us proles

in his levels of self-deception he's highly representative of a large number of americans of whatever economic class

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/upshot/why-bernie-sanderss-momentum-is-not-built-to-last.html

sadly, this is probably mostly true. that sanders is unlikely to generate the kind of enthusiasm among black voters that obama generate seems, i guess, a historical inevitability, though it although suggests the limits of "identitarian" politics (in adolph reed's formulation).

also in that piece:

Mrs. Clinton is a liberal Democrat by any measure.

really? by any measure?!

lol @ that

identitarian is a terrible term wtf

why?

the NY Times pimping for an Elite American rep, shockah

not the concept, just the word itself sounds really awkward

yeah it sounds like trustifarian or something

that article isn't "pimping" for anyone

Mrs. Clinton is a liberal Democrat by any measure we can conceive of in our glass tower, have you checked out the $10 million condo ads?

who are all these allegedly liberal ppl who love HRC, anyway?

i mean they obviously exist, but i don't think i've talked to one person who was excited about her candidacy.

celebrity worshippers who believe election-season pandering

i think the article is mostly right about bernie's chances, deluded about clinton's politics, but it's not actually endorsing either

save the "pimping" language for the numerous puff pieces that are actually pimping

i don't think it's at all a given that black voters would prefer HRC to sanders -- her husband was awful on race issues and she ran a pretty vile campaign against obama in 2008 with some really low moments.

Nate Cohn is cute, you guys

i wonder if that veteran troll i killfiled still thinks i am going to engage in dialogue with him? guess i'll never know

Polls suggest that Clinton remains popular among black voters. About three in four African Americans viewed Clinton favorably in a Washington Post-ABC news poll in early 2014. About half of those respondents gave her “strongly” favorable ratings, although not quite as high as the roughly three-quarters who strongly favored Obama. And in a recent Gallup poll, Clinton got her most favorable reviews from nonwhite men and women. Indeed, nonwhite women gave Clinton a higher favorable rating – 71 percent – than white women, 50 percent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/05/27/are-black-voters-fired-up-for-hillary-clinton/

because, tho?

Clinton drew strong support from the African American community and made improving race relations a major theme of his presidency.[21] In 1998, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison in The New Yorker called Clinton "the first Black president," saying, "Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas," and comparing Clinton's sex life, scrutinized despite his career accomplishments, to the stereotyping and double standards that blacks typically endure.[22]

In 2008, Morrison's sentiments were raised anew as Barack Obama, who would later become the country's first African-American president, ran for the presidency. After endorsing Obama, Morrison distanced herself from her 1998 remark about Clinton, saying that it was misunderstood. She alleged that she has "no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race" and claimed she was only describing the way he was being treated during the impeachment trial as an equivalent to a poor black person living in the ghetto.[23] Obama himself, when asked in a Democratic debate about Morrison's declaration of Clinton as "black", replied that Clinton had an enormous "affinity" with the black community, but joked he would need to see Clinton's dancing ability before judging him to be black.[24][25]

One measure of Clinton's popularity among African-American and other minority citizens was demonstrated in 2002, when the Compton Unified School District in Compton, California chose a name for a new primary school. The district is evenly divided between African American and Hispanic students; community leaders decided rather than name the school after an African American or Hispanic figure, potentially snubbing one of the communities, they would christen name the school after Clinton, whose popularity in both communities was enormous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Bill_Clinton#Popularity_among_African-Americans

i wonder if that veteran troll i killfiled still thinks i am going to engage in dialogue with him? guess i'll never know

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, July 8, 2015 2:35 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

good riddance!

no one has ever explained to me how to killfile someone; is there a thread for that?

Effectively, I have no idea where the idea that black people en masse are going to desert the Clintons is coming from. Sanders needs to introduce himself if he's going to pull focus; right now, he seems to be playing to the same political nerds who freaked out over Howard Dean.

Otm

no direct reasons in the WaPo except "strong woman" xxp

well, that's Bill. And he done the strong woman wrong. xp

i watched a good chunk of Sanders from Portland the other night, and he was addressing black-specific issues more than any lefty prez upstart i can recall.

Was he addressing them to a black audience? Because that would be an important thing for him to do if he would like to attract black voters.

well, it was Maine, but it was on the internets.

anyway, Hil riding Bill's Toni Morrison transference to the presidency in exchange for that lil blue dress, wow, what a great feminist role model.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/11/how-black-voters-could-determine-the-2016-election/

The most pertinent charts are the Republican vs Democrat matchups and Hillary's support compared to Obama's support, along with this:

This, of course, is highly hypothetical, and it seems unlikely either drop would be so severe -- especially given black turnout was already on the upswing before Obama came along and that Democrats haven't taken less than 89 percent of the black vote since 1996. But it demonstrates the potential for millions of votes to swing under a certain set of circumstances.

I have no idea where the idea that black people en masse are going to desert the Clintons is coming from

^^^this

i doubt the percentages will shift much -- in terms of the proportion of the black vote going to democrats -- but as that article suggests turnout could be quite a bit lower

identitarian is a terrible term wtf

i just get confused bc it also refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement ?

"there will be lower black voter turnout" is not the same thing as "black voters are likely to pick Sanders over Clinton", particularly right now when Sanders is a virtual unknown to that demographic

I don't think it's impossible but Obama had a couple of strong advantages when it came to pulling focus from Hillary:

- He had already been introduced on the national stage as the future of the Democratic Party in 2004.
- He is black.

Sanders has neither of those.

"there will be lower black voter turnout" is not the same thing as "black voters are likely to pick Sanders over Clinton", particularly right now when Sanders is a virtual unknown to that demographic

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Wednesday, July 8, 2015 3:03 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right, of course. i wasn't implying that.

to add to your list, obama is also handsome/charismatic and has a great back story. not sure sanders has any of those things. i guess it /shouldn't/ matter, but it does.

he's kind of charismatic in a grumpy but lovable grampa kind of way, idk. maybe that's just me

"grumpy old white guy" always an easy sell to the black community

no one i know of who supports Sanders (on the board, that is) thinks he will be nominated. it's a prog pacifier for the next 9 months or so.

and if HRC self-destructs and bernie loses 49 states to whatever Republican, i dont give a fucking shit.

we deserve it.

Of course we don't think he's going to be nominated when all everyone seems to want to discuss is how he won't get the nomination!

I'll vote for him - that's the only prediction that I really care about.

Right now, based on policy positions, I would vote for Sanders over Clinton in a primary. However, I will take either of them over any of the Republicans running any day of the week; it almost doesn't matter to me who wins the primary. (Where it does matter is that I think a Sanders run would be a stronger litmus test for whether the country as a whole wants to support a candidate that espouses actual liberal policies rather than centrist ones.)

his speech at the convention will be interesting

How much African Americans' peaking voter turnout in 2008 and 2012 was due to the first black major-party nominee/president being on the ballot?

It's a shame she doesn't have that first minority wave behind her, all she's got is this darn female majori-wait a minute!

Hillary's not going to get 95% of the female vote

I do think this story (and the similar one at 538) are jumping the gun a little, or maybe following a kind of circular logic. Sanders has, as I understand things, been focusing his efforts so far in the early-primary states Iowa and New Hampshire, where his message plays well among people it plays well with elsewhere, who are white, left-leaning Democrats. Fine - but to then conclude that he won't ever win over non-white Democrats, or that because he is self-evidently further left of a presupposed normative party mainstream seems like a jump, especially in a party whose demographics are changing as fast as this one's are. This is not to say I think he has a snowball's chance of beating Hillary, but maybe the time to write the epitaph editorials would be after he makes a major speech on race, or campaigns in one of the places seen as a stronghold of the center-right, and it falls completely flat and everyone throws tomatoes. Like, it makes sense to point out that Trump's high-profile and (predictably) badly-received crazy racist uncle comments are Not Helping Him Much, because that's actually a thing that's happening. I dunno, just seems like it'd make sense to wait until the campaigns proper have started before penning the "...and to top it off, nobody even knows who he is!" stories. Well, of course they don't. Same goes for at least some of the second-tier Republicans, though others just have the stench of failure all over them. The first debates will start to sort that group out a bit, but let's face it, if 2012's Republican process taught us anything it's that you really can't rule anybody out entirely until we get at least a couple of primaries in.

Maybe this is just completely nuts of me but it's at least possible that there are more people to whom aspects of Sanders's message will appeal than who have already clicked 'share.' A lot of what he's talking about are actually bread-and-butter old-school Democrat issues, right? I think it's a fallacy to assume that distance from the corporate wing of the party is fundamentally alienating to those voters. Put another way, I think the metric of more/less "liberal" may not completely capture what motivates a "Reagan Democrat." Looking at Sanders's opening blurb on his website - Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? - except for "protects the environment" which will get some pushback, a lot of that sounds like pretty comfortable territory to be on. But maybe I'm in a severe bubble.

protecting the environment is p popular actually, also you can argue it makes money/creates jobs etc.