Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Hate Mail - No, Bernie Sanders Didn't Really Gain In The Probability Of Him Being The Nominee Last Night

Paul Krugman said it best, yesterday.

Clinton has won — her big victories in the mid-Atlantic states ended any chance that Sanders can catch up on pledged delegates or popular vote, and he’s not going to convince superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters. Again, the math: Clinton leads by 280 pledged delegates, with 897 left. To overtake, Sanders would need to win the remaining contests by a 280/897 margin, or 31 percent. This is not going to happen.

This is very much true even if he wins both primaries tonight. KY and OR are both very favorable states for Sanders, basically because they’re very white. Alan Abramowitz predicts Sanders +6 in OR, +1 in KY; Benchmark Politics predicts narrow Clinton win in KY, narrow Sanders win in OR. Suppose Abramowitz is right. Then Sanders might narrow the gap by 5 delegates — but there will be only 781 left to go, and his required margin would rise to 275/781 or 35 percent. And the demography gets much worse for him in the remaining states.

He went from having to win 31% of the remaining delegates to having to win 35% of the remaining delegates.  That is the hard math of what he has to do in the remaining states to overtake Hillary Clinton and he's not going to do that.

Krugman also said this quite well.

But here’s the thing: a lot of Sanders supporters don’t understand this reality — 29 percent still believe that he’s the likely nominee, and another 11 percent aren’t sure. If news reports say that he “won” tonight, they’ll persist in their illusions — and the narrative that Clinton is somehow stealing the nomination will continue to fester.

Sanders could end all of this at any point. He doesn’t even have to drop out, all he needs to do is talk honestly about the realities — and clearly condemn the kind of behavior we saw in Las Vegas over the weekend. But I’m losing hope that he will ever do the right thing.

The conceit of much of the internet-based left is that they are "the reality community" a name they adopted from a Bush II Republican who bragged now unreality worked for them.  But what's clear is that a lot of them, including many of the staffers, editors and publishers at the big lefty news organizations are doing everything but facing the reality of this nomination.   It leads me to conclude what I've been increasingly suspecting, that they have far less reliability than they sell themselves as having and people have been following them over the cliff in the lead balloon ride to paradise they've sold over and over again.  After the third time that's happened within the last half century, you'd think the "reality community" rubes would catch on to the fact that it's going to crash, again.

2 comments:

  1. According to the numbers at HuffPo this morning, Sanders "won" the Oregon primary, but Clinton won more delegates (allocation being made according to some arcane rules, no doubt, which are not "transparent." Except, of course, they are, if you bother to decipher them.).

    "Winning" a primary has never meant sweeping up all the available delegates in that primary, so the media attention to who "won" has always been misplaced. But allocation of delegates is different in every state (witness the Nevada state convention), so it's easier to report on who "won." Meaningless, but far easier.

    And Sanders is working that confusion for all it's worth. It isn't his supporters, or a minority fringe on the intertoobs; it's the candidate himself.

    Which alone disqualifies him from being the head of the Executive branch.

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  2. I have come to that conclusion myself. I was helped along the way by reading past articles in the Vermont alternative weekly, Seven Days. Bernie Sanders has gone from me figuring he was doing a risky but, possibly productive thing, to thinking he was getting increasingly reckless to him being totally irresponsible to me thinking that his PR that I once bought was mostly PR.

    As I said, it's not just Bernie Sanders but the lefty media that has encouraged the left to march the country off the side of the cliff at least four times during my adulthood. I really think that's related to their basic elitist, elite university, anti-religious, quasi-Marxist orientation. If they do it this time, I don't see any down side to dumping them, starting with the magazines and other media that encourages this crap.

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