I have trouble with the bolded parts, many young people did this, I wonder if they really understood the differences between Mr. Aleppo and Bernie.

Don't insult my intelligence, instead try to understand the issues I find important

Criminal justice reforms
End the drug war
Reduce/end our foreign entanglements

Are you gonna tell me with a straight face I didn't vote for the candidates who align with my view on these issues???

Couldn't care less about dumb Aleppo gaffe. I don't want us in Syria I don't want us in Iraq I don't want us in Middle East. I don't admire any foreign leaders either I'm a rabid isolationist.

I don't want to get riled up about that all over again either I'll agree if you're playing to win GJ is not a very good candidate. I live in California so my E-vote went to clinton anyway

I'm with you on those issues, there are more issues for me.

On all the issues, I have an uncle who align with my view pretty well, but I didn't write his name in the ballot.

I just thought Hillary was better than Trump on all (or almost all) my issues.

I'm sure Dems had a folder like this on trump how did that turn out for them?

If you lived in MI would you have voted the same way?

trump was a terrible candidate. bernie doing slightly better/worse than trump is still terrible.

Besides abortion what others would you say?

Courts, education, imprisonment, etc., a general tendency to follow any jackass who pats them on the head. Worldviews don't only affect single policy issues, a bad mentality manages to get many things wrong.

Well, there are a wide variety of Evangelicals even here in South Carolina. I think you'll concede the Bob Jones, Liberty University crowd mostly is out of reach. Rigid gender roles, homosexuality as sin, distrust over public schools, curriculum, etc. The folks who are true Believers, attend church regularly and so on. Some (not many) of these are anti-racist, love thy neighbor types. They aren't open to Democratic politics, but it's possible for them to be allies on specific issues if the leadership is less involved in cracking the whip, particularly the younger ones.

Then you have the crowd who culturally identifies as possessing the same values, tend to vote with them, but aren't exactly sold on the practice. The second group is almost certainly larger. It's hard for the Democrats to offer them much because they are well dug in to defending the heritage. On the individual level they have all kinds of different beliefs, but as a group they are all aboard the full Trump express.

To clarify: there are other factions of evangelicals even in the south. Some others are even white, and liberal.

It's possible for someone to be a strong candidate with one subset of the population, but not be a strong candidate for the whole population. This theory that Hillary beat Bernie and Trump beat Hillary therefore Trump would beat Bernie is badly flawed.

Like, Trump convincingly won the primary, but based on unfavorable ratings and the number of votes he got, I seriously doubt he's the best candidate the GOP could have fielded.

I said two things.

1) Bernie has better polling numbers against Trump than Hillary.
2) The Democratic Party pushed their machinery for Hillary.

Now I will grant you a third and fourth point in the name of rational debate.

3) There is the possibility that Bernie would have lost to Trump after the republican went full attack mode on him. This is the point daca made and it's decent enough. My intuition tells me that Bernie would have survived the attack because of boy cry wolf , they basically call every democrat candidate a communist so the same people that voted Obama would have shrugged , but ok, this is just intuition and we will never know because it never happened ( unfortunately the hard part of politics isn't the science and the logic but the intuition).

4) Even though democrats pulled the machinery towards Hillary , there are other candidates that managed to overturn such problem and that Bernie campaign failed to deliver in such situation . Specially with regards to black voters which baids pointed out previously but nobody replied.

Also the fact that Hillary can beat Bernie in a primary doesn't make her the better candidate , black communities in the Deep South are not very useful in the general election while white working class voters in the rust belt can very easily the difference between winning and losing like they were this time.

I wouldn't say terrible but I will grant you that the main problem from a winning perspective was not that the Dnc chose Hillary over Bernie but the fact that they backed Hillary over others in the first place.
Of course since we agreed with Bernie platform we are more butthurt that they didn't pick our guy instead of the bigger mistake of not picking a proper centrist candidate.

If you look at what actually happened in 2008 you'll see that the same thing happened in 2016. The superdelegate system made it virtually impossible for the "insurgent" candidate to win the party nomination.

In 2008 Hillary actually won the popular vote and lost the nomination.

I encourage you to check the math for yourself. Perhaps it would be an interesting new topic for this forum. If you assume initially that Candidate A will get ~2:1 of the superdelegates, how much of the popular vote in the Democrat Primary would Candidate B need to win to overcome the deficit?

(This doesn't even take into account the opaque nature of how pledged delegates are awarded. It appears to me that there is some other algorithm involved other than straight popular vote.)

Then consider that the primary system has discrete votes occurring over a period of months. Early primaries have significantly more effect then later ones. In 2016, Bernie supporters saw that while he was routinely getting enough support to be competitive in the popular vote, the delegate count even after the first 4 states, before Super Tuesday, made it obvious to any observer that he had very little chance of actually winning enough pledged delegates to overcome the superdelegates.

~~~~~

FWIW -- polls are not votes. It matters not at all whether Rubio or Kasich or Bernie had better polling. In the end, they did not have the actual votes. Or, the rules of the parties made it impossible for them to win even with a plurality of popular votes.

In fact, it is sometimes amusing, sometimes distressing, how much people put their faith in polls. There is almost no way to ground truth the poll until after an actual vote is taken. And even then, situations change, new information is processed. The poll -- a snapshot -- is at best beset with aliasing issues (a la Nyquist theorem), and at worst, is a fraud perpetrated to sway the public.

This is only true for a half dozen cherry picked scenarios and not widely accepted. The 2008 primary was a dumpster fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Result...lar_vote_table

I know I am the wrong messenger hear but I want to recommend listening to Ezra Klein's podcast discussion with Heather McGhee. She attributes the Democrat's loss to three things-race, populism, and economic insecurity. No big surprise but the nuanced discussion on each is really worthwhile.

Talking about "blame" isn't really important. Sanders is a political entrepreneur, so if he sees a shot to take his product to the big stage, he's going to take it, even if it's a long shot and even if it's bad for the party as a whole. In his case, it's even more clear-cut because he's not a Democrat so it's not like his loyalty to a party not his own should even be on the table.

However, it's important to understand what's going on from a Tragic Death perspective. I posted a Clay Shirky storify the better part of a year ago that talked about how the mainstream parties on both sides are being parasitized by external forces that can achieve the necessary scale to win elections (or at least primaries) without going through traditional power brokers, mainly by using social media or free media. It's extremely relevant today, in particular where he talks about the inability of the establishment parties to censor wedge issues out of the campaign, which definitely hurt Hillary.

That's all interesting (and terrible from a governance perspective), but another big question for the future of the Democratic party is why the GOP parasite seems to do such a better job of driving engagement with down-ballot politics. The Tea Party is notorious for primarying anyone who doesn't toe their line, and being successful in part because no one votes in those elections. The insurgent left seems to mainly not vote all that much except in presidential primaries, which is obviously less favorable for the health of the party. It seems like the Tea Party is really the anomaly, in that the parasite theory would generally predict that the insurgents, who are not reliant on the party for their own success, will be much less interested in the long-term health of the party, both because they don't need it and because it can't extract concessions from them for its support. So one possibility is maybe that Trumpism and the GOPe will part ways and GOP voter engagement in downballot races will fall. In that scenario, GOPe/DEMe can scrap on even footing in low-turnout races for dogcatcher and then Trumpists and Sanderistas can square off in the social media/free media-heavy presidential contests.

Prolly would have held my nose and voted clinton if I lived in a close state

Can't you square this by simply nothing that the Tea Party parasitical insurgent types ARE the local party activists and low-level functionaries -- all of the engaged activists? All of the allied media?

So the insurgent left are truly detached but the insurgent right are more correctly like fifth column brigades. Then you get a story that makes sense stern to stern. I mean Steve Bannon and Breitbart/Drudge wing are pretty well integrated into the GOP power structures for guys whose stated goals are the destruction of the elites of the party.

I think that Clay Shirky storify is good but a huge part of this story is how much the GOPe basically relinquished all party discipline in the last decade. The acceptable conversation had been turned over to the insurgents with the dawn of the Obama Presidency but you can debate it's a process that began much earlier. I mean how much were GOP elites and allied media able to keep a lid on ANY "Don't Mention X"s in the last 10 years, like Birtherism? Seems like "none at all." In fact, the elites flattered it and fed off of it. I agree with the whole of it, but it sure seems like the GOPe wasn't much of an unwitting host. I think the lower level party activist types have been way more Tea Party oriented than anyone acknowledged, it's allied media has long gone to the hyper-partisan insurgents -- GOPe seemed far more parasitical than the other way around.

Held my nose, taken some pepto, painkillers, anti depressants and flipped the ballot off as I put it in the box.

That makes sense. I don't think there's any question that the GOP has largely had a no-enemies-on-the-right policy, such that the rightward flank of the GOP just blends seamlessly into the far-right fringe, while the DemE has more firmly enforced a leftmost boundary on the party (see, e.g., Sanders not formally being a Democrat, or the various Green Party runs). Not sure if this is tied to the Cold War or the fundamental unrespectability of the racist component of the GOP coalition or both or neither.

I guess one follow-up question is whether the Dem party is on the same trajectory as the GOP, just ******ed by 8 years due to the insurgents starting off outside the castle walls.

The key difference imo is that the Dem establishment really has delivered goodies for the left flank, like Obamacare, gay marriage, etc. They also seem a bit more responsive to the base, like see how Hillary adopted Bernie's tuition plan, waffling on the TPP, etc.

Much of the Tea Party anger comes from the GOPe pulling a bait and switch where they give goodies to the elites and only token offerings to the AM radio crowd.

That's quite a stretch to say the DEMe delivered gay marriage. It was a popular movement in the states. If one is charitable one might say the DEMe dragged their feet and tried to have it both ways as opposed to saying they flat out opposed it. Finally the SCOTUS did something which is supposedly not partisan, but perhaps recognized the popular feeling that gay people deserve equal protection. That feeling didn't come from the DEMe.

This is true, but then there's gays in the military, expanding wilderness protection, and various other goodies I'm too lazy to look up. I think it's a bit different from the GOPe's tactic of teasing the far right with dogwhistle about school lunches and then delivering goodies for the 0.1%.

Then ofc there's the far fringe left that's been scattered and disorganized since the 60s. I think they're small in number and too divergent in interests to rally around Jill Stein or whoever and be a real political force.

Yeah, I think generally the Republicans represent the interests of the very wealthy and corporations and make up a LOT of lies to pretend those interests align with the interests of some large segment of the population + a few social/religious things to try to cobble votes together.

But they do deliver on promises, like cutting government services and lowering taxes on the wealthy. It's just that their programs are **** for most of their constituency, with the caveat that some religious nuts will knowingly vote against their economic interests because they think homosexuality is a sin, zygotes have souls, and that's more important than economics.