In my never-ending struggle to see a glass less than
half-full as almost overflowing, I undertook a little experiment. General elections are won by electoral votes,
not by total popular votes or anything else.
So when Hillary Clinton has big wins during the Primaries in states that
no Democrat is going to carry in the Fall, then we ought to discount those wins
as having no relevance for the General Election, right? [You can see where this is going]. I started with the list of states Obama won
in 2012, and then put in Bernie’s column the states where he has already won a
primary or caucus and put in Hillary’s column the states where she has done the
same. Then I looked up the electoral
votes each state will have in 2016, and added them up. Here are the results:
Not Yet Decided: New
York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, California, New
Jersey, DC, New Mexico, Oregon,
Bernie has won: Wisconsin
[10], Vermont [3], Colorado [9], Iowa [3], Hawaii [4], Michigan [16], Washington
[12], Maine [4], Minnesota [10], New Hampshire [4] = 75 electoral votes
Hillary has won: Florida [29], Iowa [3], Nevada [6], Massachusetts
[11], Ohio [18], Illinois [20], Virginia [13] = 100 electoral votes
The next Obama state to hold its primary is New York, which
has 29 electoral votes.
Which means that if
Bernie can pull out a win in New York, he will be leading in the RELEVANT
electoral vote count.
So there.
Since March 15th he needed 56% of the remaining total delegates left to take a pledged delegate lead. He has won all but one election with staggering numbers (70%+). There's a real shot here. A real shot.
ReplyDeleteThis orthodox Marxist is feeling the Bern so bad, I've scheduled myself for a full STD panel and prostate check.
ReplyDeleteI think one under-reported story in this election is how the two front runner candidates both have unfavorability ratings with over half the potential voters. What does this mean for democracy and potential for change?
ReplyDeleteI do not think this has ever been true in the U.S. (although I think "unfavorability polling" was an invention in the 1980's).
The problem is that working class whites have all left the Democratic Party, so especially in the South, many of the people whom Sanders would help have left the Democratic Party. Progressives have to win them back. And that effort has to take working class people as they are. We won't reach working class people with college-level discourse, because they don't go to college. We have to learn to speak the language of the working class again.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Unfortunately, the language of the working class is too conceptually sophisticated for the college educated. It requires a grasp of such ideas as exploitation and immiseration and false consciousness.
ReplyDeleteI can see that one could ascribe a grasp of "exploitation" and "immiseration" to the working class; but I don't see any reason to think members of that class understand "false consciousness", since if they did the appeal to racism (and other so-called "social issues") that so fueled the movement of the members of that class to the Republican Party would not have worked as well.
ReplyDeleteOh, to be sure, Warren. I was being sardonic. Sufficient unto the day ...
ReplyDeleteWouldn't the relevant states be the ones that could go to either party in the general election, though? States like Massachusetts, Vermont, and Hawaii will go Democrat whether it's Hillary or Bernie.
ReplyDeleteYes, but I was trying to make the best case I could for Bernie, so I cherry-picked my facts. :)
ReplyDeleteHere's my best-case scenario for Bernie: the economy crashes in the next few months. Bernie wins every remaining primary. An angry Philly mob storms the convention and runs Hillary out of town. Bernie clobbers Trump in the general election. Congress, responding to the public mood, enacts Bernie's agenda. Clinton wises up in her old age and finally stops running for office. The Clintons donate their money to organizations fighting mass incarceration, the death penalty, "free" "trade" "agreements", and clintonism generally.
ReplyDelete