Month: April 2016

On Tuesday, 15% of Sanders voters decided they could not be bothered with voting for other Democrats down the ballot, including, most importantly, the Democratic Supreme Court candidate. This is why purist progressives can never form a coherent, effective and long lasting movement. Markos:

So there are lots of reasons why we lost that [Supreme Court race] that have nothing to do with Sanders’ supporters. Still, it is imperative that the Sanders movement figure out how to engage its supporters on the full ballot, particularly since it relies so heavily on independent politically alienated voters (around 20 percent of Sanders’ Wisconsin voters—easily his margin of victory since Hillary Clinton and Sanders split Democrats 50-50). The Occupy movement became mostly irrelevant because of its refusal to engage in electoral politics (compared to the tea party). To its credit, the Sanders movement is engaged electorally, but seemingly focused on a single personality. Sanders has undoubtedly activated a core group of people, one that could have incredible influence in our politics moving forward. But that will require broadening their portfolio of candidates so that their impact is felt up and down and in every corner of every ballot. Could you imagine Sanders supporters exerting the same level of fear into the hearts of Democratic incumbents as the tea party does to Republicans? That would be something we would all cheer.

The Sanderistas cannot be trusted to support anyone but Sanders. Every other candidate everywhere down the ballot is not as pure as Bernie or has done something to offend the sensitive sensibilities of purist progressives, and therefore no other candidate but Bernie is entitled to support. And that is why Bernie's talk of revolution is pure bullshit. For Bernie to succeed in office, he needs a progressive Congress. To get a progressive Congress, he needs all of his supporters everywhere to come out and support progressive candidates. But here is where progressives go off the rails: no one can ever agree on who is progressive. From my own experience at PDD, certain hardcore purists in that organization refused to support or endorse Bryan Townsend or Karen Peterson because they are not progressive enough. Therefore, the movement as a whole will always fail because when you build a coalition to elect down ballot members, not everyone is going to be pure or progressive enough. If you thin Democrats are weary of progressivism, that is why. It's not because they don't share the same opinion on policy. It's because progressives have a lousy track record of being a coalition ally. They are not there for you when you need them. Unions are good allies. They support down ballot. Progressives are not because they do not. If progressives want to become a growing and effective movement, they will cure their purism.

So. Over the last 24 hours, Bernie Sanders and his campaign has decided to break their word and attack Hillary Clinton personally. First, the top Berniebro out there, Jeff Weaver, said yesterday that he sure hopes Secretary Clinton doesn't "destroy the Democratic party to satisfy the Secretary's ambitions to become the president of the United States." "We want to have a party that we can unify." Ok. Let's unpack that for a moment.

Bernie won Wisconsin last night as expected, but by not as healthy margin as he needs. Don't get me wrong, a 56-43 result, and thus a 13 point win is great, and it keeps him going. But in terms of making up delegate ground, it doesn't move the needle that much. As you can see in the chart inside, he wins 45 delegates to Clinton's 36, a net gain of 9 delegates. Clinton now leads Sanders 1280 to 1025, a difference of 255 still. If Bernie had won 70-30 say, he would have won 57 delegates to Clinton's 24, a net gain of 25 delegates. And now the roads gets tougher for Bernie. New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island. To put himself on target of winning the nomination, Bernie must sweep all of these states by the 70-30 margin I talked about.