Delaware Liberal

Thursday Open Thread [5.19.16]

Delaware Dem

The New York Times:

For weeks, some current and former Sanders campaign workers have privately acknowledged feeling disheartened about Mr. Weaver’s determination to go after the Democratic National Committee, fearing a pitched battle with the party they hope to support in the general election. The intraparty fighting has affected morale, they say, and raised concerns that Mr. Weaver, a longtime Sanders aide who more recently ran a comic book store, was not devoted to achieving Democratic unity. Several described the campaign’s message as having devolved into a near-obsession with perceived conspiracies on the part of Mrs. Clinton’s allies.

Democratic leaders said they wanted to do everything possible to avoid having Clinton-Sanders tensions send the Philadelphia convention into the sort of chaos they had expected to mar the Republican convention. So far, though, Mr. Sanders has not indicated that he would ask his delegates to support Mrs. Clinton, as she did in 2008 for Barack Obama.

The big hole in this plan on the part of the Sanders campaign is the role of the Super Delegates. Sanders needs them in order to have any possible argument that he can win the nomination. He needs all of them to switch to him. What Bernie has not considered is that the remaining Super Delegates might just endorse Hillary between now and June 7, ending the campaign on their own, because they are tired of Bernie and Weaver. And Bernie may in fact start losing his own Super Delegates.

He lost one yesterday:

That being said, I encourage everyone, Berniacs and Clintonistas alike, to read this piece by The Slot titled “We called up Bernie fans Who Threatened Dem State Chair and Asked Them to Explain Themselves.” You all know me, know that I am fervently not a Bernie supporter, and you know that I have grown to despise some of the more vehement and younger Bernie supporter. And even I left reading that article feeling sympathy for them!!! Goddamnit. LOL.

The long and short of it is that the Bernie supporters who made death threats against various Democratic Party officials are just dumb, naive kids. This is their first election, and they feel like if Bernie doesn’t win it is the end of all things. I remember feeling that way once. They were frustrated and wanted to make a statement. They way they chose to make that statement was completely unacceptable, and some of them recognize that.

Jonathan Capehart says that people are overestimating the power of Trump’s white supporters:

In op-eds for The Post and the Wall Street Journal, Republican pollster and strategist Whit Ayres laid out the dismal demographics facing the GOP. Ayres pointed out in the WSJ that Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, “won 59% of white voters, the highest percentage of any Republican challenging an incumbent president in the history of exit polling.” In The Post, Ayres wrote that current demographic trends mean that in order for the GOP to win in November, its nominee must now win 65 percent of the white vote. That’s six percentage points higher than four years ago. Trump’s white support right now is six percentage points below what Romney got and 12 percentage points below the Ayres projection for 2016.[…]

That’s because white voters are a shrinking part of the electorate. “Whites accounted for 72 percent of the national electorate in 2012, down from 83 percent in 1992 and 88 percent in 1976,” Ayres wrote in the WSJ last year. “If this pattern continues—with an average decline since 1996 of 2.75 percentage points each presidential election—the 2016 electorate will be about 69 percent white and 31 percent nonwhite.” On the other hand, 50,000 U.S.-born Hispanics will become eligible to vote every month for the next 20 years.[…]

Because of this downward demographic trend, Ayres wrote in The Post that the Republican nominee would need to win 30 percent of the nonwhite vote or 65 percent of the white vote to win the White House. Meanwhile, Phillips citing voting and census data argues in his book that a progressive victory in November would require “securing the support of 81 percent of people of color and 39 percent of Whites.” If the election were held today, as the NBC/Survey Monkey survey posits, Trump wouldn’t hit either of the necessary benchmarks.

The Sacramento Bee:

One would think that Sanders, the man who continues to insist he’s the only Democrat who can beat Trump, would speak up forcefully to condemn the actions of his supporters in Nevada. If nothing else, it’s the right thing to do. Instead, much like Trump when pressed about the violent streak within his ranks, he has largely weaseled out of his responsibility to make it clear to his supporters that this is not acceptable behavior.

The Sanders campaign has been noticeably silent about the events on social media – the main way the candidate communicates with his supporters. When asked by reporters, his campaign spokesman, Michael Briggs, insists that Sanders does not “condone violence or encourage violence or even threats of violence.” Then in the next breath, his campaign abdicates all responsibility for what happened in Nevada, offers excuses and shifts the blame.

Briggs says the campaign “had no role in encouraging the activity that the party is complaining about.” He even implied to The New York Times that Democratic Party itself is partly responsible for the tense atmosphere because it’s not doing a good enough job of being welcoming to “people who have been energized and excited by (the Sanders) campaign.” Adding fuel to the conspiracy fire, the campaign still is considering whether to challenge the outcome of the Nevada delegate count.

Jonathan Bernstein:

The Bernie Sanders Trainwreck At this point, the best thing Bernie Sanders’s supporters can probably do for his reputation is to vote against him in the remaining primaries and caucuses. Hillary Clinton long ago wrapped up the nomination. Tuesday’s results — her narrow victory in Kentucky and his win by about 10 percentage points in Oregon — doesn’t change anything: It’s over. If you include super-delegates, Clinton is only about 100 delegates away from clinching, and with Democratic proportional allocation she is basically guaranteed to get there.

Yet the closer Clinton gets to her official victory, the more Sanders and his campaign act as if the nomination was unfairly stolen from him — that somehow the doors of the party have been unfairly closed against his followers. This culminated in an ugly scene in Nevada last weekend, with Sanders supporters threatening Democratic Party officials there. The result? Liberals have turned on Sanders, urging him to get out of the race now or, at least, to change his tone.

Ed Kilgore:

One thing is largely indisputable: Bernie Sanders himself could help clear the air by informing his supporters that while there are many things about the Democratic nomination process that ought to be changed, no one has “stolen” the nomination from him or from them. Perhaps a thousand small things gave Hillary Clinton an “unfair” advantage in this contest, but they were mostly baked into the cake, not contrived to throw cold water on the Bern. And the best step Sanders’ supporters could take to promote their long-term interests in the Democratic Party would be to get a grip before they wind up helping Donald Trump win the presidency. And Bernie Sanders himself has a responsibility to talk his devoted followers off the ledge.

That is the only saving grace of this election. Otherwise, the Democratic schism between purists and pragmatists would split the party in two and doom us to 1968 or 1980.

If Hillary does win this election, it will be an amazing feat, given the even unconscious sexism of her own allies. Exhibit A: Ed Rendell.

Charles P. Pierce (Bernie supporter):

The Sanders people should know better than to conclude what has been a brilliant and important campaign by turning it into an extended temper tantrum. I voted for Bernie Sanders … But if anybody thinks that, somehow, he is having the nomination “stolen” from him, they are idiots.

“I want to go up to every single one of them and apologize, I want to go up to every single one of them and tell them how grateful I am that they are in this country and apologize on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump.” — Former Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT), quoted by NBC News, just before he died, asking his son if there were any Muslims in the hospital.

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