Oh great, another day, another Salon article promoting Sanders. I'm sure I'll be downvoted for this, but I'm going to break down this Professor's argument:
But here’s the critical thing: the elections in Nevada, Iowa, and Massachusetts were either close or extraordinarily close. A little bit more time here, a little bit more organizing there, and they could easily have tipped his way. In other words, Sanders could very easily have seven states now to Clinton’s eight. He doesn’t, and coulda shoulda woulda is just that.
That's great, but delegates aren't awarded winner take all (in which case it would be 851-279 in Clinton's favor) but proportionally. Sanders has managed to win big in small states, lose big in big states, and lose small in a few.
But what this does mean, going forward, is that we have the opportunity to turn potential into actual. We’ve got time, we’ve got organizing, we’ve got money: let’s make use of it all.
Geezus, since when did Salon turn into a a place for reposting political campaigns?
In Vermont and New Hampshire, he beat Clinton among all women voters. In Oklahoma, as I said, he nearly tied Clinton among women voters. In Nevada, he nearly tied her among Latino voters (though the experts are still debating that one). In Massachusetts, as I said, he got 41 percent of non-white voters.
That's all true, but the big issue for analysts is that while he won NH and VT huge, the question is - did he underperform with women/minorities in those states? The answer is yes to all those.
NH, for instance, was a 60-38 win for Bernie. 67% of men voted for Sanders, 55% of women.
MA was a 50.1-48.7 defeat for Sanders, which is closer to 50-50. He won men 58-41, but lost women 42-57. Likewise, he got ~40% of the minority vote, which means he still underperformed with them in a tight race.
I wonder if we’re not about to see something similar — if not quite as dramatic — with non-white voters. The cross-cutting factor here is not only age — Bruenig has also shown that younger black voters are trending toward Sanders (see the graph at the bottom of this post), and even in South Carolina, Sanders did much better with younger black voters than he did with older black voters — but also region.
That's all true again, but the young demographic of voters is tiny. They don't turn out to vote. The over 65 demographic is smaller in the US, but turns out in larger overall numbers than the under 35 crowd. And in the Democrat primary, the over 45 category has been 60+% of each race.
Think about it. With the exception of Nevada, the states where there’s been dramatic support for Clinton among non-white voters have all been in the South. And in Nevada, Latino voters almost went for Sanders (although, again, the results have been a source of conflict).
Well yeah, because the South and NV are the only states so far with large minority populations. IA, MA, NH, VT, MN, CO, OK, KS, NE are amongst the whitest states in the US. States like CA (where whites are a minority), NY, NJ, FL, IL, MI, etc. have large minority populations that still remain.
But outside the South and Nevada, there have been primaries in three states that are virtually all white (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa)
Iowa was a caucus, but okay
Outside the South, Sanders has won or come very close to winning every single state. From here on out, many of the states are much friendlier territory for him.
Except that states aren't winner take all, and the upcoming states have not looked good for Sanders. FL is over 14% black, over 20% Hispanic, and almost all of them vote in the Democrat election. In other words, they make up a significant chunk of the voting pool. Not surprisingly, in the multiple polls of likely Democrat primary voters, she's polled in the +20-30 range.
A 20-30 point victory for her in a proportional allocation race, with over 210 delegates at stake, will mean Bernie loses 40+ delegates. In a race where he's already down ~206 delegates, that's going the wrong direction.
It already happened with Georgia, where he lost 46 delegates. He can have 3 Kansas's and he'd still be trailing.
In addition, where Clinton has won in states polled with big margins, she's exceeded her forecasts. The RCP average for TX was ~24-28%. She won it by 32%. In VA, she was polled around +20-24. She won it by +29. She exceeded her forecasts in TN, AR, AL, and LA as well.
MS has 36 delegates coming up Tuesday - if LA and the rest of the South was any indication, a 70ish to 20ish win in MS is likely, meaning another 10-16 delegate loss for Sanders.
Unless our brains are so completely scrambled by the Nate Silvers/Voxification of political life — where every poll is a destiny, every superdelegate a fact of nature, where everyone’s a crackpot realist rather than a citizen activist — it would be the definition of insanity to give up now.
So when the rest of your argument cherry picks numbers, go ahead and attack Nate Silver and the other data analysts who are using all the available information to make prognostications?
This reminds me of 2012 when UnskewedPolls suggested Romney's victory was imminent. Now it's the left's turn to say the numbers/data can't be correct, simply because they don't like it.
Needless to say, I'm disappointed. Instead of using numbers to back up why he thinks this race is going to change, he simply says that numbers weren't bad in NH/VT/MA (despite underperforming in minorities and women) and thus Sanders will win outside of the South - which, by the way, has more states that have minorities and the Hispanic states haven't voted yet.
So while we're busy cherry picking OK, KS, NE, MN, CO - of which 4 states were caucus states with little or no polling due to the lack of voter demographic information (and the inability to accurately weigh responses meant no reliable pollsters wanted to poll those states), and using that as a basis to bash 538 (which didn't bother forecasting states without data), why aren't we looking at how he did worse in the South than predicted, or how DC and MD are two black-heavy states in the North still to vote. Or how TX, where TX Latinos (28% of voters there) went 66-32 for Clinton in the exit polls, is the only Hispanic-heavy state to have voted with NM, CA, etc. still to come.