Friday, May 06, 2016

Try this one: Super Delegates, faced with a faltering Clinton, will choose Sanders.

Bernie Sanders should stay in the Democratic Presidential race. He may win it yet.

The media is once again creating its own myth when it predicts Clinton being nominated. 

The outcome of this primary season is far from set in stone as the media would have us believe.

Today’s stuck-in-the-moment media narrative is similar to what editors and pundits concocted for Trump as recently as three months ago.

No, the situation in both political parties (and in the electorate in general) is highly dynamic. Tomorrow shouldn’t be judged by today, just as next months shouldn’t be judged by this month.

The flux is particularly apparent with the Democrats and the Clinton-Sanders contest, which is still very much alive and will be right up to the time of the convention delegates vote.

As noted in my last post, public opinion polling in the nearly three months before the Democratic convention could spell real trouble for Hillary Clinton.

The entire electorate is unpredictable at this point, particularly since both Trump and Clinton, the "given" November match-up, have such high negatives.

Will large portions of the public simply abstain from voting at all? And, if they do vote, what will motivate them to?  Fear? Anger? Sweet reason?

And then there’s Sanders who is actually liked.

People may not agree with him but they respect him.

But what about this socialist business? Indiana and Michigan, hardly left-wing hot-beds, had no problem problem with Sander being a democratic socialist. It’s a non-issue.


Perhaps voters know more about the social/political history of Western Europe than the pundits do. Perhaps they know more about universal health care and free education than the lobbyists want them to. Perhaps they know that nothing changes until change is proposed and debated.

So here’s the deal: Given Trump’s obvious cartoonish, show-biz persona and its broad zany, nativist appeal, and given Hillary Clinton’s dynasty-bound, boring, predictable “establishment” stances, I fully expect polls in the next month to show her slipping behind Trump, and then falling way WAY behind.


Call her the Jeb Bush of the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, Sanders will continue to top Trump, if narrowly. Virtually every poll so far shows Sanders faring better against Trump than Clinton does.

Obviously these “shocking” poll results will not escape Democrats gathering in Philadelphia in late July. The unelected Democratic Super-delegates were created for just such an eventuality. Nominations are made at the convention and reflect reality at the time of it is held.


The nominating decision at the convention should be informed by the long, bizarre (and dated) primary season but not bound to it.

And as long as Sanders stays in the race and contests places like Oregon and California (and wins!) he will become a viable option as Democratic delegates face the consequences of nominating a deeply flawed and likely-to-lose Clinton.

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