{"id":28186,"date":"2020-04-01T13:21:54","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T18:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=28186"},"modified":"2020-04-01T13:21:54","modified_gmt":"2020-04-01T18:21:54","slug":"just-like-hillary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/04\/01\/just-like-hillary\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Like Hillary"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was rather amazed to read that Bernie Sanders, the all-but-vanquished challenger and former favorite to win the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination committed what I see as the same error as did Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, according<\/a> to The Daily Kos<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But beside that, it\u2019s clear as always that this was never a campaign built to expand beyond its core base. You can see it in their excuse for losing.<\/p>\n

To recap, the campaign\u00a0decided early on<\/a>\u00a0that it wasn\u2019t going to try and expand its support beyond its core base. \u201cSanders aides believe, he\u2019ll easily win enough delegates to put him into contention at the convention.\u00a0They say they don\u2019t need him to get more than 30 percent to make that happen.\u201d The assumption was that the field would remain fragmented.<\/p>\n

It was a stupid assumption for lots of reasons. But it was their bet, and they were shocked (SHOCKED!) when it didn\u2019t pay out. \u201cIn the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate\u2019s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events\u2014most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign,\u201d the\u00a0Times<\/em> wrote. \u201cMr. Sanders had been \u2018on the brink of winning,\u2019 Mr. Tulchin argued, \u2018until the most unprecedented event in the history of presidential primaries occurred.\u2019\u201d …<\/p>\n

But fact is, Sanders was running at about\u00a0half the votes<\/em>\u00a0he received in 2016. He wasn\u2019t on the brink\u00a0of winning. He was just leading a multi-candidate field with a fraction of his previous support. As I\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0previously, \u201cHe even managed to lose ground\u00a0in Mississippi<\/em>, where he\u2019d only gotten 16.6% of the vote in 2016.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Much like the Hillary Clinton strategy of ignoring those votes thought to be out of reach – or safe – Sanders, for perhaps different reasons, pursued the same strategy.<\/p>\n

And so what happened? Sander\u2019s total popular vote count was at around 30% when there were dozens of candidates in the race, and when the field compacted, it was still 30%. Let\u2019s call that unprecedented\u2014how a candidate so alienated the entire Democratic electorate that he picked up no one when everyone else dropped out.<\/p>\n

If the left hopes to achieve power in the future, it\u2019ll have to do a better job vetting candidates. Because we are doomed to eternal failure if people keep baking candidates who proudly refuse to build a majority coalition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that’s not a message which will go down well in certain quarters of the left. Much like the fringe-right that has been taking over the Republicans since the days Gingrich was Speaker, compromise is galling to some on the left because they are certain they are absolutely right; all they lack of the right’s mindset is the certainty that God stands behind them.<\/p>\n

The fringe-right has gotten around the usual roadblock to power by using a crowbar made of the abortion issue: Democrats are pure evil because they believe in abortion-rights, aka “killing unborn babies!”, and therefore you’d better fall into line. Yeah, my old hobby horse of toxic team politics.<\/p>\n

I don’t know that the left will ever find a way over the roadblock of purity, though. If they can’t compromise, then they’re doomed to being idea originators, waiting for years or decades for their ideas to be subjected to robust debate, and only maybe followed by adoption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was rather amazed to read that Bernie Sanders, the all-but-vanquished challenger and former favorite to win the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination committed what I see as the same error as did Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, according to The Daily Kos: But beside that, it\u2019s clear as \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28188,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28186\/revisions\/28188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}