Hillary and Bernie’s Quiet Email Battle
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Plus nobody is polling a Sanders win. He will lose in South Carolina by up to 30%, Florida by up to 40%, and just barely scrape by in Nevada (within margin of error).
He will be out after Super Tuesday. He just doesn't have the right demographics (people who actually go out and vote). Even if he is super popular with all of the wrong demographics.
The electoral college has rarely diverged from public opinion [1], even though individual electors can and have voted "incorrectly". I can't find a similar figure for the democratic nomination.
[1] http://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/presidents-winning-without-...
[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disenchanted [2] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disenfranchise
Overruling the result of a popular vote with votes from party insiders would be like denying people the right to vote by allowing the ritual of voting then ignoring the votes.
As well, super delegates always vote with the popular vote. They are in no way locked to Clinton, just stating that they would prefer if Clinton won the nomination.
I follow the actual polls, not the most optimistic imaginings of where a candidate might be.
Why don't you link to a poll that has Sanders ahead in SC or Florida? Seriously, you're implying I am mistaken, so present your facts.
> They are in no way locked to Clinton, just stating that they would prefer if Clinton won the nomination.
Currently those are the delegate counts. And furthermore it is a clear endorsement by the democratic establishment.
You are stating the delegate count as if it is in stone, when in fact it doesn't work the way you imply, as others have pointed out.
Yes they are. You mean to say that polls aren't conclusions within themselves.
Polls are a piece of data, a fact.
So the GP's point about the nature of polling itself isn't pedantic but my retort on the same topic is?
You'll have to explain that to me. Neither post is very productive discourse, but you think one of the two is "perfectly correct" so call out the other..?
Sorry but that's some mind boggling mental gymnastics you had to go through to write this reply.
In my book, only one of those things is pedantry.
I'm not entirely sure how that's either mental gymnastics or a double standard, but I'm smart enough to know that I don't know everything, so I'm prepared to be mistaken.
Sanders leads Clinton in pledged delegates (36 v 32). Superdelegates are meaningless at this point; they will shift to whomever is winning by the time the convention comes around. For example, Bill Clinton changed his superdelegate vote from his own wife to Obama in 2008.
As for your percentages, currently 538 puts Sanders only 20% (not 30%) behind in SC, 24% (not 40%) behind in Florida, and tied (with a slight advantage) in Nevada. Additionally, the 538 polls have consistently underestimated Sanders for the two primaries we've seen so far due to the large turnout from younger voters. [1]
Hillary is the heir apparent, while Bernie is a relative unknown. Both are great positions to be in. She has nowhere to go but down, and he has nowhere to go but up. Polling is in Hillary's favor, but momentum is in Bernie's. There's no way of knowing who will win at this point.
You may support whomever you choose, but please try to remain truthful.
[1] http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/primary-fo...
Speaking of disingenuous, the very same site lists her as having a ">99% chance" of winning SC. I said "up to 40%" because that is exactly what the polls have said, they've changed from the 20-40%+ over the last month. See:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/sc/so...
> And the 538 polls have consistently underestimated Sanders for the two primaries we've seen so far.
Indeed, but not by enough for him to win SC or Florida.
> You may support whomever you choose, but please try to remain truthful.
You've presented zero corrections to anything I've said. I stand behind "up to 40%" because I can link you to a poll which shows 40%+ right now.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/sc/so...
Don't accuse me of being untruthful because you disagree on interpretation, which you clearly do.
I didn't say you were lying, I said you were being disingenuous.
You said both:
> You may support whomever you choose, but please try to remain truthful.
The implication is clearly that I was somehow being untruthful, or lying.
If the superdegates (who are free to change their minds at any point) end up overriding the popular vote by any significant margin, I would fully expect the USA to have a republican president.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/superdelegates-might-not...
Briefly, it would only happen in the occasion of a virtual tie between the two candidates (average of 5% points or less across states), and only if the party insiders believe there is a strong electability case to be made:
"What you’re likely to see in close cases like these is competing claims to legitimacy, with Democratic party elites showing their bias by interpreting the evidence in favor of Clinton. Suppose, for instance, that Sanders is slightly ahead in elected delegates but slightly behind in the overall popular vote, which could happen if he overperforms in caucus states.3 Clinton supporters will argue that popular votes are the truer measure of support. More exotic options might include citing national polls (if Clinton is still ahead in them by June) or the number of states she’s won (if she’s won more than Sanders). If Clinton starts out well behind Sanders but then narrows her deficit, the elites may argue that momentum was in her favor."
Superdelegates are fluid; the only delegates that either candidate really has are the committed ones produced by the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary; superdelegate "commitments" aren't real counts of delegates that a candidate concretely "has" in any meaningful sense, they are just a measure of support from the establishment (in an election year in which for both parties, being associated with the "establishment" is a liability that candidates are actively running away from, this may be a negative signal.)
I may be wrong in my politics but I certainly hope that the will of the voters is respected.
EDIT (correction): Sanders was an independent until 2015, and is now a Democrat, so my point does not apply.
It is that funding that gets used for other purposes, like securing the House, the Senate, etc., etc., and as such, regardless of his current registration, Sanders is a party outsider, and a victory for him is not as big a win for the party as a Hillary, Biden, Kerry or even Jim Webb win would be.
Sanders does excellently with independent voters, Trump does terribly outside of his 35% subset of committed Republicans. This is possibly the single best chance to get a guy like Sanders into the presidency that will happen for a long, long time. If the party does override a popular vote for Sanders, I think it will almost certainly be to protect the interests of donors to incumbent Democrats, many of whom will be superdelegates, rather than any honest concern about "electability."
I'd put that at about even money.
Losing to Cruz?
Absolutely yes. If you're a typical HN reader, you're in a filter bubble where "democratic socialism" sounds way better than it does to the average American.
I do agree that the Democratic establishment is blatantly in the tank for Clinton, who isn't particularly electable herself.
A far worse scenario is that it ends up being Sanders vs. Trump vs. Bloomberg, Bloomberg siphons disproportionately more votes away from Sanders, and we do end up with a President Trump - plus Republicans retain control of Congress and Trump gets to appoint the next SCOTUS justice. A Trump presidency with control of all three branches of government would be scary indeed.
[1] http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/ge...
I don't know how else to respond except to say that I strongly disagree, and think many other people would find the idea of him leading three unified branches of government scary as well.
But this is hardly the place for political flame wars.
"I voted for Bush twice, McCain, and Romney, and I'll vote for either Hillary or Bernie (two candidates I can't stand) over Trump, and I'm far from alone."
Delegates are used to distribute influence, which is by party membership rather than population or simple voter representation. Super-delegates were introduced after the first two Democratic nominees picked by a purely popular process were a disaster (McGovern, who won only two states, and Carter, who was a wonderful person and a terrible president who paved the way for Reagan.)
Sanders supporters are correct that superdelegates exist to potentially keep people like him from getting nominated. They are wrong that that is a bad thing. When Obama ran, his ability to win over superdelegates was a strong sign of his capabilities to bring together the party and win in the general. If Sanders can't do that, he's not going to be effective in office even if he could get there.
I.e. here we have a guy who's not taking donations from big corporations, but is just as visible as Hillary who is. Money's speech apparently, and either lots from a few big donors or small amounts from lots of small donors counts.
Regardless of what happens with this election I think what's happening so far is indicative of a major change. If things keep going in this direction the 2024 election is going to be very interesting indeed.
His stance is that it's okay because he isn't fund-raising for those PACs, and that they are union PACs, not business. I personally don't see a distinction between unions and corporations.
Full disclosure, I think that Citizens United was decided correctly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/us/politics/bernie-sanders...
In one sense, it's hard to track the dollars directly. For example, an Anti-Hillary PAC at this point is effectively a pro-Bernie PAC.
On Hillary's page it says outside money spent $2,921,391 for Hillary and $4,413,617 against. So NYTime's reporting is probably out of date since it was before the Iowa vote.
Spending is a bad metric this early anyway since most PACs are just starting to ramp up their spending. Looking at spending + warchests, the Nurses have a couple million to play with while Bush, Clinton, Rubio, etc have 10s of millions. https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?chrt=V&...
It's just as easy to believe that OpenSecrets has a reporting delay as it is to believe that the FEC is using some legacy software that doesn't update quickly.
http://www.fec.gov/data/IndependentExpenditure.do?format=htm...
The only workers' rights you have were gained by unions in spite of corporate opposition
Also, money is not speech, that's like some kind of 1984 doublespeak. Money is access to popular mass communication channels. Access to popular mass communication channels is not speech and is not addressed in the constitution. Scalia's "originalism" was such a scam.
But doesn't that basically equate to speech? Money = your power to reach people?
I'm curious because my beef with search engine advertising revolves around its ability to translate money into salience (which I consider to be a kind of "speech"), so I find your distinction interesting. I wish money didn't equate to speech, but it feels like that's the world we live in.
But once you're ready to accept that, you have to recognize the uphill battle there and the need for far more fundamental reform, like sortition (randomly select people who can seriously focus on the election and take time to think about it).
I don't think that's the sentiment Citizens United opposition boils down to. Instead, I think a more accurate sentiment is that easily purchased propaganda sets the tone and content of available political discourse, severely limiting what narratives and ideas reach the eyes, ears, and minds of the citizenry to only those which are best-funded. That people are then swayed to certain positions, especially when they are in opposition to people's own best interests but couched in manipulative terms that hide this fact, is not a product of people being morons, but of there being no viable alternatives in political discourse as a product of being silenced by lack of money to pose them before citizens. By allowing unlimited spending, the playing field for the hearts and minds of citizens is inherently unbalanced in the favor of moneyed interests.
And you'd be correct! But wealthy donors aren't the only ones who can propagandize. To truly guide policy from the implications of the above, you need far reaching reform, like sortition or (heaven forbid) a strongly restricted franchise.
No, actually, I think the one of the major points made by proponents of campaign finance laws is that wild imbalances in spending prevents less well-funded ideas from being heard at all, and that, while people may be perfectly well equipped to process ideas that they are exposed to, they can't process ideas that are completely drowned out of discussion.
You don't need to assume that voters are morons to justify campaign spending limits.
Again, that assumption has a lot of far reaching implications that aren't appreciated. In fairness, there's some wiggle room between ideal rational agent and moron, but not that allows money to turn bad ideas into ones accepted by people whom we consider qualified to vote. Or do we really consider them qualified?
Actually, expending effort to propagate even subjectively good political ideas (that is, ideas that would benefit the person involved if they were widely held) is usually irrational for most people, because the expected marginal utility is low compared to the cost to spread them.
Its useful to the individual if other people spread the ideas, but its often a classic tragedy of the common situation.
Now, for wealthy people (or people with otherwise disproportionate media reach and impact), the utility cost of propagating useful ideas to those who might be receptive is lower compared to the benefit, so its more likely to be rational to do it. Further, with unconstrained spending, the spending of the rich bids up the market cost of reach for ideas, making it less rational for the less rich to expend resources propagating the ideas they favor.
You are invoking rationality, but doing so with an argument that ignores market conditions, opportunity costs, and relative payoffs.
(Also, rational agents -- by the definition of rationality -- don't act on the social consequences of options, but on their personal costs and benefits.)
Not at all -- tragedy-of-the-commons situations depend on freeloaders being able use that freeloading to further amplify their ability to freeload -- e.g. the guy that overgrazes the field produces more sheep than the restrainers, leading to further overgrazing (until collapse).
Under the assumption (again, with non-obvious implications) that voters intelligently reject bad ideas within the marketplace thereof, there is no such self-reinforcement -- they reject the bad ideas in favor of better ones. It would be like a magical commons that poisons any sheep whenever the blade of grass it eats is beyond its quota. Or, more realistically, like a commons whose polity has set up rules with punishments for those who defect from the solution to such a collective action problem.
>(Also, rational agents -- by the definition of rationality -- don't act on the social consequences of options, but on their personal costs and benefits.)
That's not the definition of rationality, but of rational agents with a particular set of preferences (i.e. of caring only about themselves). You can be rational and still care about starving kids in Africa.
But irrespective of semantic games, the relevant distinction for this issue is whether the voters are rational in the sense of identifying and rejecting bad ideas. To the extent you claim they meet this definition then (irrespective of how much altruism you want to insist is "rational"), the destructive propaganda of the wealthy would be stopped dead in its tracks by intelligent voters, rendering campaign finance moot -- but that obviously is not true, so it's hard to come up with a model that has it both ways.
(Of course, FWIW, the intelligent-but-dont-call-it-rational voter has to have some altruism in order to vote in the first place.)
(1) There is no such thing as a "bad idea". There are ideas that have net negative utility for particular voters. But these same ideas may have net positive utility for other voters.
(2) Campaign spending doesn't have to get people for whom an idea is bad (net negative utility) to accept it to be useful to propagate, as long as it does either of the following (a) reach people to whom it is of net positive utility, who will adopt it and act on it politically, or drive up the price of the resources (media access, etc.) needed to spread competing ideas that are net negative utility to the actor deciding to spend resources on the current idea, so as to reduce the cost to that actor from the uptake of those harmful ideas.
Of course, with rationality (which, aside from personal utility maximization also includes perfect information about all alternatives including their costs and benefits), propagating ideas (political or otherwise) would be unnecessary, since every one would know and choose their best alternative without needing to be exposed to or propagate ideas. But if you weaken the assumptions of rationality only enough to make propagating ideas meaningful (that is, abandon knowledge of all alternatives, but still assume that once exposed to a proposed alternative people can perfectly weigh its utilities against all other alternatives they have been exposed to), then greater inequality in access to resources to propagate information still has a distorting effect without further assuming people ever make any errors in assessing the relative merits of ideas that they are exposed to, and there is still a role for campaign finance restrictions.
It is simply false to say that you need a model in which people cannot effectively process information they receive about policy alternatives to justify campaign finance limits: it can be justified while assuming people are perfect evaluators of alternatives they are exposed to.
You can't justify it if you assume people are perfect evaluators of their alternatives without a need to be exposed to them, but with that assumption there is literally never any utility to campaign spending (and, as it has a cost and no utility, no one would do it if they were perfect evaluators of their alternatives), so I think we can reject that assumption as being useful in any universe in which campaign spending (limited or not) actually occurs.
That is a huge assumption that doesn't seem to match the world we live in. Your best attempt to justify it is with a claim that voters, while not morons, make a small amount of errors that is somehow enough to fail to appreciate the tidal wave of "let's not get exploited" advice they hear from friends, who would want to spread it like the dickens.
I don't see how that constitutes a reasonable model. At some point, you have to blame the voters themselves.
[1] And I'm going to assume you know here that I mean "bad idea" in the sense of "the purported idea that goes contrary to most voters but gets propped up by money" so as to save me the talk about "there are only bad ideas for particular voters".
Exactly. Speech is definitely speech, and a billionaire can't really shout any louder than anyone else. But with money, their voice can be thousands of times louder. So is money speech?
Democrats and Republicans are far more likely to be able to deal successfully with campaign contribution limits than small independents or third parties; both the major parties can make it up on volume, but a smaller voice... not a chance on those terms. Campaign limits is actually one way that the legal system entrenches monied interests in the political system rather than disconnecting them. This is why there is such a convergence in the governing outcomes of the two major political parties in the U.S.
The larger issue with money in politics isn't that people can spend money on speech: it's that often times that the access money buys is worth the price. Too much control by a government and there will be those that want to have their voices heard and can afford to do so.
Edit: Honest question. Financing campaigns is a difficult and complicated question.
I don't think political spending should be considered an exercise of 1st amendment rights, but this argument doesn't make any sense.
One super-rich person requires another equally-as-rich person or enough poorer people to band together against said super-rich person. Said super-rich person also, at least in the case of the Koch Brothers, also has a vested interest in the topic at hand, whereas the equally-as-rich person or even the poorer people might not be as interested.
Technically I think the news should still have fair-play laws where they were required to give equal time to someone with an opposing view everytime they did an op-ed. I think the news should be more open and accessible--I think when it comes to president ads shouldn't even be allowed, it should ALL be based on debates and nothing else. Because politics shouldn't be manipulated by people with more money than another person..--but that's in an ideal world.
And if you go one level below the presidential race you can easily buy seats in the house / senate with huge contributions because people do not care that much as they do now.
Overall this is not a problem in the USA alone if you have the media/papers on your side, who are usually owned by a small amount of people/families, the chance of winning an elections grows exponential.
Hopefully we see a change with this election as people realize they are getting gamed and start to research online. That`s one of the reasons Sanders will have a very good chance of winning because you can lookup 20+ year old videos and he is consistent.
A number of people who have put their money where your mouth is on that claim have lost quite a lot of money without ending up with the house / senate seat that is supposedly easy to buy.
Right now we live in a world where candidates raise oodles of cash. Why? Mostly to pay for marketing and media pushes. Money gets you TV ads, radio spots, etc.
Let's say we wave our magic Citizens United wand and heavily restrict campaign financing in some way. Restrict how much they can raise. Restrict how much they can spend. Restrict where they can get money. Doesn't matter, just imagine that the end result is that candidates raise a few million instead of a few billion.
What happens now? You hit the nail ont he head right there
> Overall this is not a problem in the USA alone if you have the media/papers on your side the chance of winning an elections grows exponential.
The media is biased. It's biased because it's ultimately run by humans and humans aren't robots. Media owners have politicians they favour. Media employees have political leanings.
Right now, in a world with essentially unlimited campaign spending, this media bias largely doesn't matter, because they are more than happy to take any politician's money in exchange for ad space
This changes in a world where politicians can't spend enough money to buy ad space. In this world, who gets the TV spots? The people with connections. The candidates leverage personal friendships and ideological biases to get "heavily discounted" airtime while the less well connected, or less institutionally popular candidates get nothing.
We all look at campaign financing and see the bad parts, but consider the alternative. In this world, Sanders can still run TV spots because he can crowdsource money from grassroots sources and pay what ads cost. In a world with that door closed to him, all he can do is fall back on connections and hope for the best. And for someone for whom being an outsider is so core to his branding, I wouldn't count on those connections to amount to much
You cant kill the bias but its possible to make it fairer on this side.
So this works better during a general election rather than in primaries. I mean would we give all original 12 Republican candidates the same time allotment as the three Dem candidates, what if an IND had only one candidate?
I think you have that backwards; in any case, as you have phrased this it is impossible, as Super PACs are a subset of PACs, so every candidate supported by a SuperPAC is also supported by a PAC.
Bizzy's Headline makes it sound like there is both a battle (a head to head competition) and it is one taking place in a cyber context. However, it is neither. It is candidates emailing their donors/supporters for more money and can be fairly decoupled from one another.
The Point (A.K.A. The Body)
The body is actually some cherry picked lines from emails that are not included in the post at all. There is no imagery or context so it is difficult to draw conclusions, they draw these conclusions:
> Hillary’s latent message is that of a campaign in need of resuscitation.
> Hillary’s subject lines hint at impending doom for her campaign
> Bernie’s subject lines send a message of successful impact and building a future together
Conclusion
Without including the emails, the context of the emails, and the imagery in the emails, and giving limited insight about the recipients, it is pretty difficult to appraise a marketing campaign. This is a super biased appraisal in favor of Bernie sanders. That's fine, he seems like a good guy. It does point out imperative language and future tense present a stronger and more compelling subject line, but other than that this is not how I would have presented the arguments and information and it is not the most useful to the reader. Context is very important and I would like to see screencaps of the actual emails, and get a sense for the target audience. They did a good job of explaining when the emails were sent (macro) but more granularly breaking down the context on the per email basis would also have been helpful(micro) especially by presenting the actual email.
Extras:
Bizzy.io didn't give any credit to Hillaries team for running their own mail server or the overall transparency they have provided about Mrs. Clintons emails. We don't know what Sanders is using, but the world has been well informed about the clinton Email campaign.
not making a joke like this was a missed opportunity.
Also, it's "hear, hear", though I can see how your form could be appropriate for text instead of speech. Etymology: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6690/hear-hear-or...
That statement seems a bit misguided to me. It's not that they "don't agree on what motivates Americans", it's that they recognize the differences (political and otherwise) between their candidates and play to those strengths. The author then goes on to sort of imply that the Clinton campaign is either weak or deceptive in playing some sort of defeatist card, but you could just as easily say that the campaign is about "pluckiness" because Hilary assumes she will be the nominee and is in it for the long haul.
After 2008 im surprised she still goes on the "me too" route and has no visible agenda except for "if you vote for me i will win the 1st female president award"
Almost _never_ a valid reason to use this phrase. Using it incorrectly signals (a) you're reaching (b) not so cunning a linguist after all.
HA. It's been patched to "raises the question". Good edit!
Slightly more detailed version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10659342
"Begs the question" may be hopeless at this point, but I hold out an unreasonable hope that "literally" might survive its struggle.
1 : in a literal sense or manner : actually <took the remark literally> <was literally insane>
2 : in effect : virtually <will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice — Norman Cousins>
We don't say that "miles" has a separate meaning of "a few hundred feet" when someone says "I've walked miles through this store looking for you".
The comparable opposite of "heretofore" is "hereafter" (the "tofore" comes from Old English for "before"). And its not a fluff word -- it has clear and specific meaning -- though "previously" is more fashionable now.
The transitive form "begs the question X", where X is som actual question) and intransitive ("begs the question", with no specified question, referring to the petition principii fallacy, from which, by poor translation from Latin, the English idiom is derived) forms are distinct forms; the one doesn't replace the other.
Better, the older, intransitive form can be viewed as having a clear relation to the newer, transitive form where the question "begged" is the one that was at issue and which the claim was offered to resolve, which -- given that the newer, transitive form, follows closer with the definitions of the individual words, especially in modern English -- actually provides a link between the older idiom and the rest of the language. (This can be viewed in reverse: the newer form serves as a generalization of the older form.)
> the older sense deserves the right to at least go down fighting.
Its a pointless fight when the two users are complementary and structurally distinct, as here, rather than opposed.
> but I hold out an unreasonable hope that "literally" might survive its struggle.
Complaining about the figurative use of "literally" as a figurative intensifier (where it means "almost as if literally") is pointless. Complaining about the various dictionaries that misreport this use and assert incorrectly that it is used to mean "figuratively", instead of being used figuratively itself may be more pointful (but, by this point, perhaps still somewhat quixotic.)
Bernie comes across like a "general" prepping for a battle. Words like "revolution and "campaign" are essentially "battle speak"
Political campaigns are always about creating a perception that the candidate believes will get them the most votes. The tools for creating that perception are speeches, direct email, and advertising. Sometimes they take direct action but that seems rare.
But as to the issue that the Pravda joke speaks to, any set of facts can be made to imply any desired perception with the right setup.