- The age gap between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters was huge. According to the entrance polls, which wrongly predicted a Clinton victory, Sanders got eighty-six per cent of the Democratic vote in the seventeen-to-twenty-four age group, eighty-one per cent in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine group, and sixty-five per cent in the thirty-to-thirty-nine age group. Clinton, by contrast, was largely reliant on the middle-aged and the elderly. Among forty-something voters, she won by five percentage points. Among the over-fifties, she won by more than twenty per cent.
- When you are so heavily reliant on support from older voters, it is tricky to project yourself as the voice of the future.
That might be so, but young people only decide close races because they don't like to vote.
You can turn this article on its head, and say that although Bernie had a better-than-expected night, he is screwed in the long game. If he is relying on such a huge youth margin to win the nomination, he is going to feel the diminishing returns of young enthusiasm, especially after Hillary carries some more diverse states. Obama had the young vote, but it was the minority vote that won him the nomination.
I'm a fan of Bernie, but I don't think he stands much of a chance. Young voters love him. Old progressives love him. But the rest of the Dems are going to feel just fine voting the brand, and nominating the first woman as a Dem candidate for POTUS.
Mmm... I'm not entirely sure that anything can be said definitively one way or another. Those youth margins are huge and they extend out to 40.
Frankly, I'm happy to see healthy and spirited debate on the left and don't really care where it goes from here. A friend of mine who used to be a congressional aide posted a long, impassioned plea for Martin O'Malley yesterday... which to me shows that it could go either way. I'm far more excited by the fact that Trump only beat Rubio by like 2000 votes, as Rubio is just about the only plausible candidate the Republicans have right now and up until Iowa he'd been completely written off.
Clinton may end up pulling Sanders right. Sanders will definitely pull Clinton left. That, to me, isn't an existential struggle. On the Republican side, however, it's a pitched battle between demagogues and sanity and sanity just started to show up. Considering the republicans have and are projected to continue to have congressional control, taking the mandate from the batshit insane is the number one hope I have for this silly season.
- On the Republican side, however, it's a pitched battle between demagogues and sanity and sanity just started to show up.
Dude, don't swallow the poison. If Rubio, whom a large contingent of the FL GOP establishment tried to keep out of the Senate because he's an extremist, is sanity showing up, then we're all fucked.
The media, for whatever reason (cough...GOP talking points...cough), have decided that Rubio is no longer an economic terrorist, even though he has been branded as such from as far back as you can research until last fall. Let's remember that his tax "plan" is projected to cost the treasury about a trillion dollars through the first few years, and his only response when questioned about it is, "No it won't." NYT has dubbed it the Puppies-and-Rainbows Plan, because it gives everyone a tax cut (puppy) while also promising staggeringly high growth (rainbow). He used to get challenged on this regularly back when the GOP mouthpiece was still Jeb!'s proxy. Now that they've dropped Jeb! from their radar, they get to tell the media that their formerly hated, bastard child is Their Guy.
Rubio is charming. That's the full extent of what separates him from Cruz. Their policy positions are remarkably similar, and they're both evangelical regressives. This guy isn't anyone's sane choice. The fact he's been rebranded that way in the last few months speaks only to how good the GOP media machine is, because even NPR refers to him as "establishment" at this point.
- According to National Journal, during this period Rubio did not entirely adhere to doctrinaire conservative principles, and some colleagues described him as a centrist "who sought out Democrats and groups that don’t typically align with the GOP".He co-sponsored legislation that would have let farm workers sue growers in state court if they were shortchanged on pay, and co-sponsored a bill for giving in-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, he voiced suspicion about expanding police detention powers, and helped defeat a GOP bill that would have required colleges to increase reporting to the state about foreign students.
I'm not expecting to vote for Rubio. However, I think there's a hell of a difference between Cruz and Rubio: Cruz is a true believer while Rubio is a dyed-in-the-wool opportunist. I think he became a Tea Party conservative when the winds of change were blowing that way, and I think he dropped the Tea Party rhetoric the minute it wasn't getting him anywhere. Marco Rubio is basically a young Bill Richardson - a political operative who will ride whatever politics will take him the furthest because it's the politics that makes the lobbying and board of directors seats possible.
I think his tax plan is shaky and useless and indefensible because he never intends to use it. It was written purely as pandering. Your article starts out with
- Republicans like tax cuts, but for the last couple of years the focus of a lively debate among Republican policy wonks has been on how to cut taxes.
So fuck the policy wonks and promise bread and circuses to the proles because you can't get shit done without being in office. Then once you're there, distract them with something about gay marriage or abortion because that's what you always do. Barring that, send troops somewhere nobody can find on a map. Pretty much been the game plan since... well, Reagan at least.
That's why I still say Rubio is the closest thing they have to a rational politician - he's an archetypal opportunist who would have run as a democrat if there had been a dire shortage of idealistic young hispanic democrats. But there aren't, and there never were, and there never will be, so he ran as a Republican.
I've got a buddy. He just got his JD. For the past eight years he's been in charge of LA's food welfare program. He's a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. However, he's from a prominent family in San Diego and he looks like a Republican. I've almost talked him into running as an (R) for the simple reason that there's like nobody on that side of the aisle his age. It's all part of the game - I mean yeah, promise to cut taxes and talk about the importance of family and panderbear all throughout the OC but once you're in office, do a term or two, flame out and go work for some big stupid law firm at a half million a year.
It's just a game, and Rubio plays it well. Cruz is playing a whole other game and he's playing it for keeps.
- Rubio is a dyed-in-the-wool opportunist.
Gotta hand it to you there. TIL that Rubio attends Baptist church on Saturday and Catholic mass on Sunday, just to hedge his bets. That's rich, even for a seasoned opportunist.
The only two not-insane candidates they had were John Kasich, who isn't foaming at the mouth and so doesn't excite the base, and Carly Fiorna, who is so invisible the only things I hear about her are former HP employees shuddering at the thought of her being President. I think backing Rubio should be read as "we've given up on having a grownup and are now backing the crazy who might at least take our advice."
Why? I kept reading and never saw her name mentioned once in the Wikipedia article you cited.
The short is that there were multiple leaks that were coming from the board of directors (allegedly). Fiorina started a spy program that went way beyond what a company typically would do, including personal data. She gets forced out and her replacements saw the 'spy' program and said "wow neat!" and ended up in front of Congress.
- The spy techniques that investigators used included pretexting, the use of social security numbers to obtain private records, physical surveillance and the deployment of an e-mail tracer in an email from a fictitious person with a bogus news tip. HP employees were directly involved in some of the methods, according to Holton.
I can't help but feel a strong sense of deja vu when I compare what people say about Sanders to what people said about Obama in 2008. That's not to say that Sanders will start a wave like Obama did but I sincerely believe it's way too early to write him off. Sanders could easily project a much better image to minority voters than Clinton, given his track record with the Civil Rights movement. He was arrested at a protest against segregated schools, he was present at MLK's "I have dream" speech. That could easily be spun into the image of a pro-minority President. I also think you can't discount the endorsement he is starting to receive from people like Run The Jewels' Killer Mike.
You might be right there. If Bernie can connect with minority voters, then he can really give Clinton some trouble. I just don't think that he can win with the youth vote. The polling is much thinner in Nevada and South Carolina, so it remains to be seen if the narrative that Clinton will fair much better in those states is correct.
Clinton's email issue could help Bernie too if it doesn't go away.
As an aside, IMO the GOP's best chance at the Oval Office is Rubio vs. Sanders. That would be an interesting election.