Ralph Nader Supporters Warn Third-Party Voters: Don’T Make The Same Mistake

[beourbud]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ralph-nader-voters_us_57f55aa4e4b0b7aafe0ba7f1?section=&

 

Chris Savage had had enough of Bill Clinton and his shenanigans by the time the 2000 election rolled around, and he wasn’t thrilled about putting his vice president, Al Gore, back in the White House for another four years. But as a Democrat, there was no way the 36-year-old Michigan resident was going to vote for George W. Bush either.

 

Then, he found Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

 

“He was pretty convincing in terms of the things he was advocating for. And he did have some very progressive positions and ideas, so those appealed to me,” Savage recounted.

 

He soon put a Nader sign in his yard, became politically active and was all in to send a message to the establishment.

 

But this cycle, Savage isn’t even considering voting third party. He’s now an outspoken Hillary Clinton supporter and literally works for the establishment as Democratic Party chair of Washtenaw County in Michigan.

 

And he wants to make sure that disaffected voters know exactly what they’re doing in this election before they go pull the lever for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein of the Green Party or Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party.

 

“I was somewhat uninformed and felt like there wasn’t that big a difference between Gore and Bush, believe it or not,” he said. “Obviously, in retrospect, it was a moronic way to look at things.”

 

The Huffington Post spoke with Nader voters who have since figured out that the best way to fix the two-party system is to join it. They’ve worked in Democratic politics for years ― some as penance for what they did in 2000 ― and they worry that Stein voters are going to be making the same mistake they did with Nader.

 

“If you think there’s no difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, then you’re not paying attention,” said Joe Rospars, who was the chief digital strategist for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and voted for Nader in Virginia when he was 19. “I don’t think that I’m just an old person now saying what an old person would have said to me 16 years ago. ... Voting for Jill Stein in a battleground state or Gary Johnson for any reason is just not a useful way to operate the electoral system.”

 

 

JOHN KLICKER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ralph Nader supporters protested outside Al Gore’s headquarters in Portland, Oregon on Oct. 3, 2000, upset that their candidate was shut out of the upcoming presidential debate.

Nader took 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000, and there’s been a national argument ever since over whether he cost Gore the election. He received nearly 100,000 votes in Florida, a state in which Bush beat Gore by only 537 votes.

 

People who went for Nader in 2000 have done their own soul-searching over the years, with plenty of accusations from friends that they led to things like the Iraq War.

 

“Those of us who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, most of us, if we had to do it over again, would not do it,” said Kurt Ehrenberg, 58, who served as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) New Hampshire political director but now solidly backs Clinton. “You feel, in some small way, responsible for all this stuff that George W. Bush was able to do because he was elected president ― even though it was the closest race in my lifetime and there’s still some question as to whether, if all the votes had been counted, Bush would’ve won.”

 

I was somewhat uninformed and felt like there wasn’t that big a difference between Gore and Bush, believe it or not. Obviously, in retrospect, it was a moronic way to look at things.

Jesse Berney was 25 when he voted for Nader and has since worked at the Democratic National Committee and for Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

 

When asked if he regretted his vote, he replied, “Of course! John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the Iraq war, the huge irresponsible tax breaks, the pushing of abstinence-only education. The list goes on and on.”

 

Berney eventually ended up creating a list that he called Bush’s “Scorecard of Evil,” summing up all the president’s objectionable actions.

 

Many of Stein’s supporters were one-time Sanders supporters. But even though the senator himself is now out there campaigning for Clinton, not all of them are on board. Sanders’ supporters booed the senator himself at the Democratic National Convention in July when he said it was time to vote for Clinton.

 

“It’s frustrating,” Ehrenberg said. “I try to talk to these folks about my vote for Ralph Nader and how much I regret that.”

 

Ehrenberg and others worry that many of the younger Stein supporters have never really known a president besides Obama ― and they don’t realize how much worse it could be under a Republican president.

 

“Part of what is going on with these voters is they’re mostly younger people who had very little experience with electoral politics before the Bernie campaign,” he said. “And their main opponent all through the primaries is Hillary Clinton. So they really continue to view Hillary Clinton as sort of the enemy when clearly, to me, and clearly if you listen to Bernie Sanders, she’s not the enemy.”

 

“A lot of them have the luxury of having Obama for eight years,” added Irene Lin, who was 24 and living in California when she voted for Nader and has since worked on Democratic campaigns. “I think they take for granted how bad it was before. Especially when I worked on the Hill in 2005, and it was Bush and then Republicans had control of the Senate and the House and it was just miserable.”

 

Some of these Nader-voters-turned-Democratic-operatives also said they underestimated just how bad Bush would be. They were, after all, primarily focused on the Clinton administration and devoting energy to criticizing the Democratic Party.

 

“I think at the time, a lot of people were under the illusion he wasn’t as bad as he turned out to be,” Rospars said. “Not that I would have ever voted for him, but ...you wouldn’t have imagined that even from just a policy perspective, that it was as bad as it wound up being based on the campaign and the broader media environment during the election.”

 

“But also as a kid, I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” he added.

 

 

MICHAEL SMITH/GETTY IMAGES

Ralph Nader attracted a hardcore group of liberal supporters who didn’t like Al Gore.

Some Nader supporters have officially joined the Democratic Party as elected leaders. Kyrsten Sinema, for example, worked on Nader’s presidential campaign in 2000 and is now a Democratic member of the House from Arizona.

 

James Wolf was in college at the University of Cincinnati when he backed Nader, unhappy with NAFTA and some of Clinton’s welfare-to-work policies.

 

“Nader really spoke to me at the time,” he said.

 

Since his college days, he’s joined the city council in Mount Healthy, Ohio, and now serves as the Democratic mayor there. He still considers himself more liberal than both Clinton and Obama, but he said his experience has helped him better understand why it’s useful to support the top of the ticket even if the candidate isn’t perfect.

 

“The work that [major party presidential candidates] do when they run for office helps build the voter file and helps build the party so that when I run for election, it helps people like me get elected,” he said. “And when people like me get elected at the lower level, we help grow the party from the grassroots and push it into the direction I would like to see. ... So now I really believe in changing things through the party.”

 

“To be honest, these third-party candidates are kind of selfish,” Wolf added in a statement that probably would have shocked his college self. “Their campaigns are selfish. Because when you support Jill Stein, the money goes toward Jill Stein, and there’s no Green Party candidate in Mount Healthy, for example. ... So you’re not building any long-term momentum or movement. You’re just helping one person.”

 

Right now, many of these Nader voters say they’re not too worried about disaffected Democrats going third party and tipping the election to Trump. But then again, most of them thought that Gore would easily win in 2000 as well. And there are indications that third-party votes will hurt Clinton more than Trump. That’s why they’re still a bit concerned.

 

“If there are progressive or otherwise just public service-oriented people who are somehow figuring out a way to rationalize voting for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson,” Rospars said, “they should seek out me and the other people who you’re talking to for this piece for a conversation because I really can’t imagine how one could come to that conclusion.”

[+Malamute]

It is only Gore's fault he lost,.... no one elses.

[beourbud]

Is it Bernies fault he lost?

[+Malamute]

Yes.

 

If he had garnered more support amongst blacks, he would have won.  He had a lot of time to make that better and he didn't.

[beourbud]

Clinton Machine

 

Vote Hillary 2016

Edited October 6, 2016 by beourbud

[+Malamute]

http://fusion.net/story/323539/how-bernie-sanders-lost-black-voters/

 

 

Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic primary in large part because he failed to win the hearts of black progressives.

 

 

It didn’t have to be that way. But his campaign never explained how black people fit into his vision of a radically changed America. And, according to a series of Fusion interviews with former staff members, campaign leadership didn’t really see the point in trying.

 

Those former staffers described a campaign that failed to give its black outreach teams the resources they needed, that never figured out how to connect to black audiences, and that marginalized black media.

 

In the process, the campaign missed a chance to capitalize on a revolutionary message that otherwise might have appealed to black voters frustrated with the current political order.

Instead, Sanders was clobbered by Hillary Clinton among black voters in state after state after state, including some where Sanders either won white voters or lost them narrowly. The gap made it all but impossible for him to win the nomination.

 

Sanders himself was “sincere to the core,” said Roy Tatem, the campaign’s former deputy director for African-American outreach. But he said he felt that neither campaign manager Jeff Weaver nor other high-ranking figures thought Sanders could overcome Hillary Clinton’s appeal to black voters.

 

“I think they felt that the relationship with Hillary was so strong that they didn’t have confidence in doing much of anything to change it,” Tatem said. “Some people felt he had a better chance at winning the Latino vote and the millennial vote than the black vote.”

 

 

Anyone who knows black voters—and Sanders clearly didn’t—knows that Clinton did not have them on lock. Black people started with a better relationship with her, but familiarity doesn’t equal votes.

 

Demoralized by police killings, left even further behind by economic inequality, held back for generations by structural racism, black people were primed for a political revolution.

 

Sanders was ready to lead one. From the time he announced his campaign, in April 2015, his crusade against economic inequality galvanized a sleeping sector of the populace that felt left out of the political process.

 

But Sanders seldom trained that same impassioned rhetoric on the problems that so many black voters wanted addressed: police brutality, white supremacy, and the ways in which economic inequality is inextricable from race.

 

It may have been white privilege, or simple cultural ignorance of black people and our plights. The Vermont senator, who built a movement on lofty promises like universal health care and free college, dismissed reparations for black people as “very divisive.”

 

He appeared not to realize that you can’t simply deliver the same speech on economic inequality to a room full of black people in Atlanta that you would to a room full of white people in Iowa.

 

“For African-Americans, he never connected the dots from a practical perspective,” Tara Dowdell, a political strategist who has worked local, state, and federal campaigns, told me. “How would this measurably improve your life? And his colorblind approach to economics ignores the fact that this is the United States of America, where policy and economics and race are tied.”

 

Put another way, it takes more than marching with MLK to win black votes.

 

It takes outreach. But several former members of Sanders’ black outreach team told me the campaign didn’t believe pulling black voters from Clinton was a real possibility; the white vote, the staffers said, was the campaign’s priority.

 

Tatem told me that his department was underfunded, making it almost impossible to do the necessary work in the Southern states that voted on Super Tuesday, March 1.

 

“We had to go through so many hoops to get resources, it felt like we had to fill out credit card applications every time we asked for something,” Tatem told me on the phone. “That’s how it felt.”

 

Tatem said that he and Marcus Ferrell, the former African-American outreach director for the campaign, had access to Weaver. But he said it felt as though neither Weaver nor other high-ranking figures in the campaign ever believed Sanders had a shot at winning black voters from Clinton.

 

Ferrell declined to discuss his time with the Sanders campaign when I reached him for comment. Weaver did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

 

It’s impossible to say how many black voters Sanders might have swung to his side. But the stakes were clear, said Paul Maslin, a political consultant who has advised six presidential candidates.

 

“If you’re running for a Democratic nomination and you cannot ultimately win substantial numbers of blacks, browns and older, traditional Democrats over 50 years old—by and large who were Clinton voters, black, white or Latino—it’s very tough to win a nomination.”

 

Danny Glover echoed Tatem’s complaints. When he joined the campaign in the spring of 2015 as its director for outreach to historically black colleges and universities, he believed he could help pull millions of young black people to the senator’s cause.

 

As a black progressive, Glover was drawn to Sanders’ message of free public college, dismantling Wall Street, and rectifying economic inequality. Surely, Glover believed, he could get black students to feel the same enthusiasm for Sanders as the young white folks who screamed the senator’s name in packed arenas around the country.

 

But it didn’t take long for him to feel that the campaign had no real interest in converting young black progressives into a powerful voting bloc that could have made Sanders truly competitive against Clinton.

 

Glover said he was never given a staff to help him match those crowds of white 20-somethings.

 

“It was viewed as something that we just had to do,” Glover told me over the phone. “We threw some resources to it to say we did it, but they didn’t put as many people behind it as they should have.”

 

Glover said that stops were cut from Sanders’ tour of HBCUs after the South Carolina primary, in late February. He said he was told by superiors that there wasn’t enough money to continue them. The Sanders campaign raised $44 million in March, its best performance to date.

 

Glover also said that campaign money for the HBCU tour always came at the last minute, leaving him scrambling to pay vendors.

 

 

Some black members of Sanders’ staff whom I met covering the campaign told me they felt that “the white boys,” as they put it, including Weaver, did not appreciate how much Sanders needed the black vote to win the nomination.

 

A visit to Morehouse College in Atlanta, in February, illustrated the campaign’s tendency to fumble when it did try to reach black voters. And the problem was not limited to white members of the campaign staff.

 

Cathy Tyler, executive director for strategic communications at Morehouse College, told me that a black representative of the Sanders campaign was rude to her staff during the final hours of the rally that took place on campus. (The Sanders campaign also did not respond to a request to address this allegation.)

 

Tyler said the staffer’s behavior was so bad that she called campaign headquarters in Burlington to complain.

 

“I’ve done rallies with Vice President Joe Biden a few months before, so I know how to work with Secret Service and I know how to work with advance teams,” she said. “(Bernie’s) team? They were new to the game, I guess.”

 

A series of last-minute changes to the program she and Glover had worked on for more than two months “caused some chaos.” Tyler said she wanted HBCU students to get ticketed first to enter the event. The campaign refused, she said, and the audience for the rally was mostly white.

 

“It wasn’t like you were at an HBCU,” Tyler said of the mostly white audience at the rally. “Once you got in that room, it could have been anyplace.”

 

Moreover, Glover said, the campaign missed an opportunity to work with the black-owned business that was set to do the staging for the rally but, at the campaign’s last-minute request, was switched out.

 

Glover told me, “This was an opportunity at one of the most prestigious African-American colleges and universities in the country to really build a relationship with their black business community. Who knows what kinds of stories of Bernie Sanders they could have gone out and told, but we chopped it off before it had a chance to materialize. We left a bad taste in their mouths.”

 

One former Sanders staffer, who spoke to Fusion only on condition of anonymity, told me that the outreach team’s efforts to make inroads with black media were consistently blocked by the campaign. This included denying requests for interviews and access to the campaign, the staffer said.

 

The staffer said that the campaign feared that engaging black media might expose Sanders’ weakness in articulating how his economics-heavy platform would benefit black voters.

 

The staffer said that the campaign even tried to block me from covering a visit by Sanders to Atlanta for Fusion because I had reported critically on the senator in the past.

 

Symone Sanders, the campaign’s former national press secretary, who is black, categorically denied the allegation during a phone interview, and she defended the campaign’s commitment to reaching out to black voters.

 

“I stand behind the work that the campaign did,” she said. “I’m proud of it. Again, there’s always room for improvement. There are always things that people look back and said we could have done better.”

 

“People that weren’t on the inside, looking on the outside, everyone can always point fingers,” she went on, “but as a person who was there on the ground, I can tell you that the campaign had a staunch commitment to reaching out to communities of color.”

 

That same former staffer told me that the Sanders campaign had no real interest in engaging black voters or in reporters who wanted to engage the campaign on issues important to them, such as challenging the union protections that police have when they are accused of killing black people.

 

“It was always a dog-and-pony show when it came to black outreach,” the former staffer said.

 

 

On Super Tuesday, powered by enormous support among black voters, Clinton swept Sanders in five Southeastern states and took a commanding lead in delegates that she never relinquished.

 

In Virginia, exit polls showed that Clinton won 84% of the black vote to Sanders’ 16%. In Arkansas, she beat him 91% to 9% among black voters. In Alabama, the margin was 91% to 6%.

 

Black voters cast their ballots for Clinton so overwhelmingly during the primaries, especially in the South, that their preference for her felt like a warning: Ignore us and we will bury you.

 

In Southern states that voted on Super Tuesday, even black voters ages 18 to 29—a slice of the electorate that Sanders’ team believed they had a shot at—voted for Clinton 61% to 36%.

 

And it wasn’t because black people didn’t know him, a lame and intellectually lazy excuse his staffers and surrogates have used for nearly a year. It was, the interviews suggest, because Sanders’ campaign didn’t work hard enough to win their votes.

 

After the Super Tuesday rout, Weaver dismissed his candidate’s poor showing with black voters by calling the former secretary of state a “regional candidate.” He also said, in what could only be described now as pure delusion, that the campaign was broadening its inroads with black voters.

 

“It’s not about margins, it’s about making progress,” Weaver said at the time. “There’s a long campaign to go. We are making substantial progress … At this point, in many ways, what we’re confronting is not by race but by age.”

 

In fact, after Super Tuesday, neither Weaver nor Sanders met with their African-American outreach department to discuss how they could better improve their black outreach efforts, Tatem claims.

 

The campaign eventually decided it would be important to step up its engagement with black women, but those efforts didn’t begin until May, two months later, Tatem added. “That was very late in the campaign when we started doing things like that,” he said.

 

By that point, Clinton had also beaten Sanders in a series of Northeastern primaries. In Pennsylvania, Sanders almost tied Clinton with white voters but was trounced among black voters. In New York, they tied among white voters; Clinton won black voters 75% to 25%.

 

When Sanders made public appeals to black voters, Dowdell said, not only was it late, “It seemed like he did so just because he was pressured into it, which is not a good way to approach anything.”

 

It is not uncommon for former staffers to complain about what a political campaign could have done to win a race. It is especially common for black campaign staffers to complain that their expertise has been undervalued or outright ignored.

 

Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who specializes in black Republican politics, told me that the grievances expressed by Sanders’ black former staffers are similar to those she has heard from black people working on Republican campaigns.

 

She said that Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign for president came to mind: Different party, same complaints.

 

“They don’t have enough money. No one is paying attention to them,” Rigueur said, characterizing the complaints on the Ford campaign. “There are thousands of letters from black constituents who wrote in to say, ‘I will support Gerald Ford if you just pay attention to black issues.’”

 

 

What makes the accounts of the former Sanders staffers particularly troubling is that the senator, according to his liberal and mostly white supporters, was supposed to be the ideal candidate for black people.

 

For one, his supporters argue that black people should want no part of Clinton because of her vigorous support of her husband’s disastrous 1994 crime bill (which Sanders voted for, by the way) and 1996 welfare reform.

 

Sanders supporters also remind us of her assertion that “super-predators” were roaming the streets in the 1990s, comments for which she only expressed some regret this year.

 

The senator, on the other hand, attended the March on Washington. And if you want visual proof, Sanders supporters often tweet the image of him being arrested at the University of Chicago in 1963.

 

When black female activists led a disruption at the Netroots Nation progressive political conference last summer, some white people tweeted in defense of Sanders paternalistically, claiming black people simply didn’t know enough about his civil rights record.

 

The online arrogance become so pronounced that it motivated Roderick Morrow, who runs the comedy podcast “Black Guy Who Tips,” to start the popular hashtag #BernieSoBlack, which mocks Sanders’ supporters’ defense of the senator’s civil rights record.

 

Tia Oso, one of the Netroots Nation activists, told me that she believes Sanders responded effectively to their demands that he speak more on racial injustice. For example, Sanders published a comprehensive criminal justice reform page on his campaign site, and he did a better job of discussing the intersection of racism and economic justice.

 

The problem for Oso was that Sanders failed to articulate what the “political revolution” he so often talked about would mean for black people.

 

“I don’t think what Bernie stands for is out of line with what a lot of black communities and black progressive movements prioritize,” she said. “It’s just that it comes from that dominant white male perspective on what’s really important. An over-emphasis on class struggle, absent racial analysis. And even if we’re talking about class struggle, why is his position on reparations that it’s unrealistic?”

 

 

In January, Sanders traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, for the Brown & Black Presidential Forum, which focuses on issues that matter to minority voters. In an interview backstage, Fusion asked him whether he would support reparations for black people.

 

He said no: “Its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive.”

 

So, we can have free college education, a dismantling of Wall Street, a federal minimum wage of $15 by 2020, 12 weeks of family and medical leave and universal health care, but not even a dialogue about reparations? Even though Sanders himself has supported Holocaust reparations?

 

Tatem, one of the former Sanders staffers, said that the few times he did get to speak with the candidate, he was a fast study whose heart was in the right place.

 

“He was very astute,” he said. “And I believe in his heart of hearts he was a sincere to the core with his approach. I believe that had we had more time, if we were talking in 2015, right now, if we had another year at this, this primary would he completely different.”

 

No matter how sincere Sanders may have been, it didn’t show during critical moments during the primaries.

 

Of course, black voters are not getting Malcolm X in the White House by supporting Clinton. And they know that. But at least they are getting a candidate they have some relationship with, even if she sometimes has taken a dismissive tone toward black people.

 

She supported the 1994 crime bill, which led to a huge increase in black incarceration. But I give her credit for recognizing her errors, and today she delivers speeches that reflect on America’s racial past, and that indirectly indict her own flawed racial 1990s politics.

 

Rembert Browne wrote for New York magazine that Clinton “won Harlem” with a harrowing speech at the National Urban League in February in which she challenged the privilege of her fellow white Americans.

 

Browne was convinced that Clinton was not trying to moo poo her audience:

 

Watching a white woman who could be the president of the United States say things like, “For many white Americans, it’s tempting to believe that bigotry is largely behind us. That would leave us with a lot less work, wouldn’t it?” and “Race still plays a significant role in determining who gets ahead in America and who gets left behind. Now, anyone—anyone asking for your vote has a responsibility to grapple with this reality” is uncharted waters.

 

I agree with that. Clinton’s frankness on race is rare at the presidential level. If you watch video of her speech, she comes across as very sincere, even if she does not directly indict her own past mistakes about race in America.

 

 

Sanders never gave a speech of that magnitude on race.

 

His lack of dexterity with black audiences showed during his botched response to a simple, yet very important, question at a black forum in Minneapolis hosted by Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, on Feb. 12.

 

Felicia Perry, an African-American woman, said during the Q&A: “I know you’re scared to say black. I know you’re scared to say reparations. But it seems like every time we talk about black people and us getting something for the systematic oppression and exploitation of our people, we have to include every other person of color …”

 

Then she asked, “Can you please talk about specifically black people and reparations?”

 

Sanders’ response reminded some people of the language of “All lives matter”: “It’s not just black,” he said in part. “It’s Latino. In some rural areas, it is white.”

 

Sanders was in a staunchly activist, anti-establishment environment full of people who were very much open to a candidate who wasn’t afraid of speaking truth to power. Yet he didn’t seem able, or willing, to speak about race beyond citing statistics on discrimination against black people.

 

This is the Black Lives Matter era, a time in which young black people are leading a movement demanding that the powers that be—Sanders included—address the specific plight of African-Americans.

 

Whether in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, or any other city in which police brutality has taken African-American lives, black young people have sacrificed their jobs, mental health, and freedom to fight a system they feel needs to be overhauled.

 

For a man who claims our economic system needs an overhaul, Sanders has proposed only moderate approaches to combating police brutality by advocating for community policing and body cameras.

 

Many young black activists believe that amounts to nothing more than putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. Why not call for a broad rethinking of American policing?

 

And, yes, reparations is a tricky subject to address in American politics, but it’s certainly not impossible.

 

Not addressing Perry’s question on the subject revealed how limited Sanders’ idealism is when it comes to exploring liberation for black people. He has no problem speaking, ad nauseam, about how America can be more like Denmark. Yet he isn’t bold enough to say black people can get reparations just like Holocaust survivors or Japanese internment victims?

 

On the economy, Sanders’ idealism on fighting Wall Street and advocacy for free public college education and universal health care doesn’t seem to extend to acknowledging that black people need a special kind of economic boost to come as close as possible to the 40 acres and a mule we were promised after emancipation.

 

Those white young people who supported Sanders in huge numbers graduate college with heavy loads of debt, but black students finish with even more of it and fare far worse in the job market.

 

Perry is 36 years old, a year or so out of the so-called millennial age bracket, but her comments reverberated with the anti-establishment vigor that motivates 20-somethings to go for Sanders.

 

The problem was that he never made young black people feel like they had a place in his revolution.

[+Malamute]

Sorry. Long article, But it seems to be articulating what I was saying his whole campaign.

 

 And worth the read.

[+Malamute]

Hillary won the black vote 76% to 23%.

 

If Bernie would have even gone 60/40, he probably would have won.

[beourbud]

Thinking Hillary won back in 2013

 

There's lies

There's darn lies

The there are statistics...Mark Twain, paraphrased

Edited October 6, 2016 by beourbud

[+Malamute]

I am not saying Hillary and her supporters didn't do underhanded dealings(wasserman shultz etc), and that media treated Bernie like he was nonexistant, and illegitimate,... but seriously,... if he had split black voters 50/50,  he would have mopped Hillary up across the board regardless of said nonsense from the DNC.  Bernie and his campaign made a mistake and i was hollering about it myself the whole time.

[t-pain]

mal, whats your statistics on young black voter turnout? because i wonder if its even double digits.

 

bernie had the younger voters, hillary's voters are older.

 

older voters have higher turnout than younger voters.

[+Malamute]

Bernie basically broke even with Hillary on black voters under 30.

 

 

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/huge-split-between-older-younger-blacks-democratic-primary-n580996

 

 

African-Americans have been sharply divided along age lines during the Democratic primary, with black voters under 30 narrowly favoring Sen. Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, while older blacks overwhelmingly backed the former secretary of state.

Clinton has won more than 70 percent of the African-American vote in most of the states with a sizable black population that have held primaries or caucuses. Her advantage among African-Americans has been one of the most important factors in her delegate lead over Sanders.

But an analysis of 25 states that held primaries and where exit polls were conducted by NBC News showed that one of Sanders' challenges is that younger blacks are not voting in large numbers. Sanders, according to the exit polls in these states, received 52 percent of the votes of African-Americans under 30, compared to 47 percent for Clinton.

 

However, blacks under 30 were only 3 percent of the Democratic electorate in these states. In contrast, blacks over 60 were 7 percent of the electorate in these states. Clinton won 89 percent of their votes, Sanders 9 percent. ((The Washington Post completed a similar analysis last week and also found low turnout among young black voters.)

 

Among blacks ages 45-59, Clinton was ahead 85 percent to 14 percent. Among blacks ages 30-44, Clinton won 70 percent, Sanders 29 percent.

 

The turnout gap was stark. About 9 percent of the black voters in these states were under 45, compared to 16 percent over 45.

 

The data in some ways contradicts two of the primary narratives about the campaign: Sanders' weak performances among African-Americans may have been because of their age, which made them more likely to back Clinton, like other older voters, not their race; and Clinton, who has lost the under 30 vote in state-after-state to Sanders, may be particularly unpopular among white millennials, as opposed to that entire generation.

 

This age gap, in terms of turnout, is not surprising. Older people of all races traditionally vote more than younger ones. In the 2012 general election, according to U.S Census data, about 57 percent of U.S. citizens between ages 25 and 44 voted, compared to 68 percent of those between 45 and 64.

 

Among African-Americans, there was a gap as well, although it was smaller: 65 percent of blacks between ages 25 and 44 voted, compared to 72 percent between 45 and 64.

[t-pain]

right, so its not that bernie didnt have the black vote. its that bernie didnt have the old vote.

 

the more you know!

[+Malamute]

Well, he didn't have the young black vote either.

 

He tied basically.

[Wild Bill]

The really interesting thing this year is that Gary Johnson has a good chance of winning his home state, New Mexico. If that happens then the other two may not get enough electoral votes to win and it will go to the House of Representatives.

 

Republicans won't vote for Clinton, Dems won't vote for Trump. Some Republicans won't vote for Trump.

 

Could be fun!