Posted on 02/21/2020 6:23:01 AM PST by Kaslin
The 2020 presidential race has got the Democratic Party, the oldest political party in the world, twisted in knots. Its basic character and enduring values -- its political DNA -- which have enabled it to rebound from multiple political disasters, may be producing another disaster this year.
Consider the Democrats' concept of fairness in representation. The party's delegate allocation rules, not just this cycle but going back years, favor proportionate representation.
This comes naturally to a party that has always been a coalition of out-groups, of segments of America's always-diverse population that can form a majority when they stick together.
This can be carried to extremes. From its second national convention in 1836 up through 1932, the Democratic Party required its presidential nominees to win a two-thirds supermajority of delegates. That gave each of its various subgroups -- segregationist Southerners, big-city Catholic immigrants -- an effective veto over the choice of nominee.
Republicans, a party always centered on a core constituency of people thought of as typical Americans but who are not by themselves a majority, have a different concept of fairness: winner take all. They've always given near-unanimous support for a Republican president, even a Republican as initially unconventional as Donald Trump.
Four years ago, winner-take-all delegate allocation enabled the party interloper Trump to go from amassing less-than-50% primary victories to a nearly insuperable delegate lead, even before he got his first 50%-plus win in New York on April 19.
That will be harder for Democratic Party interloper Bernie Sanders. National polling shows him leading with 28% of the vote, but with four other candidates -- Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg -- not too far behind with 10% to 18%. Others -- Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar -- reach that level in polling in soon-to-vote Nevada and South Carolina. Proportionate representation could give each a bunch of delegates.
But there's a catch. Democratic rules tend to require candidates to get 15% to get any delegates at all. That makes sense when there are just two or three serious candidates. But when there are five or six, a poll leader like Sanders might be the only candidate to get 15% and win delegates. Possible result: a Sanders leading in delegates but far below 50%.
It's no secret that Democratic Party leaders and their confreres at MSNBC and CNN consider Sanders a disastrous nominee and are searching for someone else. Unfortunately, at that point they come up against the Democrats' traditional professions of abhorring money in politics.
Republicans were never embarrassed by their party's fundraising advantages in the early and mid-20th century. Democrats are embarrassed to the point of denial at their party's fundraising prowess over the past 30 years. They continue to denounce the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which overturned limits on corporate political spending, even though studies have shown it's had zero impact.
Democrats still love to see themselves as representing the little guy against the big corporations. But in this century, their presidential nominees have outraised and outspent their Republican opponents, and they've been running ahead of Republicans in the highest income groups.
Yet as Democratic pols and pundits search for someone to stop Bernie Sanders, whom do they alight on? Not Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, whose support has been visibly waning. Probably not on Pete Buttigieg, who's struggling to win any perceptible support from blacks, or Amy Klobuchar, whose support seems confined to white college grads.
Instead they're looking to Michael Bloomberg, with his $56 billion fortune. Over the past several weeks, he has passed some $400 million in campaign expenditures -- the same amount former President Barack Obama's reelection campaign spent over two years.
Bloomberg wasn't on the ballot in Iowa or New Hampshire and isn't in Nevada or South Carolina. But his heavy spending has made him competitive in big states like California and Florida, where no opponent can come close to matching his ad buys.
Even before he has won a single delegate, his backers are calling on other candidates to drop out so he can take on Sanders one on one. But this isn't going to happen at least until after Super Tuesday (March 3), and maybe not then.
In the meantime, Bloomberg may be roadblocking the paths upward for Buttigieg or Klobuchar (or back upward for Warren or Biden), while revelations of his politically incorrect and, in some cases, repellent past utterances may impede his own rise. Which would leave things open for Sanders, who is beating the other Democrats in Yahoo News/YouGov's one-on-one pairings? Feel the Bern?
It’s the idiot children. Grown up Democrats (other than the most childish ones) can’t stand him and know he’ll lose everything. But the 25 year olds think he’s wonderful.
“...Who could vote for something like this?...”
I can tell ya - Other communists; Useful Idiots FOR communists; disgruntled international Socialists; disgruntled National Socialists; anarchists; lunatic sociopaths...
In other words, your typical modern democrat.
Forget about rules and delegates. If Sanders gets more popular votes in the Democratic primaries and caucuses than the other candidates, even if it is just a plurality, doesn’t that make him the “real” nominee?
For three years now, Democrats have been saying that Hillary Clinton really won the 2016 election since she won a plurality of the popular vote.
The Democrats have been indoctrinating their voters to big government, socialist policies since the Wilson Administration over a hundred years ago. They shouldn’t be shocked that a good many of their voters are supporting a real live Socialist in Comrade Sanders. You reap what you sow!
Bernie Sanders is what you get when you drag an annoying lifetime street protestor with a picket sign off the street and make him run for president on a platform of the three word slogans on his sign
Rush seems to feel that unless the Dems are willing to resort to a convention SCROOOOOOOOO job Bernie has this in the bag.
He’ll lose to Trump. But he’ll inflict a lot of damage by advancing the position of socialism in our society even further.
Sanders is running largely because it is making him rich. He made his wife the one who is in charge of buying campaign ads. Campaign finance laws allow “the buyer” to keep 10%. Last time around his campaign spent $83,000,000 of donations on ads. Bernie's wife got to keep $8,300,000 of this money. That does not include the alleged payoffs and benefits they received from the Clintons and the DNC to keep quiet when they “cheated” him in the primaries. They have Mini Mike to fleece this time around so the Bern should do even better this time around.
Sanders is a Commie Scam Artist.
The ad firm connection indicates it would be more than $8 million, it’s $12 million.
https://vtdigger.org/2016/07/15/sanders-campaign-millions-go-to-mystery-firm/
“He’ll lose to Trump. But he’ll inflict a lot of damage by advancing the position of socialism in our society even further.”
Exactly. This is my fear now with the armies of these idiots grabbing at the coat tails of these Marxists and thinking the walk on water. After the next 4 years of Trump this nation is real trouble. I hope and pray there is a candidate that stop the flow of the mindless Bernie zombies...
You’re both right.
Creating a dream of a Utopia where people don’t have to work for money, but instead have everything provided by the State: that is the goal of the exercise, and young people are falling for it.
“You’re both right.
Creating a dream of a Utopia where people don’t have to work for money, but instead have everything provided by the State: that is the goal of the exercise, and young people are falling for it.”
I think that is largely because young people grow up without experiencing the reality of work now. Those oldies like me who started doing chores at age three and joined the military before turning eighteen because it looked like a good opportunity compared to walking behind a plow or swinging an axe understand that the government produces no food or fiber or anything else so there is no rock candy mountain for Bernie to give away. Sumbody still gonna haf ta do sum work.
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