Sundance admires the skilled professionalism of the democrat party organization.
The key takeaways from the Super Tuesday results so far… Joe Biden won significantly, and it looks like those wins were by design. The media are amplifying a strong Biden narrative on behalf of the professional political class within the DNC Club.
(1) If you accept the Club objective to keep the progressive Sanders vote split, and then assemble the non-Sanders vote – all proportional states, the Club was very successful.
(2) As a result of coalescing within the moderate lane, the withdrawal of Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg helped Joe Biden achieve wins in states he never even campaigned in.
(3) If you align Elizabeth Warren votes with Bernie Sanders (progressives) and Michael Bloomberg votes with Joe Biden (Club “moderatesâ€)… Elizabeth Warren staying in the race cost Bernie Sanders wins in Minnesota, Maine and Massachusetts.
(4) Extending the math, the delegate impact from Warren staying in the race was a net negative to Bernie Sanders and a net positive to Joe Biden. Without Warren Bernie would have had larger delegate wins in Utah, Colorado and California.
(5) Joe Biden winning Texas was arguably the biggest surprise.
(6) Without Warren in the race Bernie would have won seven states: Minnesota, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Colorado, Utah and California. Biden would have also won seven states: Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Texas.
(7) If you accept the Club goal was to diminish Bernie Sanders, the plan for Klobuchar and Buttigieg to exit the race and Warren remaining in the race did exactly what was intended.”
Long, long ago, a friend from Yale tried running for the Connecticut Legislature from a suburban New Haven district.
I went out to a polling place, took a position the required legal distance away, and began handing out flyers outlining my friend’s positions. Some democrat poll-watchers came over and began denouncing my friend’s candidacy which started a debate between us. I’m a decent talker and I scored some effective points. So I was chuckling to myself at how well everything was going.
Well, in just a few minutes, a couple of cars pulled up and unloaded some new democrats. A well-dressed middle-aged man strode over and took up a position directly in front of me. There was no more debate. He just greeted every voter as he or she arrived by name, shook hands or hugged them, asked how this or that family member was, and thanked them for their vote for Good Old Irv Stolberg.
In the other direction, there was another similar democrat crew doing exactly the same thing.
I was greatly outnumbered within minutes, and by sharp cookies with strong ties to most of the local voting population. I was from Pennsylvania. I knew none of these New Haven voters personally. I was so out-matched it wasn’t even funny. And my friend got slaughtered.
They are doing it for the money and their livings depend on it. They are not theorists or philosophers. They are pros, and they’re not fooling around.
Schill McGuffin
Just as some calls were clearly made to encourage Buttigieg and Klobuchar to withdraw just prior to Super Tuesday, I suspect some calls were made to Warren to keep her in. A bigger question to me would be how serious her candidacy ever really was, and how much it might have been just a mechanism for making the establishment stopping Sanders a little less obvious than it was in 2016.
The more serious question is how powerful the Democrats’ obviously superior ground game will prove to be this year, without Hillary screwing it up. They may yet have trouble motivating the Bernie Bros to turn out for Biden in November, but they have a lot of organizational cards in their favor. They may even be buying off mid-level Bernie supporters as we speak.
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