Wo!!! Buttigieg, Biden and Warren are now ahead of Sanders! How come? nt

[LAS14]

[LonePirate]

1. Shocking! People prefer actual Democrats on a website for Democrats.

[sarcasmo]

2. +1

[question everything]

40. +2

[we can do it]

10. Warren's ideas being promoted by Warren.

[PupCamo]

26. I felt that burn!

[demmiblue]

3. I don't understand the obsession with the blue box. n/t

[LAS14]

7. How does an interest/amusement qualify as an obsession? nt

[USALiberal]

34. Obsession? Seriously? nt

[AlexSFCA]

4. Biden is unlikely to run, IMO

so shouldn’t be counted.

[we can do it]

9. He's formally announcing this week.

[defacto7]

28. Wednesday I think.

[FreeState]

37. That was canceled

https://www.philly.com/news/joe-biden-charlottesville-presidential-campaign-20190422.html

[defacto7]

42. Thanks. n/t

[Kurt V.]

6. he's 4th in a field of 17+

[LAS14]

8. But he reigned with Harris on DU for an awfully long time. nt

[Hassin Bin Sober]

14. He stayed about the same and Harris dropped from 15 or 16%

[defacto7]

29. Harris was 19 at one point.

But I think many of the early changes had to do with an increase in participation and the undecided going down.

[OilemFirchen]

11. Because all of the Undecided are secret Sanders supporters.

They're won't reveal their true preference out of a genuine fear of being taunted by the neo-liberal oligarch corporatist DLC Third Way DINO bullies on the board.

Or so we've been told on many occasions.

[Honeycombe8]

13. I'm not a secret Sanders supporter.

Not even close. I'm not a secret supporter of anyone.

You mean that's what Sanders supporters say?

[OilemFirchen]

16. Yes.

That's the meme of the month from the DU Sanders camp.

[LAS14]

17. That doesn't explain why he's slipped from 2nd to 5th. nt

[OilemFirchen]

18. I meant the REMAINING Undecideds.

They'll all come out at once, when it's safe.

[peggysue2]

33. I'm so glad you cleared that up, OilemFirchen

[betsuni]

48. We neoliberal oligarch corporatist DLC Third Way DINO bullies will mercilessly taunt them

WHILE ENJOYING ESTABLISHMENT CANAPES WITH DAVID BROCK BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.

[emulatorloo]

51. Don't you mean "neon liberal"? The neon colors look so nice on your corporo-apparatus

[ehrnst]

53. SHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

You want to lose us the canapes?

And the paycheck?

[ehrnst]

52. Yes, I've seen that posited several times.

For the "silent majority."

[Honeycombe8]

12. You mean on DU? Or in a poll? nt

[LAS14]

15. In the DU primaries forum. This one. Look at the top of the screen. nt

[vsrazdem]

19. with over 200,000 registered here on DU, how many are in that poll?

[Igel]

20. Polls pointless for now.

1. So many candidates, those who drop out will have their supporters distributed elsewhere.

2. Polls always depend on having a valid sample that matches their model of the electorate on the day they're predicting for. What's a valid sample at this point? All (D) voters? All voters? All likely voters? All those who voted in the last election? All those who say they'll vote? And are they asking about the state primary? The general election?

3. Voters shift over time as they come to recognize more names and know more, both good and bad, about candidates. Early on, it's often a beauty context--who has the prettiest, most aspirational views? It's 10 months before the first primary. Opinions now are less than a dime a dozen, a dime for two dozen on days with a y in them. A lot of voters don't tune in until the month before the general. Even those who are committed to voting now often look at whose left in the field after the primaries, and make a pragmatic decision in the month before the elections.


Often the result is just watching the polls you like and exulting in them--or seeing the polls that upset you, and wracking your adrenals with unnecessary stress-hormone production. The first is ridiculous. One election I kept track of all the posts that said how wonderful a candidate was doing, and a few months before the election he was, with all the "his polling numbers are UP!" posts, predicted to win with no less than 250% of the vote; people didn't notice that "up" often reversed an unstated, invisible "his polling numbers are down".

I personally am less "undecided" and more "indifferent" as early positioning for the primary voters and to catching the reporters' attention gives way to some sort of realization that candidates live in a real world where primary politics may be the art of the promised but in the end politics has to be the art of the possible. I've said before, I tune in rather later; I vote based on what I know and find out a week before the primary; then I tune out again until mid October. Everything else is like watching a 10-month soccer game where the announcers are breathless with suspense, the fans cheer and shout until they pass out from hyperventilation, but in the end the score's 0-1 or 1-0.

[Honeycombe8]

21. Actually, Warren & Sanders are tied at 8%. We can't see the actual count.

I wonder if that means she has more in the actual count.

[LAS14]

22. I'm sure it means she has more. "Tied" people have switched places in the past on their way up and.

...down. They're just not displaying the decimal points.

[Honeycombe8]

23. I see. Thx. nt

[Hortensis]

24. Gee, can't guess.

[Amimnoch]

54. Yep. My feelings exactly as well. -nt.

[applegrove]

25. You mean on the DU?

[LAS14]

27. Yes, look at the top of your screen. nt

[applegrove]

30. It is very healthy to have each candidate rising like the ocean here and then there.

People can try each candidate on and see what really fits. Who really fits most people will be a good fit for the country and they will win the Presidency.

[Kaleva]

31. I recall seeing DU polls where Kucinich led the field

DU is not representative of Democrats in general.

[MineralMan]

56. Bingo!

[TreasonousBastard]

32. Who cares? This is a DU poll of one forum, and we have no idea what the real numbers on DU are...

much less how they relate to the real world.

I have a few that I would never vote for in a primary, and a few that I most definitely could vote for. And a few I'm completely neutral about. It's just too soon to make a decision.

[samnsara]

35. we are a fickle group ;)

[Gothmog]

36. sanders is worried and has resorted to releasing internal polls to attempt to show electability

Link to tweet

?s=20

[TexasTowelie]

41. I've never seen a commissioned internal poll

which the results didn't pronounce that the candidate paying for the poll was either gaining or ahead. This far in advance of the debates or primaries they are essentially meaningless.

[Gothmog]

43. No one takes internal polls seriously

Link to tweet

?s=20

[BlueFlorida]

45. They are panicking

Nothing they do seems to get any traction - whether positive or negative

[Gothmog]

47. Yep

Link to tweet

?s=20

[Celerity]

49. was it an internal poll of the TYT studio and OR HQ??

[BlueFlorida]

46. Maybe it was conducted by

Old Towne Media, LLC for a hefty fee.

[barbtries]

38. because they're better candidates.

Bernie is so 2016

[Amimnoch]

55. LOL! Each and every one a better choice. -nt

[TCJ70]

39. After the last three years here are you really surprised? N/t

[BlueFlorida]

44. Reality eventually sinks in

Then there is karma

[robbedvoter]

57. All the grievances and attacks on everyone are finally paying off

Last time he complained he is not known well enough. Now he's starting to.

[Gothmog]

58. Nate Silver- Sanders Can Win, But He Isn't Polling Like A Favorite

Nate thinks that it is possible for sander to win the nomination but this is not likely. sanders is not going to be the nominee of the party. sanders thinks that getting 30% of the primary vote is sufficient which means taking the fight to the contested convention. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bernie-sanders-can-win-but-he-isnt-polling-like-a-favorite/

Historically, though, candidates who are polling at only about 20 percent nationally despite the near-universal name recognition that Sanders enjoys don’t have a great track record. From our research on the history of past primary polls, I found 15 candidates from past nomination processes who, like Sanders, (i) polled at an average of between 15 percent and 25 percent4 in national polls in the first six months of the year before the Iowa caucuses5 and (ii) who had high or very high name recognition.6.....

Achieving a delegate majority could be hard for Sanders
You could also argue that the three winning candidates from the list — Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 — aren’t good comparisons for Sanders, especially from a “The Party Decides” standpoint where preferences among party insiders and activists are leading indicators of voter preferences. Romney, for instance, had the backing of the GOP party establishment as a potential consensus choice, whereas Sanders largely lacks it from Democrats. Obama was a rising star, rather than someone left over from a previous cycle, and gained a lot of momentum among party elites as the 2008 cycle wore on, even if they also liked Clinton. McCain, who ran against the party establishment in 2000 but was someone the party could live with in 2008, is in some ways the most favorable comparison for Sanders.

In many respects, however, Sanders is more similar to Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, George Wallace in 1972 and 1976 or Ron Paul in 2012, candidates who represented important constituencies within their respective parties but who didn’t have an obvious way to unite the rest of the party behind them or to win a delegate majority.

At times, Sanders’s strategists actually seem to be leaning into the strategy of being a factional candidate. The Sanders campaign may have all kinds of reasons to feel aggrieved by how the party establishment has treated it, especially when it reads articles like the one in The New York Times that suggest the establishment is out to get it again! Nonetheless, the campaign hasn’t sought to mend fences when conflicts have arisen this year. Instead, Sanders aides told The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere that they think they can win the nomination with as little as a 30 percent plurality of delegates. That’s a risky strategy since it would necessarily entail a contested convention, where party insiders would play an outsized role. Nor would Sanders, a 77-year-old white man, reflect the various constituencies of the Democratic Party (and the demographics of the delegates themselves) as well as someone like Harris might.

sanders will not be the nominee if sanders only gets 30% of the primary vote. There are too many real democrats who have long memories and who will not forgive or forget. If this gets to a floor fight, the delegates for the other candidates will not support sanders and the super delegates will get to break any deadlocks after the first ballot.