so, i got a little sleep, there.

let me get back to this...

biden is going to have to pick a running mate that will appeal to educated voters (and they liked obama because he was one of them), and he's probably best to do it right now, to stop them from wandering off.

he won't carry the demographics he needs to win by himself.

sanders essentially has the same problem.

what happens if warren drops?

well, what happens in strictly literal, blunt terms is that the key swing demographic that won them the 2018 midterms ends up disenfranchised. they're not going to like any of these options, and they may end up staying home or voting republican.

i can't imagine many of these people voting for joe biden, who they're mostly likely to interpret as a dunce. and, they're afraid of sanders...partly from the propaganda, but nonetheless...

warren was the weakest candidate in the field, but she's also proven the most stubborn, and the system is likely going to reward her bad behaviour.

but, at this point, does it help sanders or biden if she drops? it probably helps trump. i know i just flipflopped, but the options just changed. and, you want her on the ballot to give these swing demographics somebody they can vote for so they can be dragged along, even if she doesn't have an actual chance.

if she drops early, and the voting pool ends up restricted to leftist revolutionaries in the sanders camp and low information voters in the biden camp, if educated voters don't have anybody to support and tune out, it's going to undo the results of the 2018 election.

so, what are the battle lines, here?

- biden is the candidate of uneducated & low information voters, the rank and file which make up a substantive part of the base and include a certain type of union worker and a large percentage of churchgoing southern blacks.
- bloomberg is basically splitting biden's vote in half.
- warren is emerging as the elitist candidate of educated whites (and perhaps of educated non-whites, too) - even if she was actually their third or fourth choice, initially. she's...just....still....there...
- sanders is the candidate of change, even if he's not that radical, and he really isn't. so, he's doing well with young voters, with latin speaking voters, with northern blacks and with what's left of the party's traditional left.

the best thing we can do for tomorrow is try to extrapolate results from these demographics.

and, i think it means that sanders does very well, that bloomberg stops biden from running up the score in the south (sanders may steal some states, even) and that warren does well enough with educated whites (the most important demographic.) that she ends up with enough delegates to piss everybody off.

only sanders and biden have realistic chances of actually winning states.

it's just an error in understanding the demographics.

biden's team doesn't seem to realize how badly it did in the first two states amongst the most important voters, or what that means about how appealing he's going to be to them in the upcoming contests.

they bizarrely seem to think that the opinions of illiterate south carolina voters who were told what to do by their congressman is going to overturn the empirical analysis of educated northerners, who are the key swing demographic. it's delusional. but, it's why this party loses over and over again - it's swallowed some kind of kool-aid about race and can't interpret anything rationally any more.

as badly as sanders has fucked up, everybody else fucked up more, in the end. and, he's going to stumble in and save them from their own stupidity....

i'm going to wait until the morning, but sanders should win a strong majority of delegates tomorrow.

i think they picked the wrong candidate. but, if they're going with biden, the guy that he needs to drop is bloomberg - like steyer, and unlike buttigieg and klobuchar, bloomberg is pulling directly from biden. that's where his support went, and where the split is and what he needs to fix to leapfrog.

i suspect the big winner here is warren, who may end up exceeding expectations and ending tomorrow in third place. frustratingly....

and, sanders?

he should stay in massachusetts; he must have sat on a four-leaf clover or something, because he's pulling a lot of good luck out of his ass, after doing this explicitly all wrong for months.

are they reading this?

it's not just minnesota. we're going into super tuesday with a lot of unknowns, now, but klobuchar was probably sanders' strongest challenger through the three northeastern states and a swath of the midwest.

presuming that buttigieg and klobuchar supporters even realize they've dropped, or haven't already voted, this opens up opportunities for sanders to take the pot in states where biden still probably won't end up viable.

i don't think there's been enough time to convert buttigieg supporters into klobuchar supporters, so these are two different groups of voters. and, we just don't have any polling. we're stuck with our intuition.

but, i'm exceedingly skeptical.

i know i've talked about sanders' position being shaky and predicted he'd get leapfrogged, but it was with the assumption that biden was about to drop out. these statements were really implicitly explicitly about buttigieg, who was the only one of the three that could create a common front where it matters. it really seemed obvious to me that he was the candidate that got out of this...

i might have said something differently a few weeks ago, but, after watching the debates and seeing the numbers come in, i just don't think that there's much of anything that biden can do to convince more educated voters that they should vote for him. he's going to have a brick wall, there. they just won't do it; he's just not remotely appealing to smart people, and that's why they picked these other candidates in the first place.

there's no question that they had to consolidate, but they've picked the wrong demographic groups to consolidate around, and i think it's going to blow up in their faces.

steyer is a different question, as he was pulling voters directly from biden. and, biden has gotten a bump from steyer dropping, no question.

i wonder, though, if these buttigieg and klobuchar voters take a last stand with warren, though.

we might get some tracking polls tomorrow morning and we might have to make bad guesses based on them. but, anybody telling you that they can predict this is full of shit. the changes are too dramatic.

have they passed the prisoner's dilemma? they're trying. but, i might have to give them an E for effort, in the end. they picked the wrong candidate to rally around....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/us/politics/amy-klobuchar-drops-out.html

what, you didn't think the molotov-ribbentrop drop was comical?

meh.

in 2016, cruz and kasich actually made a deal to tell each other's voters to vote for the other one in states they weren't strong in. i don't remember exactly where it was, but they were down to the three of them. kasich could have maybe won some northern state, and cruz could have maybe won some western state. so, the deal was that cruz voters would vote for kasich in the northern state, and kasich voters would vote for cruz in the western state.

this fell apart, partly because the deal didn't really make a lot of sense - i would actually expect most kasich voters to prefer trump over cruz.

but, it was the closest thing i've seen yet to candidates figuring this out, in the context of american politics.

in canada, we actually have vote swapping exchanges, and we have what we call "strategic voting". it's efficacy is questionable, and it sometimes leads to unexpected outcomes (like trudeau's majority in 2015, which was built on strategic voting....the polls all showed minorities) but it's the right approach to solve the problem, at least.

i want to clarify a little bit of a misconception.

when you set up a prisoner's dilemma, you have a choice between competing and cooperating. you fail when you both choose competition over cooperation, and you win when you both choose cooperation over competition.

cooperating, in context, doesn't usually mean just dropping out - there's going to be more to it than that.

with buttigieg and biden, some kind of deal where they split the map up, molotov-ribbentrop style, would have been a better way to cooperate.

as it is, taking buttigieg out doesn't help biden much with the rank and file that make up his base, who are largely low information and uneducated voters, and the types of educated voters that buttigieg did attract are just likely to look elsewhere, as they have biden pretty low on their list. there's no actual co-operation, here.

so, and i know this is somewhat counter-intuitive, but this is actually less like the option of mutual co-operation and more like the option where they both defect, even if it looks otherwise at first glance.

the counter-intuitive twist is that, in the context of this specific two-person subgame, dropping out is actually defecting. co-operation would mean a deal where they split the map up, some kind of strong endorsement or maybe even announcing a shared ticket. as it is, i don't think there's much that buttigieg can do to deliver his voters to biden on such short notice, so dropping out is functionally just releasing them to the other candidates - and that's defection. unless there is cooperation, it doesn't undo the relation of competition, which is what defines the defection, and the players have still failed.

does that make sense?

ok, so i've doubled back several times now, but i'm sure i've cleaned up the three blogs until the end of january, now.

it's time to take that shower before i start focusing on february.

this is perhaps an underlooked factor regarding turnout in massachusetts, as kennedy is likely to generate an older and more conservative crowd, in contrast to the far more liberal ed markey.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/485397-kennedy-holds-6-point-lead-over-markey-in-massachusetts-senate-primary-poll

and, what can joe biden do for me?

diddly fucking squat, that's what.

i had a facebook page a few years ago called "uninspiring kennedy quotes", where i just tossed their own words back out and let them stand on their own, sometimes with a sardonic quip attached to it.

i loved doing it, but i didn't keep up with it.

i think we all need to stop asking what we can do for our country, and get back to asking what our country can do for us.

i'll tear down jfk all day some other time, but i want to catch up to what i'm doing tonight.

"ask not what your country can do for you..."

is that inspiring?

or is it truly a bunch of bourgeois bullshit that is at the core of why you don't have universal health coverage, 20 years into the twenty-first century?