sanders needs to be worried about how to win over educated white women in swing districts, not how to convince deeply religious, illiterate blacks in deep red states to vote for a jew.

if you want to rally the base, sanders is the guy. whether it works or not...

but, if you're concerned about these tactical swing demographics, the best candidates were buttigieg and klobuchar, not biden.

biden's argument was that he could increase black turnout to obama levels, and he failed to do that.

a sanders/klobuchar ticket would probably be unstoppable, and they do at least know each other well.

but i want to....

should they rally the base or win over swing voters? false dichotomy - think in dialectics, instead. they need to do both.

but, that's not the debate at hand.

biden won't be able to do either, and he's proven that. he will prove that again on tuesday, as he struggles for viability across the country.

but, the party just drove off a superior candidate who had a better chance of winning the general in order to appease a base of arguably homophobic and arguably antisemitic voters that is largely irrelevant in national polling.

and, they wonder why they're the country's natural opposition party.

this is why.

because they continually make bad decisions, like this.

i'll repeat the point: there was always an exactly 0% chance that i'd support a joe biden candidacy, in any way. he doesn't even get an epsilon. and, i basically live in michigan - i'm the type of voter you need to get to vote for you.

he offers me absolutely nothing of value at all.

maybe the best way to state what i'm saying is this - biden voters would probably support buttigieg pretty readily, but buttigieg supporters are going to have biden pretty far down the list of candidates. this isn't a commutative relation.

so, if biden were to drop, buttigieg would have likely gotten a huge immediate spike. i've made that point repeatedly.

but, buttigieg dropping will likely give these other candidates, mostly klobuchar, a bump, first. biden will need them to drop, too, in order to salvage any kind of bump. they may grudgingly end up at biden in the end, but you have to understand that voting against the frontrunner is not an accident, it's an act of protest. growing up near quebec, i understand this mentality quite well.

as buttigieg was stronger across the board, klobuchar dropping would have probably produced the more competitive single candidate. and there are some states where i wonder about the gender issue; i would suspect those anti-establishment protest votes will end up back with sanders, or that they won't vote at all. so, it could actually give sanders that extra bump in states like colorado or utah. but, she's the likely primary benefactor nonetheless.

will it be enough to predict some upsets in states like maine? i'd like to see some polling before i do that...

i will accept comparisons between the ira and the plo, but not between the ira and isis. the former has some vague value in the form of case studies; the latter is offensively stupid.

but, you'll notice that i'm broadly sympathetic towards the idea that the palestinian people deserve basic rights, even if i think they make a lot of bad tactical choices in trying to figure out how to get them. like the broader syrian people, the mass of palestinians are secular and want secular governance. i don't have any problem separating these things from each other. but, that's just the point i'm making.

he made a lot of errors, and i guess this is the last one. i insist that he would have beaten biden overall, who has shown no ability at all to do well in states that actually matter. now, we can't know what would have happened.

but, it's reflective of the pathological stupidity within the party, on their insistence in following losing strategies and their inability to understand their own voting base. these idiots legitimately seem to think that the vote in south carolina is more predictive than the vote in iowa. because they're idiots....

i don't actually think this helps biden much of anywhere. buttigieg was mostly poling well in the rural areas, and biden gets most of his support from the rank and file in the cities. it probably helps klobuchar mostly, and sanders a little bit as he did well with these same voters in 2016. it may even help warren in a few places.

these voters made a conscious choice to vote against joe biden because they didn't think he could win, and the meaningless outcome in an uncompetitive conservative red state like south carolina shouldn't affect that - they will still vote against him because they will still think he can't win.

and, they're right.

jim clyburn & the illiterate voters of south carolina are wrong.

but, i can tell you who's smart and who's stupid, i can't control what they do. this was a mistake, but it's happened, and so be it.

expect klobuchar to see a spike in polling amongst literate suburban white women, who are probably the key to winning the general election.

and, i'll remind you that i used to be a bernie-or-bust sanders supporter but am now supporting the greens. i am not a party-first democratic voter; i'm not a democratic voter at all. i have rarely supported the democrats in past cycles; i have usually supported the greens. i'm an independent voice trying to analyze the problem objectively. so, i'm not a buttigieg supporter, or a klobuchar support, or a biden support or even a sanders supporter any more. there is a 0% chance i'd vote for any of these candidates, with the sole exception of bernie sanders, who i've stepped distinctly away from due to his decision to deprioritize the concerns of queer voters - a decision that has blown up in his face.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/01/pete-buttigieg-drops-out-of-2020-presidential-race.html

comparing the nazis in idlib to the ira, or the situation in ireland to syria in general, is truly offensively stupid.

the situations have essentially nothing in common with each other; the ira believed in segregation, and that was wrong, but they never tried to eliminate any ethnic groups, they never set up concentration camps, they never tried to conquer the surrounding areas, etc.

it's an utterly ignorant comparison, and the people that are making it are utterly ignorant people.

you know who really needs to step down, after this fiasco?

jim clyburn.

biden is going to lose to trump.

the early results in these white states made it clear that he's not going to be competitive in the most important swing demographics, and his inability to excite black voters in the south at levels that obama did cemented it.

he's a loser; south carolina fucked up, and that will be obvious on wednesday morning.

i'm fucking sick of letting red states pick the nominee.

the midwest needs to hold it's ground and push back and beat the south this time.

i actually think the results in south carolina suggest that biden should drop, as he didn't demonstrate the kind of dominance that he needed to.

but, i also think this regional showdown is necessary - i think it's imperative that biden get smacked around a little in the midwest to get the point across to southern voters that he's not going to win there, whether they like it or not, and send the message to stop voting for a candidate that isn't going to win.

at the end of the day, it's far more important to be competitive in new hampshire than it is to be competitive in south carolina.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/01/pete-buttigieg-quit-democratic-race-joe-biden-south-carolina

the thing about the latin speakers is that they may be a little bit socially conservative, and that might freak me out, and should concern a lot of democratic voters (support for abortion rights would be expected to be lower amongst ideological catholics, for example), but they do believe in government programs.

they actually do want single payer healthcare, unlike a lot of his supporters in other parts of the country. they are at least voting for his platform, or at least, part of it.

so, it's this confusing thing. but, this support is probably enduring, at least.

....it's just that, issues about influence from conservative voices aside, it's not going to seriously help in a general until 2050. it's too far ahead of the demographics, and it might not even be the right way - by the time that hispanics are ready to become a dominant electoral force, they may find themselves overtaken by asians.

arizona. focus on arizona...

we can get into debates about epistemology, but i don't generally care if conservatives exist, so long as i can just avoid them.

what i get frustrated by is religious people showing up in liberal spaces and trying to change them.

no. that's proselytizing. that's forcing your views on others. and, that's wrong.

if you're not comfortable in liberal spaces, then go to conservative ones - there's more than enough of them out there.

i don't know exactly what conservatives do for fun.

i guess they have events at church, and stuff.

that's your tribe. go join it.

stop deluding yourself otherwise.

what i would say to these people is this: the world's full of conservatives. go find some and make some friends.

no, i don't want to change the "toxic drinking culture" to make more space for religious muslim women.

rather, i think there should be more of an effort to promote integration by peer pressuring them to participate.

i don't want to live in a conservative muslim society. sorry.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/muslim-women-work-drinking-culture-law-a9363796.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=Feed

regarding bernie, though.

now that south carolina is over, and this strategy to contort his own views to try to win conservative black churchgoers, who do not in any way represent the democratic party, has failed, maybe he can unravel this bullshit and get back to being bernie sanders again?

the outreach amongst latin-speaking voters has been effective. but, all he's done in trying so hard to reach conservative southerners is muddle his own messaging, and harm his chances in states he can actually win.

i'm going to guess that he's going to have to fend off buttigieg in vermont.

"this primary isn't a game" - elizabeth warren

so, that's an epic fail at winning the prisoner's dilemma.

they need to just turn the mic off, at this point. but, the rules make what she's doing pointless - if she's trying to bleed support from sanders, it's actually not going to work, because she's not even viable anywhere.

buttigieg and klobuchar at least have long shot paths. but, she's really running in the same category as tulsi gabbard, at this point.

and this was obvious - i said from the start that she wouldn't win a single state, and she won't. 

if she's running for 2024, she should drop now, because she's killing herself off.

ok, we're back up in the laptop.

i haven't showered yet, as i'm waiting for a second round of dishes.

i don't think he's home, but somebody sparked some very bad smelling drugs around 4:00 this morning, and it was bad enough that i had to react. they seem to have stopped once they realized i was awake. but, we're going to need to leave the fan on all day to clear it out.

i generally prefer to drink coffee over night and sleep during the day.

so, i'm going to spend the morning getting back to cleaning up these blog posts going back to mid-january, which is just that much worse, now.

i don't expect to leave the house again until mid-week, although i'm thinking about catching the beethoven concerto on the weekend (i initially missed that). there's some other things that i'm...

...do i really want to pay to watch a 70 something steve hackett perform covers of songs he helped write in the early 70s? they're some of the most substantive pieces of music of the latter part of the twentieth century. i just don't know if there's a point to it.

but, that's what i'm doing - cleaning up the blog and listening to music.

ok, let's get away from this now, for real.

that's a somewhat sketchy calculation though, because it relies on exit poll numbers. i pulled out the actual initial vote totals for a reason. 

what i want to know is what percentage of biden's voters were black. i guess we can do this somewhat implicitly - if he got 48.4% of the vote, and 34.16% of total voters were black and voted for biden, then 34.16/48.4 = 70.6%. so, almost 71% of his voters were black.

and, that would mean that the number of black voters he got was 0.706*255,662 = 180497.  this is in very close agreement with the previous number.

likewise, if clinton got 73.44% of the vote and 52.46% of total voters were black and voted for clinton then 52.46/73.44 = 71.43% of her voters were black. .7143*272,379 = 194560. again, this is pretty close and pulls out the same roughly 15,000 vote spread.

his numbers are worse than clinton's. that's my point. and, if you identified clinton's major flaw as her inability to appeal to black voters at the same level as obama did, as though she ever could have, then biden is not a solution - he's worse, and the results will be worse.

we can update those numbers with something more precise. the margin is roughly the same because the concept is just shifted, but there is a conceptual error in the previous post as a consequence of the confusing language; it's 40% of all voters that voted clinton and were black, not 40% of her voters that were black. i did it right the first time if you go back and look...

this is the correct and more up to date math. it's the same conclusion, which is what i pulled out intuitively and then sat down to actually calculate, but the numbers are bigger because they represent correct proportions.

clinton in 2016:
(61% of all voters were black)*(86% voted for clinton) = 52.46% of all voters were black and voted for clinton.
373,063 total votes were cast. so, she got 195709 black votes. roughly.

biden in 2020:
(56% of all voters were black)*(61% voted for biden) = 34.16% of all voters were black and voted for biden.
527,728 total votes were cast. so, he got 180272 black votes. roughly.

that's a decrease of 15000 votes. roughly. 

....amidst a huge increase in turnout, and what i believe is substantive population growth.

where did all of the new votes go? well, sanders went down, too.

they appear to have gone to the lower candidates. so, i may have been on to something, it just didn't catch critical mass.

iowa is maybe a lost cause.

but, if the democrats want to win in november, nevada and new hampshire are truly must win states. he badly lost in both states, he could barely crack 10% in the primary in new hampshire, and has been dismissive of the people that live there, since. does he expect to win there in november, with that kind of attitude? or will he forget to campaign there altogether?

a big win in south carolina like this would be seismic if this were the republican primary.

it's not. and, the other candidates should pay him no heed in his pleas.

we went through this in 2016, and they're just repeating all the same errors.

they've learned nothing.

should the other candidates clear out to make way for biden?

no.

these results don't strengthen his argument at all - they've demonstrated that his support amongst black voters was overrated, and he has yet to demonstrate that he can generate support amongst key white swing demographics.

south carolina will not be in play in the general, and the argument that black voters in milwaukee (somewhere that is in play) will vote for him because he won south carolina is just racist, and probably totally wrong on top of it.  

they should force biden to win a state that has swing demographics and will actually be in play before they get out of the way - a state like new hampshire, or nevada.