Some Questions Already Seem Answered About Super Tuesday

Sounds like it's more or less come down to the Alabama (S. Carolina, Miss., etc.) Dems versus the California Dems. The party now has two quite-different wings, in terms of policy and even geographically. And the Alabamans are aligned with the party elite (DNC) and corporate donors, to fend off the popular mob and its progressive pitchforks. Which vision is best for the future? Alabama? Really?

Et tu, Nate? Et tu? First, Biden is winning states with zero impact on the general election. Glad that he can win a few but really, Nate, you must agree that the candidate winning key states that will actually make a difference in the race (Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania) has the momentum? With all due respect to Biden, winning the South means virtually nothing. Biden would gladly trade places with Bernie and claim the key states, especially the big ones like California and Texas. And your suggestion that Biden is poised to pull off upsets in Texas and/or Maine is beyond absurd. Where do you get this stuff? Can we please meet here again in the morning so we can laugh at your silly predictions. I don't have your expertise, of course, but even amateur tealeaf readers can see the writing on the wall. Sanders is going to win all the relevant states and enter the convention with a commanding lead of delegates, and it's going to be really difficult for the Democratic apparatchik to push him out of the way once again to make room for the old establishment guy who's made a career out of getting very, very little done. Ol' Joe Biden has had many chances to get things right over many decades and failed. And by all accounts, he's run an moribund campaign. Meanwhile, Bernie has been consistent and extraordinarily well organized. Would you rather vote for the independent guy taking $20 donations from the masses or the establishment guy courting bundlers and PACs?

I've seen that Russia is helping Sanders because they see him as the weakest candidate. I want to know how... Facebook posts and such trolling techniques? Or are there more sinister intrusions? Are all these "small dollar donations" that Sanders brags about coming strictly from this young progressive base... or Russia?

Why are any voter's even going to the polls? The decision is really being made by the Establishment Elite of the Republican and Democratic Parties, Trump and Biden are the RNC and DNC choices. Your vote is not planned to matter. Establishment Republican's chose Trump and would not allow any other candidates to challenge him on the ballot. The Democrats put voters through the sham and convoluted process of their debates and primaries. Most of us were confused and frustrated. This process did more to turn voters off than raise a desire to vote for any candidate. To most voter's the candidates seemed "eh". The DNC thought Joe Biden would easily win. When Biden's nomination seemed "iffy" they panicked and put their anvil of a foot on the scale. This did nothing to reassure voter's that their vote mattered. The timing of Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropping out just 2 days before Super Tuesday, without waiting for the results, seems suspect of a back-door deal. Why? The money was raised, spent and campaigning was over. Were they promised - a Cabinet position? These DNC practices scream "It's not the voter’s decision, stupid". Minnesota even did the DNC one better. If you vote on Super Tuesday, all your voter information will be passed on to the State and National Democratic and Republican parties to use as they like: mailing and phoning for fundraising, campaign literature, etc. That's enough to make you stay home. We need to take our country back from political parties elite.

I have a feeling that a lot of the most virulent pro and anti Bernie posts are possibly Russian trolls. Not the reasonable disagreements, but the black-and-white all-or-nothing ones. I cannot believe I am saying this as I am not one for conspiracies or paranoia, but we really need to be mindful not to get into wars within the party that may be being fomented from outside. I was reminded of this today in another NY Times article, referencing this Pineapple Pizza analogy: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0717_cisa_the-war-on-pineapple-understanding-foreign-interference-in-5-steps.pdf I am hoping that most of us, at the end of the day, will vote "blue no matter who" regardless of whom our preferred candidate was.

In 2016 after the SC primary: Hilary Clinton • Pledged delegates: 97 • Popular votetotal: 367,734 • Popular vote in SC: 272,379 Bernie Sanders • Pledged delegates: 59 • Popular vote total: 248,691 • Popular vote in SC: 96,498 --------------------------------------- In 2020 after the SC Primary: Joe Biden • Pledged delegates: 54 • Popular vote total: 280,968 • Popular vote in SC: 256,047 Bernie Sanders • Pledged delegates: 60 • Popular vote total: 181,521 • Popular vote in SC: 105,197 Why is there so much spin on the importance of SC by some people? Compared to 2016, Hillary had a greater lead in delegates and a greater differential in popular votes. Hillary lost. So why are we using the same playbook...with a lesser candidate? Absolute madness. If Joe Biden is supposed to be a better candidate than Hillary, maybe he should have ran in 2016.

What happens to early votes cast for pete, amy or steyer in california?

Al Gore couldn’t win his home state because he picked a Jewish person as his VP. Many people down South don’t much like non-Christians...this will sadly hurt Bernie.

The "Democratic Party"/DNC is a private institution, NOT a public service. Same goes for the GOP/RNC. It's a bit silly for any of us to demonize party leaders for doing what they are perfectly, legally entitled to do--making decisions about who leads what in the party. When you join a party, you agree to leave all decisions to the party leaders. Think about this: It's not "corruption" when company boards and executive teams choose their CEOs. It's not "corruption" when religious leaders choose who among the clergy is groomed for future leadership positions. Maybe this is why there are so many "independents"? Regardless...if you're going to criminalize party leaders because they didn't do what you wanted, it's time to wake up and stop pretending like they are working for you.

Here's my Super Tuesday question: with so much panic about e COVID-19, why weren't there any calls to postpone Super Tuesday? Far fewer instances of people touching things in the Louvre each day than the number of instances of many hands touching the same voting machines. Can't have it both ways. Wouldn't it be ironic if the number of cases actually did shoot up over the next few weeks but only among those who voted in the Super Tuesday states? Karmic comeuppance?

I think the race is decided today. The big question is, if Biden does not win, will the DNC pull a fast one via the Super Delegates to ensure Biden is the one? I think Sanders has the popular vote, but I know he does not have the DNC's backing. I would not be surprised if Biden loses big today, but wins the nomination at the end. What will the Sanders faithful do then? And the Pete and Amy true hardcore fans, will they simply up and vote Biden? they wanted different than usual, but their candidates rolled over when told to roll over. Will they follow and vote Biden? That's what I want to know.

Let's be calm and sensible. Remember when reading these comments that many are likely from foreign players trying to create havoc amongst Democrats. It may be working. Some of these comments are designed to drive a wedge between like minded people to the advantage of one person, Donald Trump. Please, don't let them win. Anyone but Trump!

Bernie will continue to have a commanding lead. Only a small portion of Klobuchar/Buttigieg voters will switch to Biden; not enough to stop an already clear juggernaut. The Democratic Party will only be doing further damage to itself and its already marginal credibility if it continues to foment Stop Bernie maneuvers. What we need now is to rally strongly behind Sanders to defeat Trump! The alternatives are just self-defeating, and one last old guard attempt to cling to the past, which is rapidly disappearing from our view.

RCP has two national polls from March 1 & 2. Biden has a small lead in one and bigger lead in the other. Bloomberg is ahead of Warren in both, with each of the two undercard candidates near the 15 percent cutoff. Polls from before the SC vote may be close to meaningless, but a lot of writers today still seem to be citing them.

Dem candidates are finally showing sense, not just dropping out if they can't win, but actively supporting someone who can. The sooner the sparring between Dems ends, the less ammo they provide to Trump and the more attention they can pay to defeating him. Sanders is a good person in many ways, but he won't win vs Trump. He has the far left locked up, but they won't vote Trump no matter what. He'll get very little of the moderate Right since he's just too far Left. Us independents will see a choice between too far Left and too far Right, each yelling at the microphone. Some may go for Trump again, horror though he's been, as Sanders is just too far left for them, or just stay home. A moderate Dem can pull together the Left, the center and some moderate Republicans. Trump's hard-core far Right aren't numerous enough to overcome that combination, even with gerrymandering, electoral college and Russian help. I'd favor a Biden-Bloomberg ticket. Biden has been in the White House before, and Bloomberg can't be outspent. Warren should have a place in the administration - smart, passionate and committed - but she won't make it to President (this time). Sanders should have a place too, perhaps leading the re-writing of ethics rules so we'll never have another disaster like Trump, but he shouldn't keep battling Biden until it helps Trump succeed. Sorry my liberal friends, but the mission is to get rid of Trump, not to go for everything you want, but get Trump again.

As an EMT that has recently seen people declining necessary medical care due to expense (even with Medicare paying 80%) I can only support a candidate in favor of medical care for all. The only way we can afford that is with a single-payer system along the lines of Medicare-For-All. This is the biggest difference I see among the Democrats-- mainstream corporate medicine backed candidates on the one hand and Bernie on the other. I pray the U.S. comes to its senses about its current radical medical system.

Nate, it's amazing that you and that other funny comedian pollster on CNN are still in the prognostication business, after the polling debacle in the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere in Europe. The fluidity of the current campaign is based on the fact that 45 has scrambled the national psyche to the point that most voters are reacting to every thing emotionally. Voters may be sophisticated, but as a variable, anger against 45 should not be the guiding narrative. Pollsters should pin focus groups to tell us, on matters of public policies, what they know and not what we want to hear, as President Kennedy said. A commenter herein mentioned immigration, yet I haven't heard any counter-narrative, as 45 continues to bray that Democrats are for open borders.

[From the coverage I have seen] I have not heard the topic of immigration discussed at all by any candidate in the democratic primary. Bearing in mind this was one of the main issues of the last election - shouldn't this difficult issue be addressed by candidates? It is obviously a divisive issue amongst democratic voters, but when it comes to the election later in the year this is going to enter the public discourse again. The nominee will be forced to have this conversation when debating Trump and risks exposure if this policy blind-spot is not properly addressed.

It truly comes down to this, and my apologies to the Biden family: The senator can barely speak. And he can’t win. I’m not crazy about Bernie, but he can end our four-yearlong national nightmare. That’s good enough for now.

Looking at the primary map, we will have a second mini Super Tuesday on March 17. Arizona, Illinois, Florida and Ohio will go to the polls. Those are pretty key states and that will be quite revealing, possibly more so than today.

If Bernie were my uncle, I'd show up late for Thanksgiving dinner so as to not hear the same lecture for the umpteenth time. Of course, he's right about most things, which makes him even more annoying. Don't forget to eat your peas!

So what did Pete and Klobuchar receive as compensation to drop out?

The real issue remains - who can defeat Trump? If Biden can attract the support of "never Trumpers" and independents, then Bernie's grasp on the left wing may not be enough to give him the nomination. Then the real issue is turnout in the election. Biden's VP pick will be crucial. In favor of his candidacy, the turnout in South Carolina was much larger than in 2016, almost as much as the turnout for Obama. A large turnout by minorities, oldsters and those fed up with Trump, could and likely will defeat Trump. If Biden can support the democrats all down the line, the Senate and House could be Democratic as well. It's a dream, but look at 2018.

Commenters seem to take this as an occasion to speak out for Bernie or Biden or whomever. Please don't. If we wanted noise like that, we can head to the internet. Nate has offered a good summary of knowns and known-unknowns. What's surprising is that so little polling data is available, so the public is largely in the dark. I'm guessing that the media finds it cheaper to report others' polls, and the campaigns keep their polls under tight wraps. The overall dynamic of free-riding and political warfare keeps the public in the dark, and privileges campaigns with more money. It encourages information hiding rather than disclosure. No one points out that Sander's lead is based on having more money to pay for more outreach in more states. It's based on money -- money the purportedly comes from small donors, but in fact is relatively untraceable, so there's no way to know if Russia has moved on to funding campaigns indirectly. So Sander's money is purportedly from small donations, Bloomberg's is his own, Warren had mostly disclaimed super-PAC's and the rest are traditional. Is that the main differentiator here? Put another way: I'd like to see more commentary in the article on how the campaigns are handling the current information/money environment, so we can recognize our biases and blind spots. In particular: why do we only mainly have relatively inexperienced white males?

Bernie is going to have a bad day today. I mean, he will win CA and get delegates more-or-less everywhere but he is going to get hammered across the South. There will be massive late-breaking surges for Biden in every Southern state. And in other states, too. Bernie showed himself s petty when he went to MA and MN to try to finish off Warren and Amy, respectively by beating them on their home ground. Amy got the last laugh on that, however. I saw a live clip of Bernie this AM on CNN. He looked and sounded flat-footed, petulant and panicky. Jim Clyburn's powerfully emotional endorsement changed the world in this election. Biden will now go fropm strength to strength and basically destroy Bernie. We are going to start watching to see if BERNIE will reach 15% in certain states. It's going to be a bad day for Mike, too.

If you thought Biden's campaign collapsed quickly after Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, just wait until tomorrow! If all Biden can win is deep red states that won't be in play in November, he is toast. He was never a real candidate in the first place, look how his projected "I guess my neighbors who I never talk to would vote for him" support evaporated nationally and switched to Bernie after those 3 consecutive major losses! Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropping out at the last minute is not only transparently hostile, spiteful and insulting to their few supporters, as they didn't necessarily want to vote for Biden when thousands voted early on Super Tuesday. It also makes it clear they were never real candidates to begin with either, but engineered purely to kneecap Bernie in the early contests. Pete managed to muddy the polluted waters in Iowa quite well, and Klobuchar failed. Vote for Bernie, the only candidate who represents working people, and the only candidate who has a chance of defeating Trump in November!

Since, SC never votes Blue in the general election, and most of the South follows suit, I don't really see Biden's advantage there.

As a Warren supporter who, if she isn’t on the NY ballot next month, would gladly vote for Sanders and who can also live with Biden as the nominee (but not Bloomberg), I’ll say this: a contested convention would likely be fatal to the nominee’s chances of beating President Trump in November. The deal-making that would have to be done to decide the nomination would likely alienate enough of the Democratic electorate to swing the key battleground states this fall, whether the nominee ends up being Sanders or not. I don’t wish for this, in fact I wish fervently against those, but let’s be realistic. Disapproval of President Trump will not, by itself, be enough to win the day. A nominee with a unified party behind him (and it will likely be a “him”) is absolutely essential. For that to happen, one of the candidates (hopefully not Bloomberg, whose balloon has lost a lot of helium anyway) will have to go on a long winning streak after today to finish with an outright majority of delegates when primary season ends in June. But mark my words: a contested convention will mean a second term for President Trump.

After the 2016 fiasco, is there any reason to waste any time analyzing polls or to worry about predictions? Using minuscule samples to attempt to predict the behavior of large populations works well in physical systems, where particles cannot change their minds at the behest of social media or any other source of disinformation. It does not work in human societies.

California has a large system of mail in voting, so final results there will not be immediate. It was reported that 40% of Californians had voted before the SC election. If South Carolina was a "swing" state, Biden's victory there would have been a game changer. But South Carolina will be deep "red" in November.

Mind-blowing that young and not very reliable voters can tolerate the no-party negativist Sanders' repetitive scoldings as many of us older folks have heard for 15 years, or that they would be influenced by polling data which can flip in one day's primary. They should ask themselves why Sanders has so few friends, legislative successes, or even shared ideas among his colleagues in the Senate. Perhaps it's because Vermont is so remote and out of the diverse mainstream from the rest of the country. And his wife seems to be his chief of staff (and hearing aid). It wouldn't seem to bode well for cabinet choices.

Oddly enough there's a lot less "uncertainty" now that the run has been reduced to only two Democratic candidates, after being reduced from the hundreds who started off in the field. And the choice now is very simple. But I find the incessant personalization between Biden and Sanders very troubling because we're not voting for a person, as much as we're voting for the ideas they represent. And too many comments in threads such as these are too often reduced to personal attacks and point by point character assassinations that have nothing or little to do with the direction they want to lead the country. It's not, or shouldn't be the job of the media or polls to influence the vote, nor is it the place of other voters to insult or outrightly dismiss those who don't agree with them. It's hard to dismiss a general mood of intolerance and negativity that has settled over the nation, and it is even more palpable at moments like these. But nothing should obfuscate the real matters at hand, and that is nothing less than deciding who should replace Donald Trump in the White House, and who can lead the country away from the cliff it is about to go over. VOTE.

Mind-blowing that one win can propel so much media attention and hype for a candidate (Biden) who struggles to even string a sentence together and has the same centrist, do-nothing policies that made Clinton so unpopular last time around. If Sanders and Bidens wins' were flipped, the media headlines would be, "Sanders has fluke win in South Carolina, but race looks too far gone" or something similar. The level of corruption in this election is not only disgusting, it's outright sad. The establishment seems desperate to do anything they can to stop Sanders and nominate a candidate who won't stand a chance against Trump. Let's hope the American people aren't so naive as the media would have them believe.