Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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In the Iowa caucuses, Sanders won a plurality, but tellingly he did terribly in second alignments. (I.e. when other candidates were not viable, those candidates’ supporters avoided Sanders.) That strongly indicates that his support is strong, but has a low ceiling—confined to a plurality of the party.

That’s not surprising. The Democratic Party as currently constructed is a third-way coalition including traditional progressives, labor, neo-liberals, and minorities. Sanders might have a plurality of the support in the party, but he threatens to blow up that coalition.

A successful Presidential candidate has to win 95% of their own party. But only 76% of Democrats say that they would vote for a socialist: https://news.gallup.com/poll/285563/socialism-atheism-politi.... A successful Presidential candidate has to evenly split independents—who comprise 30% of the electorate—with the other party’s candidate. But independents’ views of socialism are much closer to those of Republicans than to those of Democrats: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/807047941/poll-sanders-rises-.... Any successful democratic candidate must win super-majorities of non-white people (90% of African Americans, and 75% of Hispanics and Asians.) But just 33% of non whites have a favorable view of socialism.

Bloomberg isn’t “buying” the support of “media outlets, think tanks, and state party leaders.” These are the people who established the third way coalition after devastating losses in the 1980s. These people are already looking for an alternative to Sanders. Bloomberg’s money is just getting his candidacy out there to help coalesce the “not Sanders” majority of the party.

"Sanders won a plurality, but tellingly he did terribly in second alignments." <-- This is a lie, by the way. Second alignments benefited Sanders more than almost any other candidate: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/803953713/graphics-how-iowas-...

The poster I'm replying to often sneaks lies into his wall-of-text posts when he thinks no one will notice or call him on it.

Your own link shows that people went to Buttigieg more than 2:1 over Sanders in the second alignment.

Apart from that, the movement in vote total between the first and second rounds combines two effects, but we’re interested in just one of those. Your analysis of the second round data marks a positive count for a candidate where someone moves to that candidate in the second round from a candidate that didn’t hit the 15% threshold in the first round. (That’s the only way for someone to switch.) But it also marks a negative count where a candidate doesn’t meet the 15% threshold in a precinct and his or her supporters have to move to another candidate. We don’t really care about that second effect, because that just measures whether a candidate is able to consistently get above 15%.

What we want to predict is, as you knock out Biden, Warren, etc., where do their supporters go? You can find that out directly from the released caucus data, by looking at where supporters of those candidates go in precincts where those candidates don’t hit the 15% threshold. Most of those supporters don’t go to Bernie, which means Bernie is not their first choice or their second choice.

Polling backs that up: https://civiqs.com/documents/Civiqs_ISU_banner_book_2020_01_.... Right before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders was the first or second choice of 37% of eligible Iowa primary voters. That means for 2/3 of the party, Sanders was neither the first nor the second choice.

Bernie just won 70%+ of the Hispanic vote in Nevada, and came in second to Biden with African Americans, so please adjust your caucus extrapolations accordingly:

https://twitter.com/UCLAlatino/status/1231622727808610304

Why would you try to extrapolate from results in Iowa? It's a.) a caucus, which has weird effects on turnout, and b.) not at all representative of Democrat voters. And if you are going to extrapolate from Iowa, you can't simply ignore Sanders' dramatic over-performance with the few minorities that do live there.

You're also referencing polls on who would vote for a Democratic socialist, while ignoring polls of who would vote for Sanders specifically, overall approval ratings of Sanders (consistently near the top for any politician in the country), and head-to-head polls of Sanders vs. Trump.

It's pretty clear that you're just cherrypicking to fit a narrative. You're entitled to your opinion, but don't pretend it's supported by data in any sort of definitive way when that's plainly not the case.

I’m extrapolating from Iowa because it provides concrete data about the nature of Sander’s plurality support. He’s clearly the #1 choice of a significant minority of democrats. But is he the #2 choice of a sufficient number of others? Or is he only winning a plurality because the anti-Sanders candidates can’t pick an alternative? (On this front, it’s critical to note that Biden was leading Sanders by large margins until he fell apart in Iowa.)

Matchups against Trump this far out are not helpful. In the months before the nomination, Clinton had up to a 10 point lead on Trump. That closed significantly once the campaigning started. The nomination is when the rubber hits the road. That’s when the attack ads will start, going into Sanders’ lengthy record of anti-Amrrican, communist sympathizing statements. That’s not baked into the poll numbers for Sanders yet. (Meanwhile, all of Trump’s bad statements are already baked into his poll numbers.)

"He’s clearly the #1 choice of a significant minority of democrats. But is he the #2 choice of a sufficient number of others? Or is he only winning a plurality because the anti-Sanders candidates can’t pick an alternative?"

He's also winning handily in national head-to-head polls vs. others in the primary, which seem a lot more relevant to me than Iowa caucus realignment numbers: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

"Matchups against Trump this far out are not helpful."

Ah, so we can base all kinds of conclusions on a poll asking "would you vote for a Democratic socialist?", but one taken at the same time asking "would you vote for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump?" is not helpful? :-/

I wonder if "inexplicable Republican best friends"* like Rayiner, who try to tell Democrats who their candidate should be, know that they are actually showing their hand and telling the rest of us who they're most afraid of.

* https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-69-the-rise-of-t...

Polls say that Sanders is the most popular second choice for Biden supporters. Is that a sufficient number?

Those polls show that 75% of Biden supporters would prefer someone other than Sanders for their second choice: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voters-second-choice-ca...

For the majority of the party, Sanders is neither their first or second choice: https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-passes-joe-biden-top... (22% support him as the first choice, another 10% say he’s their second choice).

This isn’t rocket science. It’s literally why ranked choice voting was invented.

rayiner, you cite poll numbers a lot -- "x% of y say they do|do not support z" -- which is good, it says a lot, but I want to bring something else to your attention, which I'm increasingly realizing is vitally important: personality, likability.

I think pg has talked about this before too, one of great tests has been "is this person charismatic?" And further, that charismatic, assertive personalities can do wonders in changing and winning people's minds. No doubt Hillary would have won had she been more likable (or a man, America is still lagging behind when it comes to having a woman in charge). Sanders is more charismatic than Trump so he'll probably win, whatever the labels.

Oh hey, you raise a good point here. When it was Trump vs. Hillary I remember thinking this was a great test of pg's charisma theory, since it predicted Trump while nearly everything and everyone else was predicting Hillary. (Alan Lichtman's "keys" test also predicted Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/tr...)

But what would the charisma test say about Trump vs. Sanders? I hadn't thought about that one. If it's Trump vs. Bloomberg, that's as much a no-brainer as last time. But Trump vs. Sanders? Not so clear. You say Sanders is more charismatic than Trump, but many people would disagree. In an all-American context, I think Trump is probably more charismatic than Sanders, though by a smaller margin than with Hillary or Bloomberg. To really decide that, though, we'd have to get into definitions of charisma.

Lichtman's system is interesting since, like pg's theory, it depends on fundamentals and ignores polls. Lichtman also includes charisma as one of his keys. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/12/th.... A quick look at his "13 keys" list suggests to me that Lichtman will probably predict a Trump win this year (even though he despises Trump), whether or not the challenger is charismatic. That's mostly because of economic indicators. If those change, the prediction probably changes. It will be interesting to see how Lichtman interprets his list this year.

Trying to measure charisma is obviously very subjective, but I bet even if you asked Clinton supporters, many would admit that Trump is more charismatic than Hillary (it would be interesting to see a poll testing this). That's likely to be a very bad sign. I think you need it to at least be a toss up where reasonable people can disagree, and your own supporters should consider you the more charismatic one.

Right, it's like if you found a poll asking "would you vote for a pro-Russia game show host who mocks disabled people?" with predictably negative results, ignored polls asking directly "would you vote for Trump?", and then tried to claim that as evidence that Trump could never win.

Your analysis is certainly plausible but I think recent history, especially 2016, has shown that it's hard to trust any analysis that seems to have it all figured out.

"Never Trump" seemed to be a bipartisan certainty and we all know how that went.

It’s telling that you try and pull the whole socialism card and not Sanders’ actual numbers, where he does things like beat Trump with independents by 18 points:

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/13/1950/1919/Topli...

Leads with Latino voters, is first or second with African American voters, depending on the polling, and is literally the most popular senator in the country:

https://morningconsult.com/senator-rankings/

You’re supposition that there’s going to be some outbreak of pearl clutching about “socialism” is about as plausible that Bloomberg isn’t buying the election.

I don’t think the national polling at this stage is elucidating. It’s like Biden’s numbers in the Democratic primary. Once the campaigning and debates started, and people became familiar with the candidate, his poll numbers collapsed.

That’s why I’m pointing to the polling for socialism. My projection is that Trump will be very effective at making the election a referendum on socialism. It’s going to be wall to wall ads of Sanders’ praise of the USSR, Venezuela, etc. When that starts, I think Sanders’ poll numbers are going to collapse.

Respectfully, this is as much unfounded speculation as any other questioning of national polling. You’re free to your skepticism of it, but you can’t base arguments on a cherry picking of that skepticism.

I think Sanders will have an uphill battle against Trump (as would any of the primary candidates), but the Democrats are guaranteed to lose if he wins a plurality, they broker the convention, pick someone else, and disenfranchise Sanders’ massive base of support. And that is the documented outcome Bloomberg is pursuing:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/bloomberg-brokered-...

Lol, literally nobody supports Bloomberg. He's only riding on name recognition alone.

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