Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

You don't understand

you don't understand

Maybe not. Maybe you can rephrase your question? The answer to why Bernie supporters would be charged with rebuilding democracy & not, say, Hillary supporters seems obvious to me.

*slowly reaches toward the smoking grassroots*

What other candidates are making the case that it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up?

― Mordy, Wednesday, March 9, 2016 12:55 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh i have no idea what any of the other candidates stand for, if anything, beyond enabling the same old shitshow. so yay for that.

Smells good in here...

what is this "rebuilding democracy" that you keep mentioning? what does that actually mean to you?

it sounds like a pretty vague term that can mean whatever you want it to.

I assume it's a vague reference to the critique made by some Bernie supporters that our democracy is fatally flawed and needs broad systemic changes?

As opposed to maybe more mild reforms that Hillary supports (like reinstating civil rights voting protections).

For the insurgents of the Sanders wing, the question now becomes how many of them are willing to turn to the more difficult and less exciting work of rebuilding democracy from the ground up, and taking the Democratic Party back from the lawyers and technology millionaires and Hollywood executives and foreign-policy apparatchiks who have become its principal proprietors.

oh, i see, it's simply that they want Sanders supporters to dismantle the oligarchy that has controlled society for millenia.

yeah that's a dumb expectation to have. some people say stupid things on the internet.

As opposed to maybe more mild reforms that Hillary supports (like reinstating civil rights voting protections).

ADDRESSING POLITICAL VIOLENCE

We need to re-enfranchise the more than two million African-Americans who have had their right to vote taken away by a felony conviction, paid their debt to society, and deserve to have their rights restored.
Congress must restore the “pre-clearance” formula under the Voting Rights Act, which extended protections to minority voters in states and counties where they were clearly needed.
We must expand the Act’s scope so that every American, regardless of skin color or national origin, is able to vote freely.
We need to make Election Day a federal holiday to increase voters’ ability to participate.
We must make early voting an option for voters who work or study and need the flexibility to vote on evenings or weekends.
We must make no-fault absentee ballots an option for all Americans.
We must automatically register every American to vote when they turn 18 or move to a new state. The burden of registering voters should be on the state, not the individual voter.
We must put an end to discriminatory laws and the purging of minority-community names from voting rolls.
We need to make sure that there are sufficient polling places and poll workers to prevent long lines from forming at the polls anywhere.

https://berniesanders.com/issues/racial-justice/

all seems pretty reasonable to me

so, in the case of Chief Executive, you get to choose one of a narrow pool of candidates who are demonstrably capable of raising a billion dollars from the country's worst people. eg the First Primary

xxp

going back to some 1975 rules would be a start (more inclusive than those obviously)

I read that Sanders outspent Hill in MI

Adam those are things are reasonable but hopefully I'm not surprising you by mentioning that Bernie has made a "political revolution" a big part of his campaign whereas Hillary has not.

mordy, you just read the platform. we've had our differences but i know you're smart enough to realize that the "political revolution" stuff is largely a matter of whipping up interest and trying to differentiate himself from HRC

quit focusing on it so much

it's not that hard to understand:

our western market-driven capitalist democracy is fucked
and it needs to be dismantled
and replaced
with something else

versus

modest reforms and hopefully a return to the 90s' neoliberal prosperity!

today in the los angeles times:

"We Mexicans from the areas you report from, the latest being Boyle Heights, my old neighborhood, are not anti-Trump. We are a large group who will vote for Trump regardless of your biased views," she wrote.

"Viva Trump."

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0309-lopez-trump-supporters-20160309-column.html

mordy, you just read the platform. we've had our differences but i know you're smart enough to realize that the "political revolution" stuff is largely a matter of whipping up interest and trying to differentiate himself from HRC

a. i agree w/ you that bernie's platforms are not particularly radical but inside the parameters of the democratic party and amount to a salve that will ultimately preserve the capitalist democratic nature of the USA. b. i don't think all of bernie's supporters see it that way, and c. i don't think all of bernie's rhetoric explains it that way, and d. i don't think all of bernie's opponents see it that way so that e. when AdamB asks why bernie supporters need to rebuild democracy which presumably really means f. showing up for midterms, g. i don't think bernie voters alone have an obligation to change the politics of the US by voting in better politicians i'm not surprised like Adam is that someone might think they have a unique responsibility.

like there are ppl in this thread who think his platform is more radical than you and i think and i thought adam was one of them.

Sanders' message has the greatest appeal to people who are suffering under the current system. Unfortunately those are to a large degree ppl who've been alienated from voting.

Lol @ polls of CA GOP, probably the weakest state GOP organization in the country

Xp

So I just learned at a social event in my left-leaning workplace that I may be alone as a Sanders supporter, although there were one or two other people who kept quiet during the "Duh we all like Hillary" chatter.

My boss is a big Clinton-supporter which made me a little circumspect about saying much.

what's with the left hostility to Nate Silver this time around? a lot of people on twitter and on my fb feed seem really pissed at him lately

i feel like last election when he was saying Romney would lose and the right were screaming that his forecasts were partisan and he's a queer and the left retort was 'you dummies, he's just feeding poll data into a forecast and showing us the results, it's not partisan it's just math.' but now that his forecast is saying hilary will win, seems like it has shifted to 'ok NOW he's a partisan hack'?

bc he is generally giving bad news to bernie supporters and the left, like the right, shoot the messenger.

Rubio may be out before Florida

(Link goes to a tweet w/embedded video from FOX Business Channel. You've been warned.)

One thing I think people forget or don't realize about stats is that one big miss does not automatically call into question your entire methodology. I mean I can't actually speak to whether Silver is legit proven as a better-than-most predictor of elections, I just don't think the fact that he blew Michigan means he's worthless.

technically the polls blew MI. he can only work with the polls that are available.

right

But I would guess that's where the hostility comes from -- calling primaries at 99% likelihood of going to the favored candidate and then being wrong upsets them because the inevitability narrative and the electability narrative are a lot of what drives Clinton campaign. Some read deliberate bias into it, but I don't.

technically the polls blew MI. he can only work with the polls that are available.

― Mordy, Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:51 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sort of yes, sort of no. 538 makes their own probability calculations based on polls. Giving the eventual winner a <1% chance of winning going into the primary is blowing it.

even 538 has kinda treated this election like '¯\_(ツ)_/¯ who knows anymore, let's post some slack chats and gifs'

all silver does is average a bunch of polls and throw some fairy dust on it, the polls were massively wrong this time

xp right, but he's supposed to be the Poll Whisperer, determining the right poll for us to listen to if there is one.

538 makes their own probability calculations but he can't call an election for Bernie when Bernie has not led in a single poll (and the best poll for him this cycle showed Hillary 10 pts up).

ftr mordy fb messaged me the other day saying he thought bernie was gonna take michigan, maybe mordy should be the new nate silver

even that one that came in right before the election which i don't think 538 worked into their analysis showed hillary up

technically the polls blew MI. he can only work with the polls that are available.

― Mordy, Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:51 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is cop out. his job is to predict the election.

his big innovation was to formally and on an ongoing basis asses the likely accuracy of pollsters. if he's dubious about the polls then his prediction should have had big error bars. it didn't, so he clearly thought the polling was fine.

I realize this is kind of splitting hairs, but the whole point of Silver's methodology is that by mixing polls and fairy dust in the right way you can figure out, among other things, the likelihood that they would be wrong.

all silver does is average a bunch of polls and throw some fairy dust on it

eh, they do a bit more than that. this tracker is interesting, for example:

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/delegate-targets/democrats/

(click the "republican" tab at the top to see the GOP side of things)

it's kind of a nice guide to the upcoming primaries and how well the candidates need to do to stay on track for the nomination. so even in states where bernie lost or will likely lose in the future, you can still see if he made relative gains by gaining more delegates than expected.

if every poll comes in with hillary winning nate silver is limited to them no matter what the secret sauce. i can make up whatever shit i want so if you want someone's gut feeling analysis subscribe to my private messaging chat service :p

xp caek- his forecast updates its prior by itself though, you're making it sound like he reaches in and turns a crank in favour of bernie or hilary

if he says "lol shrug, i can only work with what the polls tell me" then his predictions should be correspondingly uncertain. "it's on them, not me" is bs.

I realize this is kind of splitting hairs, but the whole point of Silver's methodology is that by mixing polls and fairy dust in the right way you can figure out, among other things, the likelihood that they would be wrong.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Wednesday, March 9, 2016 1:57 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is not splitting hairs. this is a very fundamental and correct point. it is meaningless to predict an outcome without also giving a confidence. he knows this, which is why he gives a confidence interval.

re: 538: my own backlash has little to do with their handling of the michigan thing, though i would looooove a deep stat nerdery post where silver lifts up the hood and tries to figure out what he should have factored in, or what factors he might need to add to the next contests or whatever. because yeah, the premise is exactly that just banging a lot of polls together may NOT be very predictive at all, for reasons he's always been happy to discuss as a stats nerd. i bet he finds this michigan goof fascinating more than anything.

yea, though, i do lash back. i probably sound like a broken record on this but, as i've sorta said before on these threads, the quality/in-depthitude of the analysis has gone down a lot in the ESPN era. but more importantly he's expanded his stable to include much more hackish bro sports-pundit types (especially harry enten) and these other pretending-to-be-neutral-on-a-moving-train characters (particularly the one conservadude that chimes in with the "economic" take in all their chats). these others have generally been a lot more glib and have definitely seemed to have a strong anti-sanders bias in their shifting goalposts in addition to the less objectionable bad news for sanders that just comes out of their math. also they have really really bad headline-to-article matches and the headlines have been very hacky. i think silver's own pieces are still pretty silver-ish, if less robust in their deep digging mathwise and less rich and thoughtful in their graphics.

xp i'm not at all. i'm saying his priors about pollster reliability were demonstrably wrong. this is on him. i'm not implying bias. i'm implying that he's bad.

My exact sentiments: https://twitter.com/bernieorhiliary/status/706697262458507266

"his forecast updates its prior by itself though"

actually i have no idea what this means

if he says "lol shrug, i can only work with what the polls tell me" then his predictions should be correspondingly uncertain.

tbf he said before MI that his gut told him bernie was going to outperform the polls and he has said many times that there's a lot of uncertainty in this election so if ppl look at his figures and assume they are 100% trustworthy that is a little bit on them

i think the biggest problem is that partisans want the polls to show their candidate up bc they think it has a casual affect on things like momentum, enthusiasm, participation - like some republicans during 2012 were delusional but many more knew he was going to lose but thought that admitting that would dampen turnout.