Check out my piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s about how Bernie Sanders could very well still be the Democratic nominee and is being under rated by the Democratic and media establishments.
You can usually evade the pay wall by going through Twitter.
4 Comments.
I couldn’t evade the pay wall. But I’ve been suspicious of how low Sanders’ numbers have been, and how high Biden’s have been for a while now.
I notice that almost all sites (including 538, which really has turned into a hot mess) omit any mention of the margin of error in the polls. When you account for it, the censorship becomes obvious.
In Iowa, Buttigieg is “leading” at 19.7%. Biden’s at 19.1, Sanders at 18.3, and Warren at 13.4.
The MoE is usually anywhere from 2.2 to 4.4% on these polls. So it’s a three-way tie, with Warren possibly a fourth member of the tie. Ditto with New Hampshire, Sanders, Biden, and Buttigieg are in what looks like a dead heat, and Warren is hanging on to possibly being a fourth member of the tie.
After those two, I won’t comment because the outcome of the first two will be a decisive factor for a lot of people. Warren won’t win Iowa, and she won’t win New Hampshire, and a lot of people (enough to make it bad enough) will simply jump her bland, mediocre, wishy-washy, centrist ship.
Biden, I suspect, will do well in the South (and the pundits will jump on how that’s gonna make a difference. “Hillar, I mean Joe Biden won several southern states. Now, sure, they never vote Dem in the general, but I’m not going to mention that because it makes me sound like an idiot when I say Biden’s the future of the democratic Party.”
Although it’s still possible that the People In Charge will ventilate Sanders before he can get the nomination, I think it’s too late for that. Murdering him would simply guarantee his replacement wins.
To Alex:
In the “ventilation” scenario, who do you see as Sanders’s replacement?
I’d assume if the DNC/HRC feel the need to ventilate Sanders, they’ll just do it and take their chances with voters’ response to any replacement.
Could get past the paywall, but only with certain browsers (Firefox). Weird.
Ted’s column reads like plain common sense: looking at (early) polls and fundraising – but in a place that wouldn’t know common sense if it kicked it in the unmentionables.
The comments at the WSJ alone are almost worth the price of admission that we just sidestepped.
Noam Chomsky always wondered why mainstream outlets didn’t have him on more often – against the backdrop of groupthink he would merely sounds like someone “from Neptune”, inadvertently reinforcing the prior beliefs of readers scandalized by an unfamiliar mindset who like their Kool-aid to be tempered just right.
Well, Ted, the Wall Street Journal is the Wall Street Journal and its readers – or at least those who post to its commentary threads – are precisely what one would expect, as a glance at the comments your opinion piece has engendered suffices to show. But even if it just is to energise their reactionary base, at least they publish you….
Henri