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Monday, April 4, 2016

Josh Voorhes on the Bernie Autopsy

As I noted in my last piece, more negative attacks earlier may have backfired. After all, now that Bernie has gone negative, his approval rating is negative 7.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2016/04/what-went-wrong-for-bern.html

Voorhes quotes a Clinton endorser who thinks Bernie could have hit her on the speeches earlier.

"There was one silver lining for Team Bernie in the report, though, which was that theTimes also got one of Hillary’s endorsers to do some of Sanders' work for him with regards to her paid Wall Street speeches. “Making the transcripts of the Goldman speeches public would have been devastating [to Clinton],” Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator, told the paper. “When the GOP gets done telling the Clinton Global Initiative fund-raising and expense story, Bernie supporters will wonder why he didn’t do the same.”"

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/04/04/bernie_sanders_campaign_second_guesses_self_to_new_york_times.html

How does he know it would have been 'devastating?' Is there a new rule in politics that making paid speeches means you are toast? But even Bernie initially had thought the paid speech thing was below the belt.

Maybe it would have driven up Bernie's negatives earlier. I think overall, Voorhes shows the problem with every what if game.

"Most of these decisions were of the resource-allocation variety, which are easy to second guess with the benefit of hindsight. Knowing what we do now, you don’t need to be a high-priced political strategist to say that Sanders should have focused a little more on Iowa and a little less on New Hampshire, or that he should have spent more money in Nevada or more time making inroads with the black community well before the primary race reached the South. But a candidate only has so much time and so much money, and spending those resources in one place means you have less to spend in another. Given Clinton’s massive advantages, Sanders could only look so far ahead without running the risk of being knocked out early. Sure, his blowout win in New Hampshire probably came with some diminishing returns, but a loss there would have brought a swift end to his campaign before the race even reached more diverse states like Nevada and South Carolina. (To say nothing of the fact that Sanders entered the race with the primary goal of pulling Clinton to the left—and he succeeded!—something that required a different strategy than a better-positioned challenger would have used.)"

Here's my theory. There has been a hunger for an Emoprog candidate during the Obama years. They wanted to primary Obama in 2012 and are getting their wish in the Bernie campaign. But this remains the minority of the party.



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