My dislike for Bernie has grown. I am not going to vote for him in the primary. I am leaning towards Buttigieg
No doubt about it the supporters of Bernie "Bros" of the Sanders campaign are the most diverse. BTW I went up to the Iowa Caucuses for 5 days to work for Bernie and actually was a Precinct Captain for Bernie in a caucus, though as an out of stater I could not vote. It was a farce that CNN and the rest of the media let Mayor Pete strut on national TV for 40 minutes and proclaim himself the winner with 0% reporting. Imagine if Sanders had done that!! It seems Pete and Bernie are tied with delegates and Bernie with at least 6000 more actual voters. Pete is a media darling, but has very very little support among Dem voters under roughly 35 or 40, same with African Americans of all ages, Bernie is number one among Latinos of all ages. I was assigned to a small white rural caucus 75 miles outside of Des Moines. All older whites nobody under I would guess of at least 55-60 with perhaps a majority in their 70's ?, Biden with absolutely zero support, Pete, Bernie and Warren all tied for delegates and were the only candidates to get delegates. Pete and Warren picked up the most from the Yang, Klobuchar and other non-viable candidates switching to end up tied with Sanders for delegates out of the caucus. Biden is toast. Pete can only hang in virtually pure white areas. Warren only strong with the highly educated and not doing real well with people of color in genera. With Bloomberg now tied in some polls for third w. Warren iirc nationally it may get down down to Bernie and the oligarch Bloomberg who has said he will double his ad buys. I think the billionaire is the perfect foil for Sanders. Bernie seems so nice but in a race against the richest man in Vermont in one of his campaigns, Senate or House, Sanders destroyed his opponent. The whole billionaire oligarch thing when presented so starkly will probably not play to the average American despite the ads and the spin.
If you are referring to the app issue... No, it was human mistake in coding. Anyone that does any app development for critical application understands that you do not introduce late changes until it's fully validated. It sounds like that was the cause - a late change, one that they believe was needed to cover up some security hole that someone found. The security vulnerability must be big enough for them to risk introducing a late change. Sh*t happens. If you are referring to the ad-hoc reporting afterward... As I said before, there isn't any way to report it and not have an issue with some group of people. I get both sides. Both are valid. But all in all... the reality of this is simple. Biden did horrible. Pete surprised. Everyone did as expected. Emotion seems to cloud that reality. And of course, the GOP wants to play that up as much as possible to sow division within the DEM - as they should, politically speaking. DEM should just be aware when they are being played vs their own legitimate grievances.
No. He's playing to win, like everyone else on the campaign. If you don't play to win, get out of the race.
imo, you just described Sanders' weakness, not his strengths. He looks strongest when there is a big field, and you isolate comparison of his voters to each other candidate individually. But as candidates drop out, they will not go to Sanders, but they will vote, because Trump. This is why Pete had the surprise showing...because of the 2nd Alignment voting of the Iowa Caucus format puts a lense on the math optics of limiting the field. Biden voters went to Pete.
Not a Buttigieg fan, but have to give him props for coming out of nowhere and winning/tying the Iowa caucus with nationally well-known, well-funded opponents. Sanders had a four-year head start on organizing for it, as well. I give a lot of credit to Lis Smith who boosted his campaign early on with a smart free media strategy. If Buttigieg wins the nomination, he should choose Barbara Lee as a running mate. If Sanders wins, he should choose Val Demings or Stacey Abrams.
Buttigieg seems inauthentic to me, like a weasel. I hate the sound of his voice. Don't get me wrong, I will contribute and support him if he wins the primary, but definitely not in my top 3 of this field.
Pete has that overpolished gloss that Mitt Romney had in 2016. It is a "right out of central casting" look that is too clever and too careful by half. It is a presentation that reeks of too much input from focus groups and career political consultants, to a degree that it is off-putting. Even though they both look the part and talk the part about as perfectly as any human being could ever reasonably expect to be able to do. But people have learned - correctly I think - to not trust that sort of overly manipulative presentation. A candidate with more warts, more flaws, more failures, and also a clear vision, with real passion and some demonstrated strength, including an ability to take some punches and to throw a few, is at the present time much more attractive. Romney failed in 2016 in large part because his candidacy did not strongly resonate with people on the conservative right, such as myself. I voted for him, but not with any great enthusiasm. Pete is in many ways a similar sort of candidate for the Democrats. If Pete ever wins the nomination for the Democrats, he is not likely to engender any more enthusiasm among voters than Mitt Romney did for the Republicans in 2016.
GOP 2012 - Counted wrong, declared the wrong winner, and didn't correct it for 2 weeks. Dems 2020 - Slow reporting and lots of chaos. Never declared a winner inappropriately. Also, GOP 2016... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...a-caucuses-through-fraud-idUSMTZSAPEC23ZBL9YS NEW YORK (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday accused rival Ted Cruz of stealing a victory in the Iowa caucuses and called for another vote or nullification of Cruz’s win. ... “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it,” Trump (@realDonaldTrump) tweeted. “That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!” ... “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Trump wrote.
I don't think this whole thing has been very costly to anyone besides the credibility of Iowa. The delegates are not winner-take-all, and the delegate count is tiny anyway, so that never mattered. The basic narrative of Bernie and Buttigieg coming out basically tied on top, Warren trailing, Biden disappointing -- that was clear all along. Who actually won between Bernie and Pete doesn't matter. So they were robbed of the opportunity to make an emphatic speech. The voters in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina got the gist of the outcome. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Let's revisit after South Carolina. There's history there, so I think more credence for conspiracy theories. Still wouldn't look too likely though.
The bigger problem with the Iowa caucuses is that it seems each precinct chair was expected to do math and calculate the SDEs on their own end. They should just report initial and final counts, and the IDP should have a central spreadsheet that does all the math. Asking something like 1500 separate volunteer precinct captains to each manually calculate the SDE's is just asking for endless mistakes.
