Talk Elections

Yowza, Bernie. (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/173201-sanders-says-it-would-be-good-for-obama-to-face-primary-challenge)

I think that was rather predictable.  The hard left of the Democratic party hate the president, think he is a traitor and practically a third-term Bush '43, and they want to get somebody like Kucinich or Sanders himself to primary Obama.  This is not that last time we'll see a call for a Dem primary challenger this year, and who knows?  Someone might step up just to make the liberal case.

Bernie, the Green Party wants you to run for President. Go for it!

Someone had to say it.  :P

The thing is, thinking through it for a few moments, a liberal primary challenger to Obama would get so massively overwhelmed in the early states that running such a challenge would actually hurt the liberals' case.  Only about 20% of Iowa voters identify themselves as liberal, New Hampshire Democrats are pretty famously moderate, Nevada Democrats, many of them Hispanic, are not going to turn away from a president who put a Latino woman on the Supreme Court and at least supported the Dream Act, though he didn't pass it, and South Carolina Democrats, with a big African American base, are going to stick with Obama too.  

I think, if the liberals wanted to make their case, they should do something like host a kind of public "summit" with Obama, where they could air their grievances and try to pin him down on some commitments, instead.  Running a primary challenger who would only get destroyed with elemental fury in the early states would not do much to advance their agenda.  And, besides, eating your young is not a good way to stay in power; Jimmy Carter could relate a few stories about that.

Bernie would probably win Vermont if Obama were deemed to have more than 272 evs in the vag.

*!ag

**bag

I would vote for Sanders if he's the nomination for the Green Party.

That's my boy!  :)

I understand the logic of threatening to primary a democratic president to push him to the left, but what's the logic in actually following through on it? Surely Sanders should recognize that compromising Obama's campaign is bad for a liberal agenda. Why isn't he as afraid of a rupublican/ tea party administration as I am?

Sanders would be better than Obama or Romney.

Sanders is delusional if he thinks a hardline progressive can win nationally.

Obama is that particular type of leftist that doesn't inspire the touchy-feelies, does a lot to look like a corporate shill, and still manages to cause even right-leaning independents to froth at the mouth in abject hatred.

I do think Obama could be successfully primaried, though.  But I don't see the Dems doing that to the First Black President^TM.

okay this is my signature

-facepalm-

Best. Texting typo. Ever. :)

I would love to see Sanders run as the Green Party's candidate. But only if Paul runs as the Libertarian's candidate to even things out. :P

Bernie's not a Democrat so it's not really surprising that he'd say this.

They can vote for Obama's Democratic primary challenger, Randall Terry. :)

Or almost anyone else for that matter.

Chairman Sanchez says Sanders needs to get off his lazy bum and do it himself!

The problem there is that Sanders probably won't win, and then he'd be out of the Senate too. Other than that I would be with you a hundred per cent. Great Senator. Great guy, too. When I was growing up in Vermont he was already a living legend from his time as Mayor of Burlington even when he'd only racked up a few terms in the House. About the only modern Vermont politician who was any more the very definition of a freedom fighter was Fred Tuttle.

I disagree with Sanders on everything, but I love him still. He is the opposite of Ron Paul in a sense. He sticks to his convictions.

A lot people on the left are pretty pissed at Obama, but the right has the whole populist thing going on for the most part. I can't see the Democrats out doing them, especially not through a primary challenge.

Sounds like Sanders is just expressing his serious dissatisfaction. That's fine with me, Sanders has a lot of integrity, he's been around and stuck to his positions. That's far more than I can say for Obama, a man I have respect for....but it's dwindling every day he sells out his base for Wall Street and some fair weather independents. He got elected because of the people he energized, first to beat Hillary and then in the general. Obama owes progressives big time.

Sure thing. I have the same kind of respect for Ron Paul, he's talked the talk and walked the walk. The general feeling of frustration we have today (both right and left) is because neither party has shown any willingness to confront Wall Street or truly fight for the bulk of the working population.

Switch Sanders's and Paul's names there and I agree verbatim. If somebody like Paul could start some robust and electable paleocon (or even actually prinicipled neocon) outfit in Texas or somewhere that was anything like what Sanders did for Vermont when he helped found the Liberty Union Party (now doing business as the Vermont Progressive Party in all but name), I think that the political discourse would benefit tremendously.

Why doesn't the Progressive Party try and expand nationwide? I know many Democrats wouldn't want it to since they share some similar positions, but it would be better for the country if there was a viable third party. Plus the Progressive Party has in the past had success winning with Republicans like TR and  La Follette did.

Come on dude, chill out. The left wing of the Dems might be dissapointed or displeased but they certainly don't "hate" Obama. Not even David Broder's ghost would say something so ridiculous.

And in case you haven't noticed, Kucinich isn't exactly Mr. Popularity among the Kos crowd.

Well, Lyndon, whether one prefers the word "hate" or "displeased," if they prefer to stay at home rather than go to the polls next year, Obama will be toast.  They want to air their grievances, in any case.  I'm just saying that holding a "summit" where they would get to do that would be a better idea than running a primary challenger.

It's because Vermont is too small a base for the VPP to expand nationwide from. The Liberty Union Party was an outfit founded in 1970 by former Congressman William H. Meyer (the only Democratic Congressman from Vermont, ever, until 2007) which Sanders joined within the first year of its existence and almost immediately became the face of. It never won any statewide elections but it managed to elect a lot of local candidates during a period of immense social change in the state. Sanders resigned from the party leadership before his first election as Mayor of Burlington in 1981, after which it entered a period of decline and lost ballot access in the nineties. At that point Sanders, who was in the House of Representatives by that point, founded the VPP, along with a bunch of rural-working-class Republicans who felt alienated by the national party (think Jim Jeffords, though he himself wasn't involved). Right now there are I think five Progressives in the Vermont House, and their chief function is to introduce radical-seeming concepts that Democratic majorities end up passing years later (gay marriage and the nascent public option in Vermont started this way). This would definitely be a good idea at the national level, but it's so far been impossible to export even to New Hampshire and Massachusetts except on a very limited local level (Franklin, Hampshire, and Berkshire Counties in Massachusetts have a lot of these sorts of people, who tend to run in the Green-Rainbow Party there), because the conditions that created this coalition of leftist indies and alienated ancestrally-Republican farmers really don't exist outside the region. tl;dr The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills, and you shall understand it.

I really think that will be the #1 decider in the election anvikshiki.......We can have lots of fun making ev maps and such showing every pub candidate vs. Obama.....but all those projections are useless if a Dem turnout is in the tank.

A "summit" to express liberal dissatisfaction with Obama sounds exactly like the kind of meaningless, ineffectual gesture Obama himself would employ. So I wouldn't be surprised to see liberals embrace it.

Agreed, Gramps.  I don't know exactly where independents will be next fall, but my money is on independent support for Obama definitely being down from last time, and other demographics may be slightly down too.  If liberal turnout is lackluster, and with unemployment still high and the whole spectrum of the GOP fired up to oust him, it's hard to see how Obama can win. 

What percentage of voters who voted for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008 will vote for Obama in 2012 do you think?  Just asking. I actually know someone who did that. :P

I'm curious what % of voters who voted in both elections did that and what their party affiliation is.  As you probably have seen elsewhere, the number of actual swing voters is smaller than advertised.  2/3 of "Independents" are actually partisans.  But between actual Indy swingers and soft partisans who can stray, I don't think the voters in play are all that much, but not insignificant either.

As for liberal turnout for Obama, I bet the state of the economy will affect it more than Obama's centrism.

Good question.  Some of that cross-section of voters were probably conservative Democrats who were worried about security in 2004 and then swung back in 2008.  Obviously, some of that population must have been self-identified independents, with some shape of a default persuasion, too.  Probably most of the first group of conservative Dems will stick with Obama in 2012.  But, since the economy and not security will be the most important issue next year, I'd venture a guess that, as long as the GOP nominee isn't a nutter, maybe somewhere around a half of the independents in this group will either vote for the GOP nominee or sit the election out.  The independents in this cross-section are a bigger group, so their votes or abstentions will have more of an impact.

Actually my theory is that the cohort are mostly well do to RINO's. Thus my CD had one of the strongest trends to Obama in the nation, by about 10% or double the national average. CA-48 went 59% for Bush 2004, 49% for McCain, and 59% for Meg Whitman. I was one of those voters. :)

In other words, HW Bush Republicans. ;)