So, just because you add some numbers, doesn't mean that you've "done math at it." Admittedly, I
skimmed this blog post, partially because I hate when people decide which fonts to use, and partially because it woefully shrank a problem to "719 ÷ 1,016 = 0.707677 or approximately 71%". As I see it, the strategy here is:
- Clinton has 1664 delegates today, but needs 2383.
- There are 1016 delegates still in play.
- Therefore she has to get 71% of all the remaining ones.
- Sanders would need to get 99% of the remaining ones to win, but
- Sanders is going to win. QED.
There's also the useful footnote of "have not counted the so-called “super-delegates” because they do not vote until the convention, which you might not know because of the media’s disgustingly corrupt attempt to warp the public’s perception of the election."
Sigh.
How many superdelegates (who could totally change their minds, sure) are pledged for Hillary? Wikipedia suggests
498. That reduces the calculation above to 22% of remaining delegates need to go to Hillary. That doesn't seem impossible at all. Let's see if people who study this agree.
- 538 probably wouldn't exist if they didn't study this.
- Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium probably study this, since it's in the name and all. They have the likelihood of a Clinton Democratic candidate at 95%.
- Paul Krugman doesn't technically study this, but he knows people who do, and they show that you can predict the Democratic race based on some simple demographic breakdowns.
- The PEC has this nice examination how you can get google to do those breakdowns for you, and that that gives better results than other ways to estimate it.
Apparently there are counter arguments presented in
part two of that dumpster fire. I read this one even less, although I was taken by point 3 at the top. "the fact that a recent WSJ/NBC poll shows that 58% of the people “cannot see themselves voting for Hillary Clinton,” while Sanders" blah blah because there's a
link with the polling data. For
some reason, he's used the data from Q13 which considers the reaction to each candidate for all registered voters, where Clinton is unfavorable to 58%. However, in that same table, you see Sanders has a 48%. Not that big of a difference, given you can roughly assume half of people are Republicans, who wouldn't be in favor of either. Q14 is more applicable, which considers only Democratic primary voters, and showing Clinton and Sanders both having 78% favorable / 21% unfavorable. Those are literally the same numbers. Those crazy 21% people should probably relax a bit, and consider what's best for everyone.
It looks like the comments there are part of that 21%, which is unfortunate.
"If that’s what it takes to give the dnc the message, then yes!" No. That's not the way to do things. Just because you won't personally be impacted by a conservative government, doesn't mean you get to ignore people who would be.
"[...] most of the superdelegates are either lobbyists or elected officials with deep ties to the Clintons [...]" The first part is wrong, but they're all currently elected or previously elected (or ran the DNC at some point). Is that 100% democratic? No. But, consider that those people are largely people who have run on the Democratic ticket. They have an interest in keeping the party attuned to their goals. It prevents a charismatic leader showing up and making it so the party now has a platform plank that "people named Keith are jerks."
The final point is that not everything has to be solved immediately, and very little needs to be solved by some sort of revolution. Who makes up the Democratic party? "[...]
a coalition that included banking and oil industries, the Democratic state party organizations, city machines, labor unions, blue collar workers, minorities (racial, ethnic and religious), farmers, white Southerners, people on relief, and intellectuals." There's no need to be increasingly dogmatic, because the point is to help everyone get by. Everyone works together to solve a problem that individually they can't accomplish. Sometimes you bend what you want to get somebody else what they want, but as long as things generally improve, you accept it as the cost of compromise.
