If you ask how that’s possible — Bernie Sanders just won seven states in a row! — you need to realize that those seven states have a combined population of about 20 million. Meanwhile, Florida alone also has about 20 million people — and Mrs. Clinton won it by a 30-point margin.
To overtake her, Mr. Sanders would have to win the remaining contests by an average 13-point margin, a number that will almost surely go up after the New York primary, even if he does much better than current polls suggest. That’s not impossible, but it’s highly unlikely.
So the Sanders campaign is arguing that superdelegates — the people, mainly party insiders, not selected through primaries and caucuses who get to serve as delegates under Democratic nomination rules — should give him the nomination even if he loses the popular vote.
.. Mrs. Clinton didn’t win big in the South on the strength of conservative voters; she won by getting an overwhelming majority of black voters. This puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it?
Bernie’s Economics may not be feasible but it is useful
Known as the institutionalists, they believed that institutions, more than market forces, determined the distribution of goods in a society. As a group, they were more united by what they disliked in conventional economics than by what they agreed on. But they agreed that there was huge opportunity to improve the human condition by transforming the institutions that made up our society. They generally wanted stronger labor unions and weaker corporations. They wanted the government to play a continuously active role in regulating what they saw as the predatory practices of business.
.. Over the last 75 years, the actual people designing Republican economic policies — figures like Martin Feldstein, Gregory Mankiw, Glenn Hubbard — have nearly all relied on Keynesian principles and models of the economy. Even Milton Friedman, the most effective critic from the Chicago school, experimented with Keynesian ideas early in his career, and his proposals that actually affected government policy (the Federal Reserve’s approach to inflation, the earned-income tax credit, automatic tax deduction from payrolls) fit neatly into a Keynesian mode of thinking.
.. I spoke with Warren Gunnels, Sanders’s policy director, and he told me that the senator doesn’t believe there is a trade-off to be made.
.. It will inspire such enthusiasm and determination that more people will work harder and invest more, and the country will easily generate the tax income to pay for it. Hence, Sanders’s plans won’t cost money; they’ll raise money.
Sanders is bad on detail, but he has what Hillary lacks: the spirit of protest
But at a recent meeting with the editorial board of the New York Daily News Sanders could not put forth any coherent specifics on how he would go about breaking up the big banks – one of the demands he’s most associated with in the public consciousness. He wasn’t sure whether the Fed had the power do it or Congress, where the legal authority resided.
.. Not that the fuzziness mattered to Sanders supporters. His devoted following, mostly white and young, will remain steadfast to the end. Their loyalty to him is reminiscent of the Donald Trump supporters who don’t seem to care whether anything that comes out of his mouth is based on fact.
.. When Sanders talks about economic inequality and the 1%, the rallying cry of Occupy, he uses morally charged terms to describe them. This language is central to his appeal.
Your theory of politics is wrong
A democratic polity does not elect a technocrat-in-chief, but politicians whose role is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details. Paul Ryan’s various budgets haven’t been wrong because they require giant magic asterices to make the numbers add up. They have been wrong because the interests and values Paul Ryan represents are wrong. The magic asterices don’t reflect dumb mistakes, but smart politics.
.. expertise on technocratic matters ought not translate to any deference on interests and values
.. If you are honest, you will follow your own theory where it leads, as Bryan Caplan has, and work to limit democracy. But Caplan, whom I love, is mistaken, because he begins with a mistaken theory of politics. If you want to see how that theory of politics works in the real world, look no farther than the European Union, which is a real-time experiment in demoting democratic adjudication of values in favor of technocratic adjudication of facts.