Bernie Sanders earned three big caucus wins yesterday, taking Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington by 70% or more. [Update 2016.03.28 09:37 CDT: I originally said all three were over 70%; the final result from Hawaii was 69.8% for Sanders.]
His unearned win this weekend was even better.
Yes, yes, that little bird. Sanders was mid-speech in Portland Friday when a little bird (sparrow?) flew onto the stage, then as if cued by Sanders, fluttered up to the podium to check out the democratic socialist and his water bottle for a few seconds while 11,500 Sanders supporters cheered.
This isn’t policy. This isn’t political art or artifice. This is just the nicest moment of the 2016 Presidential campaign. A plain little bird, who shouldn’t stand a chance against hawks and vultures, takes the stage and brings 11,500 people to their feet. And the kindly gentleman whom the bird interrupts, who’s working really hard to make an important point and win an important job, gives a fine human response to the unpredictable cosmos: he laughs and wishes for peace. Symbolism? You bet your yarmulkes.
Not that we need official campaigners to process moments like these for us in the Internet Age, but Team Sanders knows this unscripted moment makes a good campaign poster:
Every now and then, nice things happen to nice people. Shalom, sparrow. Shalom, Senator Sanders.
Bernie is picking up momentum! Things are going to get very interesting now.
Go Bernie!!
Alaska and Hawaii are small states. Not enough delegates there to even get excited about. Washington has more but since all three states are proportional, the delegate count hardly moved enough to make a difference for Ol’ Snowball. The Clintons only need to win 35% of the remaining delegates to Snowball’s 65%. A Sanders nomination is not going to happen no matter how many birds land on his lectern. The Clintons should clinch by the end of April.
Ol’ Don Coyote has only been right once in his life and that was when he choose to start reading this blog. Bernie is doing just fine and doing what has been expected all along. His losses in the deep south, where the Clinton machine sees to the doling out of donor monies from the Clinton money interests, were not a surprise to the Sanders campaign, it was expected. Arizona’s loss for Sanders was really a loss for the country as a whole. Republicans all want voter regulation except when it comes to actually allowing voters to vote. This is a national disgrace the way that Arizona claims to not have the money to regulate polling and yet has the money for taxpayer supplied sports arenas.
Look to Wisconsin and New York for some good things to come for Bernie if you believe in the power of movements. Look to South Dakota for that matter and see that the only candidate that is reaching out to Native voters as well as those that are actually doing the hard work to keep the state moving and you will see support for Sanders. That Ol’ Snowball does have a chance in hell to go against one of your boys and kick their fascist behinds.
Go Bernie!!
Only thang small about Alaska is their wingnut leadership.
http://www.themudflats.net/archives/46967
Bernie could beat Trump in the national election. I’m even surprised with how popular he is and this shows just how progressive the country has moved. I’m afraid it will be hard to beat the Clinton machine, though.
Young people are liberal these days, folks! The Grand Ol’ Fart Party doesn’t have much to offer when they’re anti everything.
Sanders represents decency, something that is surely lacking in politics these days.
His only flaw was that he does not keep his hair combed and now he combed his hair and the bird felt totally safe. Sanders can make Americans into good people and all Trump wants is to make you think you will get rich.
Sanders’s chances remain slim, sure. One online betting firm says his odds improved this weekend from +700 to +500. Don’t ask me what those numbers mean exactly, but apparently smaller is better. To compare, Bovara pegs Clinton’s odds of winning the nomination at –900.
I say the bird and the caucuses were each worth 100 of those points in Bernie’s improvement.
For the Presidential election, Bovada keeps Clinton as favorite at –225, then Trump at +225, Sanders at +900, Cruz at +2000, and Kasich at +2500.
FiveThirtyEight.com notes that Sanders has done better in caucuses, and there are only two caucuses left, in Wyoming and North Dakota. Says Harry Enten, “there’s nothing in the recent results to suggest that the overall trajectory of the Democratic race has changed. Clinton was and is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination.”
At least it is Bernie’s own hair,not a pelt stolen from an endangered spider monkey from Columbia. The “Bern” is a real man. Drumpf-not so much.
Cory, I’m just guessing, but the I think when the odds on Sanders improved that meant that if you bet on Bernie to win the Democratic nomination you previously would have gotten paid 7 times your bet. When the odds improved to +500, I think then you would only get paid 5 times your bet.
If you bet on Clinton to win the Democratic nomination you will only get paid 1/9 of a dollar for each dollar that you bet on Clinton. This means she only has a little over an 11% chance of losing the Democratic nomination according to Vegas.
For the Presidential election, if you bet on Clinton and she wins, you will get paid 1/2.25 which equals 44.4 cents for every dollar you bet that she will become President.
Trump pays 2.25 for every dollar bet on him if he wins. Sanders pays 9 to 1, Cruz 20 to 1, and Kasich 25 to 1.
Maybe a serious gambler can confirm or deny my hypothesis.
Sanders now has 46% of the pledged delegates. He has a very legitimate of closing the gap with wins in New York, California, and other states. If the primary season had been front loaded with states that he has won rather than a cruise through southern states where Clinton won, we would be having a very different discussion now. As it is, Sanders stands a very good chance of having a slight lead in pledged delegates. What will remain for speculation will be what will the super delegates do if we have a Iowa caucus like margin at convention time.
Spot on Charlie: Bernie narrowed the gap the single digits. Clinton is toast if the non-democratic super delegates vote as did their states. Bernie wins in the most diverse states, despite lacking media coverage, despite DNC even-handedness. In some states Clinton won by narrow margins, while in others Bernie wins in landslides.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/bernie-sanders-just-trounced-hillary_b_9551782.html
Close the gap! Close the gap! Bernie people, that means showing up. Get registered, get to the polls!
Speaking of polls, the Real Clear Politics average shows the gap between Clinton and Sanders is not as narrow now as it was in the last week of February. But it also shows Clinton peaked in December and hasn’t regained her strength from that peak. Over the same period, Sanders has climbed from 30% to 43%, his best average yet.
And Darin! Thank you for that math!
So if I bet a dollar on Clinton and she wins, I get my dollar back plus 11 cents? If I bet on Sanders and he wins, I get my dollar back plus $5
If I were teaching this in math class or writing a spreadsheet, I’d have to create a conversion: – means divide, + means multiply. Weird!
I believe that is correct Cory.