I'm Looking at the numbers from last night and I see that Sanders has lost just about every race. We knew it was an uphill battle going in, and we came out alive and have learned one thing: you can't beat the establishment at their own game. I can't but think that America is politically constipated with the two dominant parties, Democrats and Republicans.
Some of my friends wonder why I have such antipathy for Hillary - I don't hate her, I just don't like what she does. Read my blog and any article in it for the last 6 months or so and you'll get an idea. Given the numbers against Sanders in the primaries and the numbers in the general election polls, it's become clear that Hillary may do well in primaries due to all the unpaid assistance she received from the press, from her extensive political network and from establishment politicians sitting in office, but she is not likely to win the election in November.
The simple summary is this: polling well within the party is not the same as polling well without. Therefore I have come to accept that unless something big changes between now and the convention, an independent run by Bernie Sanders, and a much more organized and serious Green Party challenge to Clinton will very likely insure that Trump wins the election. We can only guess if that the other shoe will drop on that FBI investigation at the worst possible time for her.
I also see that the picture is even bigger than that. Let's assume that Clinton actually wins the presidency. I believe that down ticket, there will be a concerted effort by voters and supporters of Bernie Sanders to find their adversaries and vote against them. Many of them, and myself included, will be looking for anyone and everyone running for office and sitting in office who supported the Clinton game on the primaries. We will sniff them out and find their opponents and support them and we will vote for them. And I'm not talking about Republican opponents. I'm talking new Democrat and third party opponents.
This is already starting to happen with a new organization called Brand New Congress, an organization started by Sanders supporters and staffers, and mayday.us, another organization started by Harvard professor, Larry Lessig. Jane Sanders has said as much in a recent interview that this was a two-pronged approach. Try to elect Bernie Sanders and start a new organization working towards effective and positive change in government. If Bernie wins, that's a bonus, but the revolution is starting to turn and it will likely bear fruit by 2018.
This change may even be seen this term as discontent spreads and people express themselves by voting against incumbents. I saw this in the early 90s when I used to hang with the Libertarians. I watched as B-1 Bob Dornan lost his seat to Loretta Sanchez when Libertarian Richard Boddie took enough votes away from him to settle the score against him. That was an enlightening moment that I will never forget, and I expect to see it repeated at a much higher frequency in this and the following election cycles. There is a chance that the Green Party will find a seat in Congress and it only has to start with one seat.
Supporters of establishment politicians like Hillary Clinton are older as Hillary tends to poll well with Democrats over 45. The long game then is that Clinton and others like her will become less relevant over time as their numbers decrease. Millenials will work for change, with due notice of how they've been royally screwed by the current class of elite idiots who enabled Clinton to engage in her run for president. Her run for president is fueled purely by personal ambition and Millenials know it. They will find a way to vote in people who share a genuine concern for their well-being and start to effect a real change in this country, one for the better.
What Millenials are seeing now as the largest voting demographic, is that their previous, "I, me, mine" generation, went off on a lost weekend, declaring that everything they earned "is mine", succeeding generations be damned. This is the gift of the Reagan Revolution, a political movement prolonged by "we'll take what we can get from the Republicans" leadership demonstrated by Bill Clinton. We can expect more of the same from Hillary Clinton.
Now the two dominant parties are each outnumbered by independents at 43% of the voting population. This does not compare favorably with Republicans at 26% and Democrats at 30%, according to recent Gallup polls. Both major political parties are now firmly disconnected from most of the country.
With numbers like these, it is clear that a change is in store for both major parties and they may not be prepared for or willing to accept this change. Walter Bragman at Paste magazine has noted this reluctance and suggests that Clinton is such a weak candidate that she is not likely to see a second term. He is not the only one. I've seen more than a few articles on this subject and the writing is clearly on the wall.
Even considering the immense antipathy of the current crop of Republicans in Congress towards Obama, he's got nothing on Hillary. Already a target of several investigations, Hillary is looking at a very tough road indeed should she win the presidency. Worse, the conditions that helped her to win the nomination will only go further to help Republicans down ticket in Congress. She will very likely spend most of her time on defense as a leader of a party so thoroughly disconnected from the people they claim to represent.
She will almost certainly lose a large share of support even if she extends an olive branch to Sanders supporters. The response to her overtures, especially after all the irregularities in the primaries, is very like to be millions of middle fingers and votes for her liberal adversaries now running for Congress. If she wants to unify the party, her efforts will seem hollow at best. Her personal ambition to be the first woman president is just too hard to hide - there very little "public service" in her character. Before you claim any misogyny in this article, note that I would love to see a woman as president, just not this one.
Given the breadth, timing and scope of the voter purges, the party preference changes, and the clear divergence between election results and exit polls, it seesm that Clinton supporters are playing a sort of chess game. They're betting that they can stall and delay the investigations until after the nomination is secured in July. Sure, that's possible.
But that sort of game perverts democracy, when the purpose of democracy is to allow for peaceful revolutions to allow society to adapt to the way the world changes. At best, Clinton and her supporters have only delayed the inevitable change that the Millenials and succeeding generations so desperately need.
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