Tuesday, February 02, 2016

A Super Narrow Iowa Victory For Hillary

The margin is not even a full percentage point, and they might even end up snatching an equal number of delegates in the state, but it is a victory nonetheless. Suddenly things are topsy turvy. It was Donald Trump who was supposed to be the clear Republican nominee. Hillary was supposed to be in the doldrums. Now Trump looks like he might not even make it. And Hillary might end up narrowing Bernie's lead in New Hampshire.

The nomination is not Hillary's yet. The fight will go on all the way. But right now Hillary has the edge. Bernie will not stop. He will not quit. But the thing about fighting hard but clean is, they might even end up on the same ticket. Hillary and Bernie on the same ticket would give a decisive blow to Cruz. It might also considerably narrow a Bloomberg possibility. An Iowa loss for Hillary would have made clear room for Bloomberg.

Right now The Donald is probably licking his wounds. I thought I was rich and successful.

Cruz would be super easy to beat. The guy is so far out. He simply gives away all the middle ground on a platter. The Donald would be a circus. Also easy to beat, but more comical.

But this is still a close contest. Hillary can not rest. There will be drama.

No one on either side has been assured a nomination yet, but this was a rather interesting night.

Fierce competition inside both parties makes room for a Bloomberg. One way to look at Iowa is, we thought only the Democratic nomination was fiercely contested, now we know also the Republican nomination is.



Iowa’s many self-proclaimed winners
Hillary Clinton, who strode out with her family in tow to claim victory over Bernie Sanders without actually uttering the words “I won.” The closest she came was saying that “I stand here tonight, breathing a big sigh of relief.” At the time, however, her razor-thin lead was shrinking to mere tenths of a percent. There it remained. ......

Clinton was finally declared the apparent winner, 49.8 percent to 49.6 percent — not exactly what anyone would call a mandate.

...... Donald Trump gave brief remarks in which he graciously congratulated Cruz, thanked the people of Iowa and

said he liked the Hawkeye State so much, he might someday buy a farm there.

I’m trying to picture Trump in a pair of overalls. ...... Trump is a numbers guy; he looked at the results, saw that Cruz had more votes and conceded. But other candidates and commentators preferred to focus instead on expectations — what “they” said would happen versus what did happen. Hence the surfeit of self-proclaimed winners. ..... three months ago polls showed her 20 points ahead. And Sanders said he had fought the powerful Clinton political machine to a draw, which of course beat expectations. ....... the Sanders rebellion is certainly not halted and perhaps not even slowed. A party in which such a familiar and experienced figure as Clinton can be fought to a tie by a self-proclaimed democratic socialist is a party divided. ...... About 180,000 Iowans participated in the Republican caucuses, an all-time record. Meanwhile, just about 170,000 caucused on the Democratic side, far fewer than the record of nearly 240,000 in 2008.
Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders were the real winners in Iowa
Judging the victor by differences of tenths of a percentage point is a ridiculous enterprise when what’s being measured are delegate numbers, not tens of thousands of individual votes. ......

The real winners were Marco Rubio, with his remarkably strong third-place showing, and Bernie Sanders, with his virtual tie.

..... In the short term, Donald Trump was the biggest loser — true of any front-runner but even truer of a candidate whose campaign raison d’etre is that he is a winner. ..... The elaborate network of evangelical support and intensive voter contact and analytics he constructed outdid

the swaggering hold-a-rally-and-they-will-caucus approach of Donald Trump.

..... They were torn — except when it came to Trump. He had been crossed off almost all their lists, as too big a blow-hard, too politically inexperienced, too ideologically untrustworthy. ........ That Rubio came within a percentage point of passing Trump — the candidate leading in most polls leading up to the caucuses — is the most significant number of the night. ....

New Hampshire is not obviously fertile territory for Cruz; it is better suited to Rubio.

...... I left the Rubio events I attended here with a revived sense that Clinton should be very nervous about the prospect of facing him in a general election campaign. ...... Between Sanders and Clinton, tie goes to the underdog. If you have any question about this, ask yourself: Which campaign was celebrating Monday night, and which was trying to figure out what went wrong? ..... In short, Sanders is not disappearing any time soon. Trump is not running away with the nomination. For both parties, the Iowa results reinforce the likelihood that both nomination battles will stretch well into the spring, if not beyond.
The two numbers that explain Iowa caucus vote
"I am so thrilled that I am coming to New Hampshire after winning Iowa,” she said, fresh off a red-eye from Iowa, at a campaign rally in Nashua. “I've won and I lost there. And it's a lot better to win." ...... her tight win in Iowa speaks to the success of Sanders. ..... Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called Clinton’s performance in Iowa an “unmitigated disaster.” ...... “Hillary Clinton once again finds herself running neck and neck with an upstart challenger in a race that never should have been this close to begin with,” Priebus said in a statement. The committee also released a video titled, “Déjà Vu,” recalling Clinton’s troubles in the 2008 Democratic race. ...... “Nine months ago we had no political organization, we had no money, we had no name recognition and we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the country,” the Vermont senator told a cheering crowd in Des Moines on Monday night. “Tonight, while the results are still not known, it looks like we are in a virtual tie.” ...... With her slim win in Iowa, and a potential loss in New Hampshire on the horizon, Clinton’s path to the nomination may have gotten a bit rockier.
The two numbers that explain Iowa caucus vote
64. That’s the percentage of Hawkeye State GOP caucus goers who were Evangelicals ..... That’s much higher than anticipated ...... Cruz outperformed his poll numbers and pulled off a surprising win because Evangelicals turned out in big numbers ....

Among non-evangelical voters, he lost to Trump, 22 to 29 percent. That’s close to how final polls had predicted the caucuses would end up.

...... Mr. Trump may have upended the race, but he hasn’t destroyed the effectiveness of old-style retail campaigning. ......

84. That’s the percentage of voters age 18 to 29 won by Bernie Sanders

.... 58 percent of voters age 30 to 44. ..... Look at it this way: Sanders did better with young voters than did Barack Obama in his hope-and-change campaign of 2008. Obama won 57 percent of the under-29 crowd in that year’s Iowa Democratic caucus.

Monday, February 01, 2016

Bernie Has Momentum

Right now it is looking like Bernie will win Iowa, and win big in New Hampshire, and he has already raised so much money in January before any victory, his February haul will be bigger. This is a huge shift from where the race was only a few months ago. This is not Hillary's race no more. Two early victories will give Bernie a ton of momentum. A lot of working class Dems will give him a second look after that. Considering I was not following the race closely until only a few days back, I guess I am surprised.



New Polls Show Bernie Sanders Even in Iowa, Up Big in New Hampshire
winning by a whopping 31% in New Hampshire ..... Both of the recent Iowa polls are within the margin of error, illustrating that the caucus winner will depend upon turnout. If there is a big turnout, like the one that won the day for Barack Obama in 2004, then Bernie Sanders will likely win. If the turnout number is simply ordinary, the Democratic frontrunner should win the day. ...... In New Hampshire, recent polls are showing Bernie Sanders winning by bigger and bigger margins. ...... has Senator Sanders soundly defeating Hillary Clinton 61% to 30%. ..... In New Hampshire, Senator Sanders is bolstered by the fact that independents can vote in the Democratic primary, although he is now experiencing leads across virtually all demographics in the state with the motto “Live Free or Die.” ......

Senator Sanders will be in a great position to pull off one of the greatest, if not the greatest, political upsets in history if he can win both of the early states.

Here's Why Winning Iowa Could Break The Election Wide Open For Bernie Sanders
In the fall of 2007, Hillary Clinton held a 24-point lead over Barack Obama among black voters in a CNN national poll. By Jan. 18, 10 days after the New Hampshire primary, Obama was winning blacks by 28 points in the same poll, a 52-point swing...... This time around, Clinton again holds a commanding lead among black voters headed into Iowa. She boasts a roughly 45-point lead nationally, which her campaign refers to as a firewall. ...... The assumption fueling that fire is that Obama was able to win over the black vote because, put simply, he was black. If that's the case, the uber-white Vermonter Bernie Sanders isn't a serious threat to that firewall, and the Clinton camp can bank on a South Carolina victory no matter what happens in Iowa or New Hampshire. ...... After Obama's resounding victory in Iowa, the perception of him changed. All of a sudden, black voters saw that Obama could actually win. ..... If Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump comes out on top in Iowa, it will be the first time that millions of people waking up on Tuesday morning seriously think of those men as presidential material.

(The shock to the global audience, particularly if Trump wins, will be off the scale.)

If Obama's experience is any guide, winning Iowa could possibly unlock significant additional support. ........ For the American voter prior to 2008, the only thing harder than picturing a black man winning the White House might have been seeing a socialist occupying it. But if Sanders comes out on top in Iowa and follows it up with a win in New Hampshire, where he's well ahead, all of a sudden he becomes a viable candidate, and the firewall could be snuffed out. ......

noticed this weekend that poor and working-class white voters have been shifting toward Sanders and away from Clinton, an unusual pattern in a Democratic primary.

...... recalled in 2008 that before Iowa, Obama wasn't treated as credibly by his show's listeners, who wondered if "he would be the token black in the debate." ....... That all changed the night Obama won Iowa. "When that group said, 'We think Obama would be a good president,' that ignited something that said to everyone in our community, 'We might have something here,'" said Rev. Kyev Tatum, then senior pastor at Servant House Baptist Church in Ft. Worth, Texas. ....... Simmons, an Obama supporter, said he saw the 2008 shift in attitude in his own Detroit family, most of whom thought Obama had no shot with white America. "It is challenging the African-American community's assumptions of white people," he said. ........ "A black man won Idaho? I don't know if there's any whiter state in America than Idaho. That was the ... comical relief that sort of solidified it," Madison said. ...... "If South Carolina had come before Iowa and New Hampshire, Obama wouldn't have won," he said in 2008. "After New Hampshire and Iowa, the whole tide turned and he became credible, not because black folks changed their minds, but it was more as a result of white America validating to the black community that, 'Hey, he's OK with us.'" .........

Obama himself seemed to recognize the significance of the Iowa victory. "Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment. This was the place where America remembered what it means to hope," he said in his victory speech that night.

....... recalled what happened in 2008 to point out that Clinton's double-digit lead in South Carolina could erode. ....... in 2008, most if not all of the elected officials here were not with [Obama]. ..... It was a grassroots movement that bypassed elected officials. There was nothing she or anyone else could have done to stop it. It was sheerly the force of nature." ......

On Sunday, Sanders announced that he had raised $20 million in January alone, nearly all of it from small donors. “The numbers we’ve seen since Jan. 1 put our campaign on pace to beat Secretary Clinton’s goal of $50 million in the first quarter of 2016,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, said in a statement. “Working Americans chipping in a few dollars each month are not only challenging but beating the greatest fundraising machine ever assembled.”

...... If that kind of financial strength can be coupled with a handful of victories, Sanders could very well blow right through the Clinton firewall.


What would a Trump presidency be like?

Bernie Sanders shows strong momentum on social media
Sanders amassed the largest number of new Facebook followers of any candidate in the race, the social network said on Monday, topping Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump by 15,695 to 10,704. Clinton had the third most new followers, with 6,210 liking her page in the past day. ...... Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, also dominated the conversation surrounding the caucus on Facebook through Monday morning. .....

42.2 percent of conversations about the caucuses were about Sanders, compared with 21.7 percent for Trump and 13.1 percent for Clinton, according to Facebook.

..... Google trends data also showed strong interest in Sanders...... In Iowa, Sanders was the top-searched-for Democratic candidate on the search engine, with 52 percent of queries relating to the Democratic candidates. Clinton commanded 42 percent of queries. Even so, Trump was the top most-searched for presidential candidate overall, according to the most recent Google search data available.
My Iowa Predictions
Donald Trump, of course, is the frontrunner in the polls, and has been for much of the last six months (to everyone's amazement) -- both in Iowa and nationwide. ...... it'll be a big night for Trump, and it very may well be the beginning of Trump's eventual nomination. ....... The only real question for O'Malley is whether he drops out of the race immediately after Iowa, or whether he hangs on to see another crushing defeat in New Hampshire before he hangs up his spurs. ...... If the crowds are big, Bernie likely wins. If they're small, Hillary will emerge victorious. .....

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that Bernie Sanders takes the night.

...... Clinton and Sanders, in this scenario, will exit Iowa with an almost-equal number of delegates

Can't Wait For Google 5G

A network made up of thousands of autonomous drones, powered by solar energy, would then be used to deliver high-speed, reliable Internet around the world.
The push by major tech companies like Facebook and Google to deliver universal Internet access has been praised for its potential to connect the two-thirds of the planet without access to broadband, but critics have suggested it is solely motivated by private gains.......“We shouldn’t celebrate Facebook’s efforts to ‘bring the Internet to all’ because that is not what they are doing,” transparency advocate David Sasaki said in a blogpost published shortly after the unveiling of the Internet.org foundation........“When Zuckerberg says that access to the Internet is a human right, what he means is that access to Facebook should be a human right.”