OT: Democratic Primary Thread

[Jeff Van Gully]

Absolutely. I was disappointed by Obama in many ways, but I also know he started off with bad hand and ended up with an obstructionist GOP making it hell for him to legislate. But I love Obama the person. He's a wonderful personality and he clearly would have been the perfect president for this current crisis.

He started off with a bad hand but he played it the worst way imaginable when he spent so much time trying to build consensus with Republicans. They were never going to work with him and then when they took over Congress they completely neutered his Presidency. Now Joe "Once Trump is out of office Republicans will work with us" Biden is doubling down on that strategy.

The issue with this line of thinking is that long term a country cannot function long term without the two parties working together in some form of bipartisan manner. Otherwise you just get what’s happening now, Trump Republicans undoing everything that Obama did and the next Democratic President trying to build it back up.

Obama started off trying to do the right thing, but he couldn’t have predicted that voters would reward Republicans for being cynical, obstructionist pieces of ****. The Democratic Party and voters really failed Obama by not coming out in the midterms and he spent the majority of his Presidency playing with one hand behind his back and working against the refs.

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[Knickfan1982]

I find this idea that working with the other side of the aisle is somehow weak to be wrong. Every good politician does it, even when they have the majority.

Working with the other side is only good so long as they are willing to work with you. If they are going to drag their feet and demonize you rather than work with you then run the mofos over. Get done what you need to get done and let history sort it out. Republicans whined about Obamacare but when they had the power to repeal and replace it they didn't. They knew better because people had time to learn to like it.

Whitmer has enough progressive leanings to be considered left of center and to satisfy most of the party. And the GOP is really afraid of her. She would massacre Pence in a VP debate. She is a strong orator and she left a mark on Michigan politics with her fiery speeches in defense of labor unions. She has the character to be president. I think she is a much better choice than Klobuchar if they're leaning towards a woman from the mid-west.

If she helps Biden win Michigan and Wisconsin and helps in Pennsylvania then I would love her on the ticket. But I am thinking he might lean towards a minority to secure as big a turnout there as he can.

The Democrats are aiming for a sweep so they have control of the WH and Congress. The 2018 elections and the current circumstances make it very clear the Senate is highly obtainable now. That's the objective, regardless of your opinion of Obama

I think Obama's status as the first African American President and how his temperament compares to the Nativist dumpster fire that followed me makes him look like a much better President than he was. Would he be a huge upgrade over Trump. Without a doubt. But he was not an effective President and part of that was self inflicted. I am worried Biden learned nothing from his mistakes.

The evidence is already coming in real time that Biden actually learned quite a bit from past mistakes, whether they were his own, Obama's or Hillary's.

If he gets the sweep, he'll be much better than you expect. He's not running to get re-elected. He already said he'd step down if his age or health becomes a factor. That is why his VP selection is so important, because they will probably become the president.

All of that means Biden can do what he feels is good for the country without worrying about the rest of his career. This is it. If he has a majority I think he'll end up considerably more liberal than Obama was. Obama had some miscalculations and was not bold enough at times when he should have been. Obama is too careful in ways that were good at times, but also very detrimental to getting true progress on many fronts. I don't really think that is going to be Biden's flaw.

I do think he takes his role as a civil servant to heart and I do think he is running because he felt he might be the one that gathered the votes that beat Trump. So far, his calculation is looking correct. Anyway, I do believe you need to give him a chance to assemble his team and continue to show he's listening. He is showing that he is.

I hope you're right.

[Knickfan1982]

And it’s pretty dismissive to say that African American voters are voting against their own interests or just voting for Obama’s boy. Politics is the art of persuasion and building coalitions. Biden has been doing that over the years with many African American members of the Democratic Party and especially in South Carolina so it’s no surprise that he did so well compared to other candidates who didn’t make the effort.

Saying he is popular among African American voters because he was connected with Obama is no more dismissive than saying he's popular with them because he spent years building relationships with African American politicians in the Democratic party. Either way his popularity is more by association than by taking action to genuinely improve their lot.

[duetta]

The issue with this line of thinking is that long term a country cannot function long term without the two parties working together in some form of bipartisan manner. Otherwise you just get what’s happening now, Trump Republicans undoing everything that Obama did and the next Democratic President trying to build it back up.

Obama started off trying to do the right thing, but he couldn’t have predicted that voters would reward Republicans for being cynical, obstructionist pieces of ****. The Democratic Party and voters really failed Obama by not coming out in the midterms and he spent the majority of his Presidency playing with one hand behind his back and working against the refs.

Nonpartisanship is impossible in this country so long as Fox News and its fellow travelers in the conservative misinformation movement continue to hold sway.

When Trump threatens to change libel laws, my response is "make my day". This clown has no idea how much the First Amendment is protecting his fascist movement from the brutal takedown that they have earned.

[Knickfan1982]

The issue with this line of thinking is that long term a country cannot function long term without the two parties working together in some form of bipartisan manner. Otherwise you just get what’s happening now, Trump Republicans undoing everything that Obama did and the next Democratic President trying to build it back up.

I 100% agree. But Republicans need to show they are willing to meet us in the middle. They've effectively used threats of socialism to scare the Democratic party into the Center only to demand that we meet them in a middle which is actually the right. We need to drag them to the left so that we can finally meet each other in a genuine middle and the only way to do that is to ignore their screams of socialism and pass legislation that proves popular with the majority of the American people.

I had spoken to someone else on another site and he had pointed out that when right wing political parties took over some Scandinavian country after a recent election (I forgot which one. Might have been Norway or Finland) they didn't take any real steps to undo free college, free healthcare and several other large social programs because those programs were too popular. We can do the same thing here.

Obama started off trying to do the right thing, but he couldn’t have predicted that voters would reward Republicans for being cynical, obstructionist pieces of ****. The Democratic Party and voters really failed Obama by not coming out in the midterms and he spent the majority of his Presidency playing with one hand behind his back and working against the refs.

He overestimated the American people. lol

[HarthorneWingo]

Yes, Bernie would have captured the majority of the black vote in the general election simply because black voters are voting democrat by and large. But you need those votes to win the nomination, so ............

If the goal is to beat Trump then I think this discussion matters because Bernie supporters aren't guaranteed for Biden. That problem was one way and it's why I've always maintained the electability argument was pretty much illogical...Black voters will turn out for Bernie; Bernie supporters might not for Biden.

yep. they went against hillary last time.

shoe on the other foot, hillary supporters were more likely to support bernie against trump. i think the same would have been the case if bernie won this election.

Not quite. Hillary supporters fcked Barack more than Bernie supporters fcked Hillary. Really, Hillary fcked Hillary.

[HarthorneWingo]

So can someone explain to me how a public option healthcare system works during an economic depression you have 30% unemployment?

[j4remi]

yep. they went against hillary last time.

shoe on the other foot, hillary supporters were more likely to support bernie against trump. i think the same would have been the case if bernie won this election.

Pure speculation but I think the dynamic comes down to the fact that a lot of lefties have found more success fighting for their causes through collective actions than electorally since the Third Way rebranding of the Dems. Moderates have won the electoral battles so their more loyal to that process whereas lefties have a natural affinity toward activism and protest action because that's all they've had.

Even in this cycle the DNC threatening to black ball anyone advisors who helped an incumbent challenger shows the type of obstacles that lefties have uniquely had to deal with and why a sizeable chunk choose to focus on their specific battles rather than stress over voting (for better or worse). I also think that's why it's been a bigger challenge getting the left to coalesce behind a single candidate.

[Clyde_Style]

The issue with this line of thinking is that long term a country cannot function long term without the two parties working together in some form of bipartisan manner. Otherwise you just get what’s happening now, Trump Republicans undoing everything that Obama did and the next Democratic President trying to build it back up.

I 100% agree. But Republicans need to show they are willing to meet us in the middle. They've effectively used threats of socialism to scare the Democratic party into the Center only to demand that we meet them in a middle which is actually the right. We need to drag them to the left so that we can finally meet each other in a genuine middle and the only way to do that is to ignore their screams of socialism and pass legislation that proves popular with the majority of the American people.

I had spoken to someone else on another site and he had pointed out that when right wing political parties took over some Scandinavian country after a recent election (I forgot which one. Might have been Norway or Finland) they didn't take any real steps to undo free college, free healthcare and several other large social programs because those programs were too popular. We can do the same thing here.

Obama started off trying to do the right thing, but he couldn’t have predicted that voters would reward Republicans for being cynical, obstructionist pieces of ****. The Democratic Party and voters really failed Obama by not coming out in the midterms and he spent the majority of his Presidency playing with one hand behind his back and working against the refs.

He overestimated the American people. lol

I can confirm that even the White Nationalists in Sweden won't attack public health care. People are used to it and they have paid for it.

[Knickfan1982]

So can someone explain to me how a public option healthcare system works during an economic depression you have 30% unemployment?

Probably works about as well as a private health care system during an economic depression with 30% unemployment considering a very significant amount of Americans get their health care through their jobs.

[Jeff Van Gully]

If the goal is to beat Trump then I think this discussion matters because Bernie supporters aren't guaranteed for Biden. That problem was one way and it's why I've always maintained the electability argument was pretty much illogical...Black voters will turn out for Bernie; Bernie supporters might not for Biden.

yep. they went against hillary last time.

shoe on the other foot, hillary supporters were more likely to support bernie against trump. i think the same would have been the case if bernie won this election.

Not quite. Hillary supporters fcked Barack more than Bernie supporters fcked Hillary. Really, Hillary fcked Hillary.

nah, bruh. there was a no vote movement after bernie was out. those bernie bros could have spared us trump at least.

[Pointgod]

The issue with this line of thinking is that long term a country cannot function long term without the two parties working together in some form of bipartisan manner. Otherwise you just get what’s happening now, Trump Republicans undoing everything that Obama did and the next Democratic President trying to build it back up.

Obama started off trying to do the right thing, but he couldn’t have predicted that voters would reward Republicans for being cynical, obstructionist pieces of ****. The Democratic Party and voters really failed Obama by not coming out in the midterms and he spent the majority of his Presidency playing with one hand behind his back and working against the refs.

Nonpartisanship is impossible in this country so long as Fox News and its fellow travelers in the conservative misinformation movement continue to hold sway.

When Trump threatens to change libel laws, my response is "make my day". This clown has no idea how much the First Amendment is protecting his fascist movement from the brutal takedown that they have earned.

I don’t think that non partisanship is impossible, it’s just that there’s no penalty for Republican partisanship. Democrats are expected to act like adults while Republicans can act like **** lunatics. The only way that changes is to get better Republicans and the only way that changes is for Democrats to take power and bury Republicans in every election for the next 10 years. And that doesn’t happen unless people consistently show up to vote Democrats into office.

[DOT]

yep. they went against hillary last time.

shoe on the other foot, hillary supporters were more likely to support bernie against trump. i think the same would have been the case if bernie won this election.

Not quite. Hillary supporters fcked Barack more than Bernie supporters fcked Hillary. Really, Hillary fcked Hillary.

nah, bruh. there was a no vote movement after bernie was out. those bernie bros could have spared us trump at least.

12% of Bernie supporters voted for Trump in 16 compared to 25% of Clinton supporters in 08 voted for McCain

While yes, you can say that if every Bernie supporter voted for Clinton she would have won, I use the analogy of, that's like blaming the guy for missing the last second shot in a 1 point loss when you shoot 5-19 from the free throw line. Yes, it's technically not wrong, but you shouldn't've been in the position to need that shot if you hadn't f*cked up all game

And blaming it all on Bernie supporters is a cheap way of not actually wanting to analyze the problems of 2016 and figure out how we can avoid that happening again

Here's the source, with some analysis: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/24/16194086/bernie-trump-voters-study

Basically, the people who defected to Trump from Bernie were the more older, white voters who were more of the working class, union folk than his soc dem base

[Pointgod]

The issue with this line of thinking is that long term a country cannot function long term without the two parties working together in some form of bipartisan manner. Otherwise you just get what’s happening now, Trump Republicans undoing everything that Obama did and the next Democratic President trying to build it back up.

I 100% agree. But Republicans need to show they are willing to meet us in the middle. They've effectively used threats of socialism to scare the Democratic party into the Center only to demand that we meet them in a middle which is actually the right. We need to drag them to the left so that we can finally meet each other in a genuine middle and the only way to do that is to ignore their screams of socialism and pass legislation that proves popular with the majority of the American people.

I had spoken to someone else on another site and he had pointed out that when right wing political parties took over some Scandinavian country after a recent election (I forgot which one. Might have been Norway or Finland) they didn't take any real steps to undo free college, free healthcare and several other large social programs because those programs were too popular. We can do the same thing here.

Obama started off trying to do the right thing, but he couldn’t have predicted that voters would reward Republicans for being cynical, obstructionist pieces of ****. The Democratic Party and voters really failed Obama by not coming out in the midterms and he spent the majority of his Presidency playing with one hand behind his back and working against the refs.

He overestimated the American people. lol

The current Republican Party is made up of cynical, politically craven idiots, but the party is not completely without hope. People claim that Trump is a symptom, not the disease, well that’s not entirely correct. Who’s at the head of the party matters. Having the dark Lord Mitch McConnell and criminal sociopath Trump leading party gives permission structure for the rest of the party to do their worst. While the politics of someone like Kasich are pretty trash, there’s no question that you’d be seeing a different party with him as President and majority leader Romney for example, because ultimately character matters.

And it’s funny because Republicans can be bipartisan on a lot of issues it’s just that they let politics get in the way. The perfect example is Obamacare. Mitch McConnell loves Obamacare, it’s just that in Kentucky it’s called KYconnect. Republican voters love ACA but hate Obamacare. Don’t think for a second if Medicare4All was being pushed nationally he wouldn’t defend KYconnect against Socialist healthcare. The only way to move the country left is for Democrats to control all 3 branches of government and the Supreme Court. For that to happen people need to show up in every election, special election, national election and everything in between to make sure Democrats control and maintain power. Once left leaning laws are in place, it’s going to be hard to roll them back. But for that to happen Democrats need to do what they didn’t do for Obama. Give the party the tools to make a difference.

[GONYK]

You may be right, but as the boring pragmatist that I am, I'll say it again, that's the path to the nomination and Joe had it and Bernie did not, so it really doesn't matter if you are correct about that elasticity.

What matters is what Biden does now with Sanders team to build the coalition.

My pragmatic strategies are more general election focused than primary. I'm not even sure Biden wins if Warren drops out and puts progressive goals over her hurt feelings before Super Tuesday (the numbers leave plenty of space for doubt).

I also think it's not on Sanders any more. It's on Biden. Sanders can give advice and suggestions but Biden has to be the one to reach out and win over the progressives. He's shown a willingness to move left with a couple of policy ideas so I'm hoping he gets it but winning trust with his record is going to take some work and probably a few roles in his transition team.

Unless the belief is that a Warren endorsement was going to put Bernie over the top with black voters (which it clearly would not have), I don't see how it would have changed much, which is probably why she didn't endorse Bernie. I'm interested in seeing the numbers you reference.

Her endorsement carries significantly more weight now and could even be possibly parlayed into a VP or very high ranking cabinet spot.

Looking back, Bernie would have been better served building a relationship with someone like Clyburn, rather than banking on his 30% carrying him through a very large and contested field.

[Clyde_Style]

You may be right, but as the boring pragmatist that I am, I'll say it again, that's the path to the nomination and Joe had it and Bernie did not, so it really doesn't matter if you are correct about that elasticity.

What matters is what Biden does now with Sanders team to build the coalition.

My pragmatic strategies are more general election focused than primary. I'm not even sure Biden wins if Warren drops out and puts progressive goals over her hurt feelings before Super Tuesday (the numbers leave plenty of space for doubt).

I also think it's not on Sanders any more. It's on Biden. Sanders can give advice and suggestions but Biden has to be the one to reach out and win over the progressives. He's shown a willingness to move left with a couple of policy ideas so I'm hoping he gets it but winning trust with his record is going to take some work and probably a few roles in his transition team.

Unless the belief is that a Warren endorsement was going to put Bernie over the top with black voters (which it clearly would not have), I don't see how it would have changed much, which is probably why she didn't endorse Bernie. I'm interested in seeing the numbers you reference.

Her endorsement carries significantly more weight now and could even be possibly parlayed into a VP or very high ranking cabinet spot.

Looking back, Bernie would have been better served building a relationship with someone like Clyburn, rather than banking on his 30% carrying him through a very large and contested field.

I mentioned before this key point that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere: Warren still had (has) a shot, albeit an outside chance, at being Biden's VP. And that was worth far more than endorsing Bernie when he was already going to lose. Her endorsement would still have seen her base split between Biden and Bernie, so it would have been a wash at best. There was not logical reason for her to endorse Bernie. She had to sit it out and simply back the winner.

[duetta]

So can someone explain to me how a public option healthcare system works during an economic depression you have 30% unemployment?

It might not work in a depression - which might open the door to single payer.

Remember, the issue here is the reluctance of Americans to let go of their employer based policies, which they receive on a greatly discounted basis (and is considered part of their current compensation).

However, if you have U6 unemployment at roughly 20%, and another 20% of Americans afraid that they could lose their insurance (along with their job), in addition those on the left who already support the policy, then all things become possible.

But they were not possible with unemployment at 3%.

The Coronavirus is rapidly changing the equation - but supporters of this change need to be savvy and emphasize the dramatic savings in our national healthcare expenditures that this policy could lead to.

The American people are diverse bunch, with a quite a number not persuadable by humanitarian arguments; but they might be persuaded by an emphasis on the dramatic cost saving that would be possible under single payer.

To put this in perspective, the last figure that I saw was that the US spent roughly $3.6 trillion in 2017 on health care (which is roughly equal to 17-18% of GDP). If we could just achieve the level of efficiency that our non-single payer advanced industrial competitors enjoy (which is 12%-13%), we would save roughly $1.2 trillion a year (while covering everybody - with most of these savings coming out of the pockets of the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and top executives in the hospital systems of America).

But to get even Republican-leaning voters to go along with this, you need to emphasize the cost savings, not the usual humanitarian arguments - which many Americans have been trained to emotionally discount.

You need to emphasize what's in it for them.

That's how we win.

[HarthorneWingo]

Biden's opening offer sucks.

Lawrence O'Donnell knows the truth.

Watch on YouTube

[Pointgod]

Not quite. Hillary supporters fcked Barack more than Bernie supporters fcked Hillary. Really, Hillary fcked Hillary.

nah, bruh. there was a no vote movement after bernie was out. those bernie bros could have spared us trump at least.

12% of Bernie supporters voted for Trump in 16 compared to 25% of Clinton supporters in 08 voted for McCain

While yes, you can say that if every Bernie supporter voted for Clinton she would have won, I use the analogy of, that's like blaming the guy for missing the last second shot in a 1 point loss when you shoot 5-19 from the free throw line. Yes, it's technically not wrong, but you shouldn't've been in the position to need that shot if you hadn't f*cked up all game

And blaming it all on Bernie supporters is a cheap way of not actually wanting to analyze the problems of 2016 and figure out how we can avoid that happening again

Here's the source, with some analysis: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/24/16194086/bernie-trump-voters-study

Basically, the people who defected to Trump from Bernie were the more older, white voters who were more of the working class, union folk than his soc dem base

Feel free to discount but here’s a post that I found from another forum. I’ve only seen that 25% number attributed to this one study. I’d actually like to see exit polling from 2008 and 2016 that shows a breakdown of Primary votes to General Election votes.

The line is "25% of Hillary supporters voted for McCain, only 12% of Bernie supporters voted for Trump." Not only do you see this all over social media, it's also one of the #1 talking points Sanders surrogates use in media appearances. And you're going to start seeing it far more often once Bernie's anti-party scorched-earth tactics, factionalism, and the 2016 mess become campaign issues, which appears to be Warren's strategy.

Let's start with the 25% number. There is one single source for this, which is a "Public Opinion Quarterly" poll (anyone ever heard of them? lol). It says that of Clinton voters, 70% of them voted Obama, 25% McCain, 5% didn't vote.

This isn't actually a poll, though. It's an unweighted dump of survey results. As we know here on Atlas, just reporting raw numbers isn't a poll; pollsters use stratification and demographic weighting to get actual predictive results. And that's why we see a whole bunch of issues. First and foremost, it also says only 87% of Obama voters voted for him in the general. Second, doing the math on the results in the poll, it says McCain received 1% more than Obama (8% away from the actual results).

So, I think we can all agree that this number is baloney. The actual results, according to exit polling, were that 84% of Hillary voters went for Obama, and 15% for McCain, 1% Other/NV.

Fact 1: 84% of Clinton voters went for Obama. The "25% voted McCain" number is from an unscientific survey, not an actual poll.

Now let's look at that 12% number. That's coming from a FiveThirtyEight report. But when we look at this table, we see that yes, it's true 12% of Bernie supporters voted for Trump; however, 4.5% voted for Jill Stein, 3.2% voted for Gary Johnson, and 6% were Other/NV. In total, 25.7% didn't vote for Hillary.

And this makes sense when you think back to 2016. Yes, there were plenty of former Bernie "supporters" urging them to vote for Trump. But the real effort was to encourage them to vote third-party or stay home. A lot of people currently in senior positions in Bernie's inner circle (including all three black people he campaigns with - Nina Turner, Killer Mike, and Cornel West) supported Jill Stein and urged former Sanders supporters to vote for her over Clinton. Sanders' own wife was out there telling folks to "vote your conscience" the day before the election. The online left-wing media, which gets its cues directly from the Sanders campaign, was divided between "anyone but Clinton" and "I hate her with all my heart but I'll vote for her if I absolutely have to." Is it any surprise that more than 13% of Bernie supporters ultimately voted third-party or stayed home?

Fact 2: 74.3% of Sanders supporters voted for Clinton. 12% voted for Trump, but a further 14% voted third-party or stayed home.

So 84% of Clinton voters went to Obama, while 74% of Sanders supporters voted for Clinton. Sanders got 40% of Democratic primary voters, so let's say those were 20% of the country. That means that a full 5% of the electorate were Sanders voters who could have voted Clinton but instead voted Trump, Stein, Johnson, Harambe, or Netflix. And there was a 10% difference between 2016 and 2008, which means that the #NeverHillary impact in 2016 was a full 2% more of the electorate. Add 2% to Clinton's results and she wins Florida (lost by 1.2%), Pennsylvania (lost by 0.72%), Michigan (lost by 0.23%), and Wisconsin (lost by 0.77%). In PA/MI/WI, Stein voters alone outnumbered the Clinton-Trump margin.

Fact 3: If Clinton had received 84% of Sanders supporters instead of 74%, she would have won the election.

Now is this the only reason Clinton lost? Is Sanders solely responsible for the Clinton loss? Of course not. In a campaign that ultimately comes down to 0.7% of the vote in three states, it took a confluence of several different factors to take Clinton down. If Comey hadn't dropped his phony "reopening" of the Clinton investigation over nothing a week before the election, she would have won. If the Clinton campaign had focused 100% of their resources in October on solidifying the swing states, instead of getting overconfident and trying to spread themselves thin to help downballot candidates, they would have won.

But the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible that if Sanders had done for Clinton what she did for Obama in 2008, a full-throated endorsement and diligent, devoted effort to defeat Trump, she would have won. Instead, we got a half-baked "Clinton is bad but she's not as bad as Trump" endorsement, a self-centered book tour disguised as campaigning that barely mentioned Clinton, his former campaign staff absconding to the Green Party, and his former media empire turning extremely anti-Clinton, none of which Bernie did anything to stop.

Bernie has spent most of 2018-19 trying to gaslight voters into thinking he did everything he could to help Clinton and the Democrats in 2016. But I was intimately involved in the Clinton campaign in 2016 and I remember being horrified at what Sanders was doing. It was a series of "Oh God, he's really going to do this to us" moments.

After running a scorched-earth campaign where he was still attacking the nominee in June/July and creating mayhem at the convention and endorsing the WikiLeaks attack as an avenue towards blackmailing the Democratic Party, Sanders gave a begrudging speech where the only nice things he could say about Clinton were "she agrees with me on some issues", disappeared for several months to write a book about how great his campaign was, demanded a private plane and all sorts of concessions from Clinton just to campaign for her, and then his campaign events were the same begrudging speech and self-aggrandizement. He barely mentioned Clinton during those events, just saying "anyone but Trump", which left the door open to 14% of his supporters voting for someone who was neither Trump nor Clinton.

Fact 4: Bernie may not be fully responsible for the gap, but he did far less to help Clinton in 2016 than Clinton did to help Obama in 2008.

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=354294.0

Also in a strictly literal sense you can argue that if the people in the Primary that voted for Bernie votes for Clinton she wins.

Read on Twitter

It’s a depressing stat. Even if half the Sanders to Trump voters voted for Clinton she would have won. It’s not so simple as that though. It’s possible that the votes for Bernie in the primary were really anti Clinton and these people wouldn’t have voted for her in the general. What doesn’t get the right focus is the number of voters who went Bernie in the primary, then either voted 3rd party or stayed at home, which is inexcusable.

[Clyde_Style]

Trump's support is weakening. Older voters are disproportionately affected by the virus and they are losing confidence. He cannot win if that support continues to erode.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/trust-in-trumps-virus-response-is-falling-what-does-it-mean-for-november/ar-BB12r003

"Just 43 percent of people 65 and older said they thought Mr. Trump was doing all he could to confront the outbreak, according to a CNN poll released this week. Fifty-five percent said he could be doing more. By comparison, Americans aged 50 to 64 — who tend to see Mr. Trump more favorably over all — were more likely to say he was doing what he could."

Also, Rasmussen polls have been the most Trump-centric polls and their numbers have slipped heavily. I don't recall ever seeing this low before at 43% for/51% against. Rasmussen typically has Trump at least 5 points higher. 5-38's adjusted numbers for Rasmussen are 37% for/58% against which is the territory where the GOP starts to panic. If Rasmussen's unadjusted % hit the 30's, that will be significant news. That Rasmussen is now among the lowest of the polls is also a first.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/