@boriscleto

reporting that 82% is in. If so then Biden would need to get 67% of the remaining votes. He's currently at 27%. What are the odds that such a huge number of Biden votes would now come in? Zero, of course. There's no chance of it and Bernie has won California. But CNN, for one, is still refusing to call it for him. They had no problem calling Michigan, though, with something like 18% in.

Perhaps Bernie will hold on and win Washington. We'll see. Tulsi has over 8,500 votes so far. If we were to emulate the Hillbots we'd be screaming at her, saying she hurt Bernie!!!! But we don't do that because we're more aware.

#2 Said results won't be available until tomorrow. We still don't have full results from California...

@Daenerys
on that idea, going into more detail.
I was impressed, when Greta appeared, that it became more difficult to get past caring parents (hers and others) to harm her message. How would you enforce no non-appearing?

#5 I know, stuff we've been saying for a long time now, like don't buy anything you don't absolutely need, shop local/small businesses, cut your cable, etc. Walk or ride a bicycle if you're able to and it's safe for you to do so. It would be so easy to cripple the economy; right now is a good time because people are already stockpiling things.
Hubby is on spring break this week and wondering if his university will even be open next week. Kinda hard to do lab work online.

@Pricknick I would help organize donations.
I would give everything I had to them, since I won't need it that much longer (age is the thing!)and I have no children or family, other than a crazy fun brother.

#5

General strike for those who can afford it.

The majority can not. That's the plan.
We will all see exceptionalism wither and die as it should.
All greater and lessor nations succumb to the belief that they are the greatest.

@Pricknick

I bet there are some people who can afford to strike. Or do some of the things Danny mentions.

Of course this generation is going as planned. From Reagan destroying unions, Clinton's deregulation of banks, NAFTA etc.., Biden's bankruptcy bill that made it so people couldn't discharge debts especially student ones, Bush doing what he did and Obama doing what he did it's all been planned for decades. The new deal is almost totally rescinded.

#5

General strike for those who can afford it.

The majority can not. That's the plan.
We will all see exceptionalism wither and die as it should.
All greater and lessor nations succumb to the belief that they are the greatest.

@MichaelSF @MichaelSF I think Sanders was between a rock and a hard place. I don't think he or his staff are fools with no clue about what they were getting into. There must have been serious discussion about Dem vs 3rd party that took place. But I wasn't there so I don't know what factors they considered when deciding to cast their lot with the Dems. With the amount of time and energy needed to build a new party my guess is that it was never seen as a very likely option, or they'd have jumped in years ago to get the ball rolling.

After all, things were looking very promising for Sanders as a Dem just a few short weeks ago, but talk about stopping on a dime and getting 9 cents change it all went downhill (or was pushed downhill) very quickly.

The Dem Establishment is full of rats, and I suspect they were starting to feel cornered. There's an old saying about dealing with cornered rats, and it looks like it applies here. Like Sanders, the Dems will do what they think they have to do.

I find it interesting that with about 80% reporting it looks like Biden has gotten about 80% of the Mississippi votes. I'd think that the typical MS D-voter would probably benefit a lot from what Sanders was proposing, but I guess they didn't see things the way I did.

#6 1)A number of states have "sore loser" laws that prevent someone who loses the primary from running in another party, and 2)the duopoly has done a thorough job of making it difficult for other parties to even get on the ballots in some states. There are steep requirements to be met, and I think I've seen those often have to met many months ahead of an election. So last minute switches to 3rd party seem pretty much non-starters.

If Sanders had wanted to run 3rd party he should have started right after the 2016 Dem convention, and I'd expect that even if he had there'd be no shortage of roadblocks thrown up in 50 states plus territories, all of which get to have their own rules on who gets on a ballot.

Sanders bet on the Dem party, and if that turns out to be a rigged game, he'll lose with it. Of course, if he had run as 3rd party this time what are the chances of there being even more of a media blackout/attack than he faced as a Dem?

@Steven D

Either way, I expect a Trump win in the General. GOP will hack the machines in the states they need to win. They did it in 2004.

In 2020, they won't need to. If Joe Biden gets the nomination, Trump won't even need to campaign much, just have the campaign staff glean embarrassing cuts from Biden's campaign clips. We'll get "four more years", no problemo.

#6 #6 it's an enforceable agreement. They can sue him if they like but it will be a bad loom for the Dems if they do.

Either way, I expect a Trump win in the General. GOP will hack the machines in the states they need to win. They did it in 2004.

@mimi
that they haven't been working to rig the primaries. They couldn't use that sorry previous court case to hide behind, because enforcing the above nonsense requires that they upheld their side of it in good faith, which they clearly haven't and never intended to do.

#6
in this comment from you:
here

Here you go,

". . . I am a member of the Democratic Party. I will run as a Democrat, accept the nomination of my Party, and I will serve as a Democrat, if elected."

". . . as Democratic Candidate for the Office Of the President Of The United States, . . . record of public service, accomplishments, public writings and/or public statements affirmatively demonstrate that the Candidate is faithful to the interests, welfare, and success of the DP of the United States, and will participate in the Convention in good faith."

.
It triggered a comment from me I won't repost, but basically I have still the same thoughts about it.

@Shahryar
than the early voting states. It's an all mail-in ballot state.

For a very long time, absentee ballots were used by the most conservative CA voters or they were the easiest ballots to rig in various ways. This was never tolerable imo, but way back then, only a small minority used absentee ballots and voters needed a legitimate reason for needing to vote absentee. Most voters preferred to vote after the campaigns were completed.

Governments like early voting, absentee ballots, and all mail-in ballots because they're too freaking cheap to hold elections. IOW, we can't afford even this small aspect of democracy.

Unlike an mail-in primary ballots, at least caucus voters can move to a second or third choice when their first choice isn't viable. Perhaps WA voters will now recognize that all mail-in primary ballots are a very bad idea unless it's a ranked choice ballot.

#8

a friend of mine voted for Warren two weeks ago.

@thanatokephaloides

They are that powerful in relation to those who watch them. Most people under 50 don't watch them. Most of their viewers are 60 and over. That leaves most of America out.

The other power they have--and it's, to coin a term, YUGE--is that they get to "call" elections. Or not.

But if you're talking about "How on earth did all those people vote for Joe Biden? Why did all those people vote for candidates who are no longer in the race?" the answer is "They didn't."

#8

Is the MSM THAT powerful?

Yes.

Most Americans still get their news from print and broadcast (or online sites owned by the same monopolies). Independent broadcasters, when and where they exist, are nearly all virulently right-wing propaganda outlets like Rush Limbaugh's "Excrement Excellence in Broadcasting" or fully owned Bible thumping subsidiaries of the Religious Reich. And genuinely independent print outlets are extinct for all practical intents and purposes.

Bernie has jumbo rallies and Joe can barely fill a classroom. Bernie speaks for an hour and Joe reads a teleprompter for seven minutes.

Why are 34% of Washington State voters voting for candidates that have dropped out?

Because they are the same kind of unthinking neoconservative/neoliberal boneheads that the rest of the Democrapic Party are nationwide.

And why the hell are any Democrats voting for a man that has advocated cuts to Social Security for decades and championed the Iraq War before, during, and after, along with praising GWB for "getting it done?"

At the risk of repeating myself,

.....because they are the same kind of unthinking neoconservative/neoliberal boneheads that the rest of the Democrapic Party are nationwide.

@thanatokephaloides Google has given top priority to mainstream outlets for search results. Sites such as World Socialist and others notice a dramatic decrease in traffic to their sites. It is getting more frustrating at least for me when google returns results that don't even have any of the search terms.

Duckduckgo sometimes returns the same results, but often they do not and typically return results which are closer to may request.

#8

Is the MSM THAT powerful?

Yes.

Most Americans still get their news from print and broadcast (or online sites owned by the same monopolies). Independent broadcasters, when and where they exist, are nearly all virulently right-wing propaganda outlets like Rush Limbaugh's "Excrement Excellence in Broadcasting" or fully owned Bible thumping subsidiaries of the Religious Reich. And genuinely independent print outlets are extinct for all practical intents and purposes.

Bernie has jumbo rallies and Joe can barely fill a classroom. Bernie speaks for an hour and Joe reads a teleprompter for seven minutes.

Why are 34% of Washington State voters voting for candidates that have dropped out?

Because they are the same kind of unthinking neoconservative/neoliberal boneheads that the rest of the Democrapic Party are nationwide.

And why the hell are any Democrats voting for a man that has advocated cuts to Social Security for decades and championed the Iraq War before, during, and after, along with praising GWB for "getting it done?"

At the risk of repeating myself,

.....because they are the same kind of unthinking neoconservative/neoliberal boneheads that the rest of the Democrapic Party are nationwide.

@Marie @wokkamile
those on the left, myself included, took our eyes off the bouncing ball. In 2015 as most people kept saying that Trump won't get the nomination, I kept pointing out that he'd been leading in all the polls since July and was doing very well in the debates. If he kept slogging it out, he would defy all those professional and blogger pundits and win the nomination. (After that those same people began chanting that he can't win the general election unaware of the fact that conservatively Trump was only short by one state as early as September 2016.)

Biden had been leading in the polls for several months longer than Trump did in 2015. I puzzled over that and his weak fundraising and limited campaigning among the general public and limited ground operation. That differed from Trump who had been all over the place and held large rallies and in the early going was self-funded, but like Biden, he didn't have a ground operation. Lack of boots on the ground led to Trump falling short in Iowa, but Biden fell far short there this time and further short in NH. I and maybe others took this as confirmation that we'd been right to take our eyes off the ball -- Biden's poll numbers.

We were dead wrong. And should have known better because the NV DP can pull a trigger for a favored candidate and that the SC DP machine is really solid and strong. Should have known that the DP wasn't going to coalesce around any one of their own that had weak polling numbers (single digits with no consistent upticks) or obvious handicaps, apparently that doesn't include dementia. From September on, the DP only had three horses in the race, and in a worst case for them scenario, they could find their way to accepting Warren (and it's plausible that her Clinton retread staffers told her that if she cut further into Sanders support). It was never going to be Pete and Amy had but one bounce out of single digits (NH) and immediately dropped again. Outside of IA and NH, Joe still had polling leads in many places and was competitive with Sanders in others.

#8 stories of this primary season is how Biden doesn't need to spend a lot or make a lot of campaign stops in a state to do very well. It's as if a switch was flipped sometime around SC, and word was sent out across the land, especially to many low-information voters and throughout the AA community, that Biden is the correct selection. And there is the common bandwagon effect post-SC. People want to vote for someone who seems to be a winner.

I doubt if many voters are aware of Joe's long track record on SS/Medicare cuts or favoring bad trade agreements costing US jobs, or his record of blatantly lying about his record, and so on. They get one or two headline pieces of information about him, or watch a snippet of coverage on the teevee, and that is the extent of their knowledge.

There was a telling Status Coup video a couple days ago where two local MI women, both former military, were interviewed at a Biden rally and told a few things about Joe -- e.g. his lying about being arrested over apartheid, and SS/Medicare cuts -- and both were unfamiliar with those facts that are well known to everyone on this board. This I'm afraid is a good example of what I see as the all too common typical voter out there. We are in our little bubble here, with our elite knowledge level, and there's probably a tendency to extrapolate that high information level to the rest of the populace, but that is a big mistake.

Can someone enlighten me about the media ads that Biden's pacs and super pacs have been running in the primary states? Frequency, content, etc. How much have they been spenging?

Bernie has jumbo rallies and Joe can barely fill a classroom. Bernie speaks for an hour and Joe reads a teleprompter for seven minutes.

Why are 34% of Washington State voters voting for candidates that have dropped out? And why the hell are any Democrats voting for a man that has advocated cuts to Social Security for decades and championed the Iraq War before, during, and after, along with praising GWB for "getting it done?"

@on the cusp @on the cusp

he's just weak.

They all have their beltway connections to think about if they lose, so therefore a pissing match with Neera Tanden about Club D loyalty is still more important right now than rallying the morale of the movement they are purporting to lead.

Same goes for Bernie.

The BIGGEST issue right now is the collusion of the party establishment and the rigging of the primary in EVERY state. But apparently the stripping of hundreds of thousands of his supporters' fundamental right to vote isn't as important as hurting his good Buddy Joe's fee fees or calling out the Dem establishment for the crooks they truly are.

#9 I remember I once like Sirota.
sigh...

@Cassiodorus @Cassiodorus

that's his "not us, me" moment.

And we'll see at the debate whether Bernie has his.

He needs to gut his old pal Biden like a fish on Sunday. If Bernie is personally unwilling to do that, he will be doing his campaign and the movement a grave harm.

#9 "Not me. Us."

Our task, then, is to identify the points at which people we might otherwise respect are basically saying "not us, me." Thus when Sirota says, "I helped elect a Dem congressman & governor and am married to a Dem legislator," that's his "not us, me" moment.

@Marie and they meddle in every election from bottom to top.

#11
decided that counting approximately 69% of the ballots is good enough. No updates reported for more than thirty minutes.

Liberal central - King County has Bernie leading by less than 5,000 votes.