Can Sanders or O'Malley win? Yes. How? Basic math.

[jeff47]

148. Incumbents have a benefit, and that was 2006.

Since 2006, CA has elected a massive super-majority to their state legislature, and Republicans have utterly failed in statewide elections.

MA's totally going to vote for the Republican right? MA elected Scott Brown to Senate, and just elected Baker to governor. So clearly, they are guaranteed to vote for the Republican, right?

And NY elected Nelson Rockefeller in 1958 and re-elected him 2 more times, so clearly NY is going to vote for the Republican in 2016, right?

You still aren't explaining where all this magical money is coming from.

Because money is not nearly as critical in statewide or higher elections - money has been a very poor predictor of the winners once you reach that level of media exposure. Candidates are not introducing themselves via ad campaigns, they're introducing themselves via media coverage.

House races and state legislatures, money is a good predictor. The candidates are much less well known, so ads play a much larger role.

There are a LOT of Democrats who won't withhold their money, but they'll funnel it to Senate and House contests, rather than waste it in a Presidential contest that is bound for failure

And the point of this OP is for someone like you to show, specifically, how it fails. What states does the Republican win to get to 270, and why the Republican will win them.

California will elect someone who plays the centrist, who doesn't have a reputation for screwing corporations, industries, who puts forth a friendly and 'reasonable' attitude

Yeah, that's why this strategy failed twice against Brown, and just failed twice against DiFi and Boxer. It's also why the state legislature is 75% Democratic. Because CA really wants to elect a moderate Republican.

Jeb!" has that patter down. You watch him scurry right to the center as soon as he locks down the nomination

Jeb! has no room left to win the nomination. Walker has taken the position that Jeb! was supposed to fill. Rubio is to the right of Walker, so Jeb! can't go there. And beyond Rubio it gets way too crazy to effectively tack back to the center in the general.

That leaves running to Walker's left. And running to Walker's left will not win the Republican nomination.

Also, what about money? You were just arguing money is the all-important metric. Jeb! doesn't have a billionaire lined up. So why is money so unimportant in the Republican primary but absolutely critical in every other election?

That's how they got Martha Coakley--of all the ads the GOP PACS ran in the last MA gubernatorial race, only a quarter were "Pro-Baker." Most were "Martha Coakley is the devil incarnate." Over, and over, and over again. They raked her over the coals.

Coakley had a big pile of money too - that was the argument why Coakley was the "electable" candidate.

So if we go with your money-is-all-that-matters metric, Clinton's would be 2016's Coakley. The Republicans have already set her up as Satan incarnate over the last 30 years, so they don't even have to create a negative favorability. It's already there.

So your argument would mean Clinton is actually doomed.

I eagerly await your counter-argument that Clinton is magical and would be unaffected by conservative PAC spending. Unlike every other candidate who can't possibly counter it.