The Numbers Show Bernie Sanders Won’t Win, So What Will His Faithful Do Then? [View all]

[SunSeeker]

90% of Iowa’s population is white and Sanders is a New Englander, making a strong showing in the first two contests for him not all that surprising. But once that hurdle is cleared, barring some miraculous and monumental shift in national opinion, Bernie heads into an electoral gauntlet he won’t emerge from. It’s all about the numbers: According to Nate Silver’s 538which crunches a massive amount of polling data, district information and voter behavior and arrives at some scarily accurate predictions, when the primaries move to South Carolina, that’s when the plummet to the ground begins. 538 declares that Clinton has a 96% chance of taking the state. Then there’s Super Tuesday, which is a built-in firewall for Clinton as it’s a day in which she’s almost certain to sweep through the South, where Democrats tend to be more centrist and where a strong minority vote — which Sanders simply does not have — gives her a huge leg-up. Clinton can nearly bring it all home delegate-wise in one day. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia are hers for the taking and if he’s honest with himself Bernie has to know this.

If Sanders somehow does survive Super Tuesday, then he has March 15th, two weeks later, to contend with. In Florida, which holds its primary on that date, combined polling puts Clinton at 61% while Sanders has only 26%; North Carolina has 58% for Clinton and 28% for Sanders; Ohio is 53% for Clinton, 39% for Sanders. Regardless, by now it’s all over. Keeping in mind that Clinton already has a 45 to 1 advantage over Sanders in terms of pledged superdelegates, this thing will almost certainly be sewn up before the end of spring. That’s not an opinion. It’s math. The thing about reality is that it’s always there and you’re subject to the constraints of it whether you choose to believe in it or not. Barring a political deus ex machina of statistically inexpressible proportions, Bernie Sanders just isn’t going to be president.

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What Democrats and liberals in general can’t do is stay home out of spite. And it’s easy to look at the behavior of far too many Sanders supporters and discern that if Bernie’s presidential hopefuls die, a whole slew of Democratic votes die with him. They actually do conduct themselves like petulant children, and their unwillingness to acknowledge how both the electoral process and the American government works — which manifests clearly in the fact that they ignore campaign math and governmental reality in favor of emotional broad-strokes on how Bernie’s the singular figure who’ll make it all irrelevant — is a huge detriment to the Democratic party. 

http://thedailybanter.com/2016/02/sanders-numbers-game/