Kansas isn't actually feeling the burn [View all]

[jmowreader]

If you go into Bernie Underground you get the impression, from reading all the "Bernie! Fuck yeah!" threads about the Kansas caucus, that Sanders just swept California. Did he?

Well...by reading the title of this thread you can pretty much figure the truth is ugly. This is how bad.

According to NBC News, Bernie had 26,450 people standing for him. The population of Kansas is 2.904 million, so only 0.91 percent of the total population of Kansas is feeling the Bern.

However, we ARE talking about Kansas here. You know Kansas. It's the state that reelected Sam Brownback. The state that spawned Fred Phelps. People tune their radios to Rush Limbaugh and throw away the knob. Kansas has been redder than the side of a fire truck since the day it achieved statehood and nothing's ever going to change that. (As a matter of reference, Ted Cruz came within four thousand votes of Bernie's and Hillary's COMBINED totals...and he only took 48 percent of the Republican vote.)

Then I thought, who is Bernie's core constituency? Of course! College students, right? Kansas has a few of those. If you add up the student bodies of Kansas' seven four-year public universities you find there are 100,804 college students there. Let's subtract the people who were recruited from out of state to play sports and the thousands who flock to Kansas universities from around the world to study the things no one does better - like agronomy and grain science - and we'll say there are 90,000 people enrolled in Kansas universities who are eligible to vote in Kansas elections. Of those few people, he only got 29.38 percent.

Which leads to the critical question: if Bernie can't even get the people who love him to the polls to support him, how are they going to convince the rest of us to go?