We have
heard a lot about the Political Revolution lately. The Sanders movement insists that it is
different from all campaigns that have come before it; that together a
grassroots movement is sweeping the nation, which will change politics forever.
We will look into this in more depth
later, but for now, we got our first taste of this on Tuesday and frankly the
result speaks for itself. Senator Sanders on the eve of the primary went to
campaign for Eric Kingson, the kind of Democratic who shares his values. The
results were not particularly kind.
Sanders’ candidate was defeated by a margin of 49% to 32% with another
candidate taking 19%. There are lots of reasons for this, and to lay all the
blame at Sanders’ feet is absurd. Yet what is also clear is how weak is the
evidence that the Revolution is about more than Sanders or has blossomed into a
movement to engage in politics. In the Presidential vote a little over 2 months
ago Sanders received 26,673 votes in the District. His candidate in defeat
received 3,786 or 14% of the total from two months ago. To win this race for the Revolution would
have required only 22% of the vote from 2 months ago. To be clear changing who
votes and how often they vote is an incredibly difficult challenge, and this
was not a particularly low turnout for such a Congressional primary. But the
point remains that such transformation is a key part of the Sanders platform.
When an obstinate Congress refuses to address a progressive agenda, his plan is
to flood the people into Congress to make them do what he wants. But if he
can’t get more than 15% of his own primary supporters to vote for the
Congressional candidate he wants, what does that say about a strategy that
depends upon the people demanding change.
It takes a lot of time energy and effort to change such voting behavior,
and the problem desperately needs to be figured out. Pretending you have
figured it out it is not a strategy and in fact makes it harder on those who
want to figure it out. Revolution is hard.
The Scorecard
The Scorecard is a political strategy and analysis blog. Our hope is to provide information and insight that can be found nowhere else into how and why things are happening in American politics. Unlike many political pundits, we will tell you who we think is going to win as an election approaches; we will tell you why; and we will give you a sense of our level of confidence. Ours is a holistic approach, one that takes in as many numbers as possible but is also willing to look past the numbers if need be. When we turn out to have been wrong, we will let you know. When we are right, we’ll let you know that too.
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About Me
Author Jason Paul is a longtime political operative who got his start as an intern in 2002. He has been a political forecaster for almost as long. He won the 2006 Swing State Project election prediction contest and has won two other local contests. He had the pulse of Obama-Clinton race in 2008 and has been as good as anyone at delegate math in the 2016 race. He looks forwards to providing quality coverage for the remainder of the 2016 race.
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