Candidates, campaign operatives, high profile donors and endorsers, media analysts, and reporters all have very strong incentives to base their electoral projections primarily on factors that their target audiences both understand and believe credible. Unfortunately, that means willfully discounting the single most potent and predictive factor in election outcomes, party identity. Of course, if campaigners, pollsters, and media pundits took the role of party leanings more seriously, most of them would be out of a job.
Iowa is unrepresentative of the United States and Iowa caucus goers are even more divorced from the American populace. And that’s exactly why Iowa is actually representative of our unrepresentative American electoral politics. Iowa is the American election process on speed -- if speed was made from ethanol.
Robert Reich is taking on the “Bernie skeptics.” Sadly, that includes me. Also sadly, Reich’s effort to rebut the conventional wisdom regarding Senator Sanders’ general election viability is all too easily debunked. Reich’s professorial presentation is filled with many logical and reasonable premises and claims. Unfortunately, there are also an alarming number of unsupported claims and flawed or flat out incorrect assumptions about the way voters behave and about how our electoral and policy making institutions are designed and how they function in real life.