Tag Archives: 2016 Democratic nomination

The Kaine Mutiny?

Last Friday I was on Vermont Edition,  hosted by the always great Jane Lindholm, to discuss the “Full Bernie” – a retrospective on the Sanders campaign.  During the call-in portion of the show, more than one Sanders’ supporter phoned in to complain about the DNC rigging the nomination system, the media’s treatment of Sanders’ candidacy and also about Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine as her vice presidential running mate.  Callers suggested that Kaine represents everything that is wrong with Clinton’s candidacy: he’s more moderate than her, and is on the wrong side of key issues, such as trade, and he isn’t particularly charismatic. In their view, Elizabeth Warren, or Sanders himself, would have been the wiser choice. According to Vermont Digger, many delegates expressed similar disappointment with the selection of Kaine: “In a poll of nearly 300 Sanders delegates to the Democratic convention, nearly 90 percent said they are dissatisfied with Hillary Clinton’s selection of Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., to be her running mate.”

One needs to be careful about drawing conclusions based on a handful of callers to a radio show, of course, but a recently conducted Vermont state poll shows that in the Green Mountain state, at least, a large minority of Sanders’ supporters are not yet ready give up the dream and coalesce behind their party’s nominee. According to the poll, which was in the field July 11-23, only 54% of Sanders supporters say they will back Clinton in November.  About 30% said they would vote for someone else (they didn’t specify who) and only about 5% of Sanders’ supporters indicated they would back Trump – the same number saying they would support Gary Johnson.

Of course, one might expect this lingering opposition to Clinton in Bernie’s home state, and the poll doesn’t indicate the state will go Republican any time soon. Nationally, polls suggest a greater willingness for strong Sanders’ supporters to vote for Clinton.  According to a Pew poll, of the 20% of Democrats who were “consistent” Sanders supporters throughout the campaign, fully 90% now say they will back Clinton.  (Keep in mind that Pew, unlike the Vermont poll, did not offer respondents an option other than Clinton or Trump, so this may be overstating their support for Clinton.) Although the comparison is not quite the same, another Pew poll conducted before the convention suggests that 80% of those Republicans who initially backed another Republican now say they will vote for Trump.

So why does it appear Democrats are more divided than Republicans, as evidenced by some Sanders’ supporters decision to stage a walkout after Clinton won the nomination, and to occupy the media headquarters afterwards, and by their continuing efforts more generally to disrupt proceedings?  In part, I think it is because of the intensity of the “Bernie Bros” opposition to Clinton, and their corresponding passion for Sanders and what he stands for.  For the true-blue Sanderista minority, supporting Clinton and Kaine amounts to repudiating the very principles that animated the Sanders revolution.  In Sanders, they found the authentic vehicle for expressing their deep-held political opposition to the political establishment and the rigged system that keeps them in power.  In this respect, they are holier than the Pope; that is, they view themselves as more true to Sanders’ cause than is the candidate himself, and they are going to make sure the public understands this, no matter how disruptive they are. I expect they will continue to make their presence known during Hillary’s speech tonight. It will be interesting to see how she reacts to these interruptions. My best guess is she is going to extend the olive branch at the start of the speech, and also talk about how Sanders’ supporters represent the vitality and diversity in the Democratic Party.

On the Republican side, as I wrote in my earlier post, you did not see the equivalent outbursts among the delegates once the debate over the rules was settled on the first day. And most delegates seemed to react negatively to Cruz’ non-endorsement speech – a different type of opposition than what we are seeing among Democrats, where Bernie has wholeheartedly embraced Clinton. The reason the Republicans appear less divided below the elite level, I think, is that those opposing Trump do so not out of any commitment to another candidate, or any set of ideological principles or issues, but because they just don’t like Trump.  But the fatal weakness of the #NeverTrump movement is the same flaw that allowed Trump to win the nomination in the first place: Republicans felt little passion for any of the 16 alternatives.  And so, rather than try to disrupt the convention, most have either made their peace with Trump or decided to mow their lawns instead.

The difficulty for Democrats, and why I think their divisions are more troubling at this point, is that this active opposition to Clinton suggests an intensity of preferences that may make it harder for the small but vocal group of Sanderistas to ever pull the lever for her.  In a close race, even if only 10% of Sanders supporters sit this out, or vote for Stein or (gulp!) Trump, it could make the difference come November.

I have long argued that most Sanders’ supporters will, eventually, come around to Clinton.  It’s difficult to judge just how large the opposition to Clinton is, but based on media reports (and they are often conflicting), it appears to be more than a fringe of delegates, but nothing close to a majority of Sanders’ supporters in attendance. No matter what the numbers, however, tonight offers Clinton her best opportunity to bring the remaining holdouts around.  Let’s see if she can do it.

Postscript:  It appears this morning that the Sanderistas, although perhaps limited in numbers, are continuing their efforts to disrupt the convention.

On, Wisconsin: BernieMentum, The Donald’s Gaffes and What Tonight Really Means

If the current polls hold up and Ted Cruz pulls out a victory over Donald Trump in Wisconsin, the media spin will immediately focus on The Donald’s “terrible two weeks” as the proximate cause of his defeat. As the New York Times puts it:  “A Cruz victory will suggest that a backlash against Mr. Trump has set in after a series of nasty episodes, including his insults of Heidi Cruz and the arrest of Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, on a charge of manhandling a female reporter.”  This narrative fits nicely with the media’s tendency to portray political campaigns as a horse race in which the tactical decisions by candidates collectively exert a huge influence on the election outcome. Under such a dynamic, a candidate’s fortunes can ebb and flow quickly as the result of even a single misstep, as when a campaign manager allegedly pushes around a female reporter, or a candidate insults another candidate’s wife.

But as the Times own analyst Nate Cohn reminds,  there is an alternative explanation for why Trump may not do well in Wisconsin tonight – one more consistent with how political scientists view the nominating process.  Simply put, Wisconsin is not a good state for Trump, demographically speaking. That is, even without Trump’s “gaffes”, it didn’t look like he would do particularly well in a state whose voters tend to be, on average, a bit more educated, with higher incomes, and more religious than the typical Trump voter, to cite only a couple of demographic classes.  As research by Middlebury College student Tina Berger shows (see below), although Trump’s support ranges across demographic classes, for the most part exit polls suggest he does a bit better among downscale white voters. Here are his averages based on income according to exit polls – although he does well across income groups, he does slightly better among lower income voters.  The last column is the percentage of times Trump won that demographic group in a particular nominating contest.

trump and income

And here is the same type of analysis based on education, again using exit poll data Berger has analyzed.  Once more, although he does well among all eduction levels, his strength increases among the less well-educated.

trump and education

Moreover, for what it is worth,  polls in Wisconsin are not consistent with the narrative that he is being hurt by his recent remarks about abortion or the incident involving his campaign manager. But that will not stop the media from claiming otherwise should he lose the state. Polls close there in less than two hours, but we may be in for a long night based on current polling which gives Cruz a slight lead over Trump.

 

On the Democratic side, meanwhile, all the talk is about Bernie Sanders’ “momentum” coming off of his string of five victories in the six most recent Democratic contests. But as a concept by which to explain a candidate’s success and failures, momentum is a much touted but poorly defined term. It is possible to believe a candidate can gain momentum as a result of a series of victories if those wins drive opponents from the field, and the winning candidate then picks up some of the departed candidates’ votes. But that is not what has happened with Bernie and Clinton – no Democrat has dropped out as a result of Bernie’s victories.  However, if by momentum one means additional votes picked up in subsequent contests solely due to the victories themselves, then I’m skeptical that the concept has any meaning. This is particularly true in Sanders’ case, since all his recent victories came in caucus states and, along with his defeat in the Arizona, netted him roughly thirty additional delegates. This is not nearly the pace he needs to achieve if he hopes to close delegate gap with Clinton before the Democratic convention. And it doesn’t look like Wisconsin is going to do much to change those dynamics. Assuming currently polling holds up, he may net a half dozen or so additional delegates tonight.  That’s not my definition of momentum!

And that is the problem Sanders faces looking ahead – the Democratic method of allocating delegates proportionally makes it very hard for him to cut into Clinton’s lead in any significant fashion even if he ekes out victories in delegate-rich primary states which, so far, he has been largely unable to do. If Clinton performs well in the New York primary, where she had a strong lead in the polls, she could in one night erase any of the delegate gains Sanders has accumulated by winning 6 of the 7 most recent contests.  So much for his momentum.

This, of course, is precisely what the punditocracy does not want to hear, since it undercuts the horse race narrative that drives so much of their coverage. And so no matter what the outcome tonight, I expect to hear a lot about “momentum” and Trump’s gaffes and how we have witnessed a potential “gamechanger” in Wisconsin. And, with roughly two weeks before the New York primaries, the media pundits will have plenty of time to speculate, based on the usual “well-placed sources”, about strife in the campaign of (fill in the name of the candidate who lost) and how they are considering retooling their campaign strategy and bringing in new advisers and changing tactics and kissing babies and changing hairstyles, etc.

And the winners? Why, they will have momentum!

I’ll be intermittently live blogging the results tonight at this site, then on Australian television bright and early tomorrow morning to break it all down, just in case you live Down Under!

In the meantime, On, Wisconsin!

 

Joe Biden Is Still Not Running For President

Vice President Joe Biden’s announcement a few moments ago that he is not running for president should surprise no one. Pundits, desperate to derail the Clinton coronation, held out hope that by entering the race Biden’s candidacy would at least create the semblance of contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. But as I told The Guardian’s Tom McCarthy in an interview yesterday, Biden was never likely to enter the race because he had no realistic chance of beating Hillary, barring a Benghazi-related smoking email that sent her to the Big House. Given that fact, the logical play for Biden was to fuel speculation that he might run by playing the Hamlet card for as long as he could before the endless media speculation threatened to turn him in a caricature of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo (who in 1992 famously toyed with running for president up until the eve of the New Hampshire primary.)

Make no mistake about it. If Biden saw a path to victory, he would have thrown his hat into the ring long ago. But that path didn’t exist, short of a Clinton indictment. On most issues – with the prominent exception of foreign policy – his views are mostly indistinguishable from her’s. This left him struggling to create a public rationale for a Biden candidacy. Yesterday, at an event honoring former Vice President Walter Mondale, in bid to create such a rationale, Biden went so far as to revise his account of the events leading up to the President’s decision to send in a Seal team to assassinate Osama bin Laden.  After previously stating that he had advised against the raid, Biden changed his story yesterday and said he had privately advised the President to pursue the raid on bin Laden’s compound. The changed was apparently a thinly-veiled effort to make the case that on the most important decisions, he was the President’s closest and most trusted confidant – even closer and more trusted than the President’s then Secretary of State Clinton. The gambit exposed just how weak his case for running for president really was. Indeed, except for the additional gravitas afforded him by serving two terms as Vice President, it was never clear why his run for the presidency today would end any differently than his two previous unsuccessful attempts in the 1988 and 2008 cycles*.

Some pundits will point to last Tuesday’s Democratic debate as the tipping point for a Biden candidacy. In the aftermath of Hillary’s strong performance, a number of pundits pontificated that it removed any pretext for a Biden run. But, as I tweeted on social media at the time the debate had no impact on the underlying electoral dynamics which made a Biden run a longshot all along.

Instead, what it did was make pundits realize that, their fervent hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, there was never any valid rationale for Biden to run.

Absent the indictment, Clinton was going to clean his clock, strong debate or no strong debate. All the polling data led to that conclusion, not to mention the other indicators of Clinton’s strength, including money raised and endorsements received.  As evidence, note that after more than a month of getting hammered in the press for her emails, Clinton continued to lead her nearest rivals by 20% or more in national polls, and she was using her prodigious fundraising to put together a massive campaign infrastructure that dwarfed her rivals’.

So where does this leave the Democratic race? Precisely where it was before Biden’s announcement: with Clinton firmly in the lead. The latest polls indicate that she has pulled even with Sanders in New Hampshire, buoyed no doubt in part by her debate performance but also by the slew of media ads she has been running there for more than a month. Sanders is yet to get on the air in New Hampshire.  Nationally, polls show a slight uptick for Clinton of late, while Sanders’ “surge” seems to have leveled off, although one probably should not drawn any firm conclusions about what might be a short-term fluctuation.

There’s still a long way to go, of course. Sanders, who also did well in Tuesday’s debate, may yet be able to rally enough support to win in Iowa, a caucus state in which Clinton now leads, but which is notoriously difficult to poll. If so, he could conceivably parlay that victory into an upset in New Hampshire. But even then he faces an uphill climb to expand his support beyond the professors/young people/Ben and Jerry’s aging hipster crowd in order to compete against Clinton in states like South Carolina and Nevada that have larger minority populations.  But if Sanders is going to beat Clinton, he can’t count on Biden to help him bring her down.

And what of Uncle Joe? In his speech today, Biden acknowledged that, “As my family and I have worked through the grieving process, I’ve said all along what I’ve said time and again to others, that it may very well be that the process by the time we get through it closes the window. I’ve concluded it has closed.” But that is wrong – Biden’s window of opportunity has not closed. It was never open.

*Correction. An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated Biden ran for President in 2000.

Who Is Really Winning The Money Race?

When is $28 million worth less than $26 million? When the media tells you it is!

At this early point in the presidential race, most political scientists are looking at two measures to gauge candidate viability, and neither one is based on how the person is doing in the polls. Instead, we are interested in how much money the candidate has raised, and how many endorsements from party elites the candidate has secured. Past research has suggested that both of these are more useful indicators of candidate strength than are polls this many months before actual voting takes place. With that in mind, it is worth examining the candidates’ fundraising totals for the third quarter, which closed on September 30. Although the actual candidate fundraising reports do not need to be filed with the Federal Elections Commission until Oct. 15, some totals have leaked out already.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton raised a reported $28 million during the last three months, while her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders reportedly pulled in close to $26 million. Based on fundraising reports from the last two quarters dating back to March 30, that means Clinton has raised $75 million during the current campaign cycle, compared to Sanders’ $40 million, giving her a substantial lead in the money race – and this doesn’t count the Super Pac money backing Hillary, which totaled $20 million as of July 1, and undoubtedly has increased since then. Sanders, in contrast, has repeatedly rejected Super Pac backing and there are, to my knowledge, no Super Pacs spending money on his behalf.

You might think the media would interpret the latest money totals as good news for Hillary, since it meant she increased her already substantial fundraising lead over her nearest rival. Alas, you would be wrong. In the “new math” evidently embraced by many media pundits, Clinton’s $28 million is not nearly as substantial as Sanders’ lower figure. Why is this? One reason is the “expectations game” that I have documented in several previous posts. Simply put, because Clinton’s fundraising lead over Sanders in the third quarter is smaller than the pundits believe it should be, and she raised less than in the previous quarter, while Sanders has increased his quarterly total, it must show that she has a major problem.

But there is another reason why journalists are touting Sanders’ latest fundraising figures. He has amassed over a million donations so far – more even than Barack Obama attracted at this point in his successful run for the presidency in 2008. (Never mind that he has raised less than Obama did at similar points in their campaigns – as I discuss below, it’s the number of donations, not the total size of the donation pie, that the media thinks most important.) Moreover, most of these contributions have been in small dollar amounts – the average Sanders’ contribution is about $25, according to the Sanders’ campaign. If pundits are to be believed, the relative proportion of small dollar donations a candidate attracts is a useful barometer of a campaign’s vitality.

This is not the first time we have heard this argument. When Obama ran for president in 2008 and broke all previous fundraising records, his campaign touted his ability to raise money in smaller donations than either his primary rival Hillary Clinton or his general election opponent John McCain. This was a sign, they claimed, that Obama was running a genuine grass-roots campaign, rather than relying on deep-pocketed investors who expected a return for their donation. The record amount of money he raised, combined with media reports about his reliance on small donors and, of course, his ultimate victory, cemented the myth that the percent of the small donors is a meaningful gauge of a campaign’s level of support.

In truth, it’s not entirely clear that the percent of small donors contributing to a campaign means nearly as much as the media, and candidates, would have one believe. This is partly because candidates, remembering the favorable coverage Obama received for his army of small donors, now actively encourage supporters to contribute money in small dollar amounts. Clinton, for instance, reportedly sent out emails soliciting $1 dollar online donations shortly before the Sept. 30 deadline! The problem, however, is that because the FEC does not require candidates to disclose the names of those who contribute less than $200 to a campaign, it is impossible to independently verify how many actual small dollar donors a campaign has attracted. Rather than individual donors, the candidate is only required to report the percent of total contributions that came in under the $200 threshold. Thus journalists are left to rely on the campaign to find out how many individual donors contributed toward that small donor percentage. At the same time, pundits aren’t always careful to distinguish the number of donors from donations. More than one initial report on social media stated that Sanders had eclipsed one million donors, rather than donations, during the current election cycle. In fact, the Sanders campaign says it has attracted 650,000 donors – still a substantial number, to be sure, but not quite as impressive as the initial incorrect reports suggested. Clinton, as yet, has not revealed how many individual donors she has.

A second problem with the small donor metric is that one individual can make multiple donations under $200, thus creating the perception that campaign is being fueled by small contributions when in fact it is not. In 2008, for example, an independent study of Obama’s fundraising concluded that while nearly 50 percent of his donations came in individual contributions of $200 or less, when one added up multiple donations from the same donor, only about 25% came from contributors whose total donations added up to $200 or less. That number, it turns out, was not much different than the percent of small donors that contributed to George W. Bush’s campaign in 2004, all the media talk about Obama’s small donor revolution notwithstanding.

Some pundits defend the small donor metric by arguing that it allows a candidate to go back to the same donor as needed for additional contributions up to the individual contribution limit per election cycle of $2,700. While true, the flip side of this argument is the proverbial bird-in-the-hand being worth two-in-the-bush – it is better for the candidate to have the full contribution in the campaign coffers now rather than count on additional smaller contributions that may or may not come in down the road.

A final point is worth noting about small donors – although it is common for campaigns to tout their small donors as more representative of the “average” American, studies show that the more ideologically extreme the candidate, the more likely they will draw donations from the small donor class. The reason for this, as my colleague Bert Johnson explains, is that “people who are passionate about issues are more likely to take extreme positions than those who do not care much, and the passionate are more likely to become active in politics than others.” The consequence is that small individual contributions – particularly ones too small to buy any material rewards – are more likely to come from partisan extremists. We should not be surprised, therefore, that more extremist candidates like Sanders will be more successful than relatively more moderate candidates like Clinton at raising money from individual small donors. The same logic applies to Republicans, where Ben Carson has been the most effective candidate in soliciting small donations.

Let me be clear. Sanders’ supporters should be pleased with his fundraising prowess to date, particularly since he has spent so little time courting major donors. If current trends hold, he should come close to the $75 million mark by the end of the calendar year, more than enough to fund a competitive campaign during the early contests. But if his total raised to date is surprising, his reliance on small donors should not be – we have seen this fundraising portfolio before with other presidential candidates, like Ron Paul in 2012, or Howard Dean in 2004, both of whom staked out relatively more ideologically extreme positions compared to their main rivals.

Most importantly, however, and contrary to what the pundits with their “new math” would have us believe, he’s still losing the money race to Clinton.

How Much Should BlackLivesMatter to Bernie?

By now, most of you have heard of the recent effort by members of the BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement to disrupt a Bernie Sanders’ campaign event in Seattle. For those of you still caught up in Deflategate, here’s a video of the interruption – jump ahead to the 2:40 minute mark to see the point at which the protesters walk on stage which, eventually, prompts Bernie to leave.

This disruption follows on the heels of last month’s confrontation at Netroots Nation between the BLM activists and the more economically-oriented progressives that are the core constituency in the Sanders camp. The ongoing disruptions have attracted more than their fair share of media coverage as journalists try to gauge the implications of this apparent split in the progressive wing of the Democratic party for the Sanders presidential campaign. In responding to journalists who have asked me about this, I have tried to make two points. First, to a certain extent Sanders is a victim of his own success, a point Clare Foran addresses in her National Journal piece on Bernie. The decision by the participants in the BLM movement to target Bernie’s campaign events are surely influenced by the tremendous crowds he has been attracting in recent days – crowds that are predominantly composed of Bernie’s core constituency: educated, affluent white liberals whose views the BLM movement is targeting. As Bernie gains more media attention, the payoffs to the BLM crowd for disrupting these events becomes proportional bigger.

My second point is that we should not be surprised that Bernie and his supporters are, to a certain extent, somewhat miffed about the BLM disruptions and, in part because of this, were somewhat slow to react in a positive manner. As Colin Daileda notes in this Mashable piece, members of the BLM movement aren’t necessarily Bernie’s natural allies – something that I suspect initially puzzled Sanders, particularly given his civil rights record. From Bernie’s perspective, the types of issues that he has championed, from repealing Citizens United to raising the minimum wage to pushing for single-payer health care system are precisely the issues that, if implemented, would disproportionally help lower-income voters, particular African-Americans who are suffering from among the highest unemployment rates of any voting bloc. How useful can it be to disrupt the campaign events of the one candidate who is doing the most to advocate on your behalf?

For those in the BLM movement, however, Bernie’s focus on economic issues does not address the racial justice concerns that are of particular importance to the leading activists in this movement.  As Van Jones, a former White House adviser to President Obama, argues in a particularly scathing criticism of the Sanders’ campaign, “Our economic problems include an unemployment rate that is double that of whites, racially biased policing and court systems, predatory lenders who deliberately target black neighborhoods and public schools that expel black children at staggering rates for minor offenses.” For the BLM movement, these issues of racial justice are different from and transcend what they see as the Sanders’ campaign more narrow focus on economic inequality.

To his credit, after walking off the stage in Seattle, Bernie has made a pointed effort to find common ground with the BLM activists, with issues of racial justice now figuring prominently in his speeches, and on his social media sites. But, as this Charles Blow opinion piece indicates, there likely are limits to how far either side is willing to go to accommodate the concerns of the other. This should not surprise us. Movements like Bernie’s economic populism and BLM tend to attract ideologues who are convinced they are advocating for the most important issue facing the country right now. While it might seem practical for activists in the economic and racial justice camps to join forces in a broader progressive movement, that is anathema to the true believers in each movement who are wedded to the sanctity of their particular cause. With apologies to Barry Goldwater, purists on both sides of the divide believe that “Moderation in the recognition of the other guys’ issue is no virtue; extremism in the defense of our issue is no vice.”

So where does this leave Bernie? The Sanders’ campaign is struggling to broaden its appeal beyond the aging hipsters, college students and left-wing professors to attract support from more moderate and conservative Democratic voters that right now are supporting Clinton and who typically constitute about half the Democratic nomination electorate. It’s not clear how having to respond to disruptions from BLM movement is going to help Sanders accomplish this goal if the effect is to highlight views not shared by those more moderate Democrats. On the other hand, as I have noted repeatedly, Sanders is going to need to attract some support from minority voters if he hopes to compete with Clinton outside of Iowa and New Hampshire. To date, however, Clinton continues to hold a commanding lead in the polls among nonwhite likely Democratic voters. The key for Sanders, then, is to effectively fuse his message of economic justice with the BLM’s concern for racial justice in a manner that appeals to more moderate Democrats as well as racial minorities. But this is easier said than done, particularly when issue activists in both camps express reluctance to subsume their own views on behalf of a broader cause. In this vein, it’s worth remembering that those $50 campaign contributions the Sanders’ camp is proud of citing aren’t coming from Joe and Jane Sixpack – they are flowing in from ideological purists who expect Bernie to spread the gospel of economic progressivism. And they want to get what they paid for.

Meanwhile, I expect Sanders to continue to “shamelessly pander to voters who want to hear the truth”, as “political strategist” Harland Dorrinson reminds us (hat tip to Shelly Sloan for sending this piece by humorist Andy Borowitz* along!):

“Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is gaining legions of new admirers by shamelessly pandering to voters who want to hear the truth, critics of the Vermont senator say.

According to those critics, Sanders has cynically targeted so-called ‘truth-based voters’ to build support for his Presidential bid.

‘People come to Sanders’s rallies expecting to hear the truth, and he serves it up to them on a silver platter,’ the political strategist Harland Dorrinson said. ‘It’s a very calculated gimmick.’

But while Sanders’s practice of relentlessly telling the truth might play well in states that are rich in truth-based voters, like the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, critics say that his campaign could stall in states where the truth has historically been less important, like Florida.

‘At some point in this campaign, voters are going to get truth fatigue,’ Dorrinson said. ‘Right now, the novelty of a politician who doesn’t constantly spew lies is grabbing headlines. But after months of Bernie Sanders telling the truth, voters are going to start wondering, Is that all he’s got?’

Dorrinson is just one of many critics who is eagerly waiting for the Sanders phenomenon to come down to Earth. ‘Telling the truth may be working for Bernie Sanders, but it shows a serious lack of respect for the American political system,’ he said.”

Because, as we all know:

*My apologies for not linking to the Borowitz piece in my original post, and thanks to those who pointed this out.