Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Those 125,000 Voters In Brooklyn

If the Democratic Presidential nomination campaign were about the size and enthusiasm of crowds at rallies, then clearly, Bernie Sanders would be leading Hillary Clinton by an unsurmountable margin. But it's about votes, and there, Hillary is kicking Bernie's ass any way you slice it.

The Sanders campaign is yelling bloody murder about voters in Brooklyn having been disenfrachised in yesterday's New York Democratic primary. If this campaign were about candidate's campaigns and supporters yelling bloody murder, Sanders would have had the nomination locked up some time ago. But it's about votes. I care about voter disenfranchisment. So does Hillary and her campaign. Once again, though, Those Who Feel The Bern are screaming so loud that a lot of people don't hear Hillary and her people. My question, besides whether or not these 125,000 voters in Brooklyn were or were not unfairly prevented from voting, is, for whom would they have voted? Hillary Clinton won every county in and around NYC, most of them by quite lopsided margins. As the vote count stands now, without those 125,000 votes the Sanders campaign is complaining about, Hillary won Brooklyn County by 174,236 to 116,327. The Sanders campaign is raising the question of whether those missing 125,000 votes would have swung the county Bernie's way. The answer is: only if over 73% of them had been votes for Bernie.

My question is: would anywhere near 50% of them have been votes for Bernie? My suspicion is: no. My feeling is that they only would have made Hillary's victory in "Bernie's" Brooklyn and in the state of NY even more resounding.

If I'm right about that, then the Sanders campaign' reaction to these 125,000 seems to encapsulate their approach in a nutshell: factually mistaken, irrational, emotional, misrepresenting things which, if they were seen clearly, would actually point in Hillary's favor.

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