hi i found your blog from all your conor lamb stuff.. i was hyped about that election. then i started reading like your whole blog. i'm curious what you think happened with the 2016 primaries. obvs i feel like bernie wasn't given a good shot but i also think he would have lost the general election in the end. i also don't think polls would have been reflective even if bernie had won the primary.. polling was ineffective bc no one wanted to say they were voting for a racist but then did anyway
ay thanks for the ask!Â
so the 2016 primaries. i did like bernie but i didnt thing he was going to win the primaries, because primaries, most especially closed primaries are extremely heavily party based. the major turnout in those is always the core democrats and those are the people who were behind hillary from the beginning bc bernie was an independent up until he switched parties. i get why he ran as a democrat (bc he wouldnt get anywhere as a 3rd party person) but i think he really split the party when it needed unity. i think hillary was too textbook democrat for that election cycle and esp with bernie advocating for like real legitimate change she was not anywhere close to being able to unify the party. if she was against anyone but trump she wouldve been fine in the end and bernie prolly would have been able to win against anyone else too, but it wouldve been real tight
 nd the polls.. we talked a lot about election polls in my stats class after the election and it really came down to trust. like u said people dont want to say theyre voting for trump bc he is. hes so blatantly racist what the fuck america anyway also a lot of it was bc much of the base trump voters and increasingly the whole right just flat out didnt trust the media. nd its true a lot of major media outlets have a liberal bias but the right wing media which obv has its own bias made it seem like the media was liberal trash and couldnt be trusted - and then the pollsters went out and most of the major polls u see in election predictions are from major media outlets (ap, nyt, lat, ect) the same media the right had been told were just liberal trash. so they refused to respond - which is fine but then the only responses were like the hillary people who had no issues with the media and the odd trump voter who was soooo excited about the chance to be openly racist hed talk to anyone including the failing new york times. so yea no matter who won the primary the polls wouldve sucked because the right didnt want to talk to the pollsters and so all they really registered was the left which did not help in the general
