Right, so I wrote this up as an explanation to a Facebook friend and figured I’d post it as my first diary. Let me preface this by saying: I’m not going to respond to anything; I don’t want to feel too heavily invested in this, I’m just posting because I took the time to write it.

Friend’s Question:

What do you think of:

www.realclearpolitics.com/...



vs



www.realclearpolitics.com/...



Polls still too early to be very accurate?

My Answer:

“Here's my little analysis about what I think about these current presidential polls and why they are deceptive:

It's not too early anymore, however there are other reasons the polling for these races is still unreliable.



I think there are two factors that make those polls deceptive. One is the fact that almost all of the HRC's voters would vote for Sanders if he were nominee, and gladly respond so in polls, whereas the Sanders people, for a variety of reasons, aren't yet on board with Clinton if she is the nominee and respond Trump when he's against HRC. Many of those voters will eventually be on board with HRC just because of political pragmatism, but the primary has been a fairly bitter contest and more of Sanders' people are unwilling to consider that he will lose up until the convention actually happens and is over. That factor will be eliminated after the convention, when Sanders endorses HRC and starts to campaign for her.



The other reason these polls are deceptive is because Sanders hasn't faced almost any attacking from the right, at least as far as attack ads go. I think Sanders' numbers would suffer in a general election campaign after Trump started going after his Socialist history and trips to Communist regime countries, as well as his kind of weird essays and anything else he could find to sling mud at. Sanders dismisses this possibility, responding to the Socialist bit as redbaiting and saying that his essays were youthful mistakes and then dismissing it. This works for him when it is only the left involved. No one on the left wants to attack that past, because on the left the Socialist bit is kind of like a badge of honor and the essays are seen as youthful strangeness that shouldn't be held against him 40 years later. However in the general, Trump would redbait the shit out of him for the entire election cycle, and those new attacks would be highly effective in diminishing the popularity of Sanders.



In a general, just by putting out ads that have the word Communism superimposed on Sanders' face countrywide for a month or two would likely lower his numbers by at least 5-10%.



For some reason no one thinks that attacking would work on him, but people are dumb, they believe dumb things and are easily turned against others. The reason you need super PACs and that nonsense in these elections is to defend against the kind of vile shit that the Republicans will be doling out in droves this election cycle. Sanders thinks he has proved that you can run a clean election, but all he proved is that you can run a clean presidential primary run. Unfortunately, as things are with Citizens United corrupting our Democracy, the only way to effectively fight fire is with fire, and I think, were Sanders to go against Trump in the general, we would see how true that is.



One caveat, Trump might have a really hard time raising money too after shitting all over the biggest contributors on his side for his entire primary. The Republican establishment is rallying behind him and trying to help, but I think a few people, the Koch brothers included, have told him to go fuck himself. Anyway, the general is going to be super-interesting on a presidential level, but I think Clinton will ultimately win in a landslide. I'm more worried about the Senate, which I actually think we will win now, and the House, which I think we can't win, but we can pick up several Representatives and make things a little more even and workable.”

Hope this was worthy of posting :)

#NeverTrump #ImWithHer #ProudDemocrat