Bernie surges to a big national lead

In just one month, Sanders is up 9 points; Bloomberg’s up 6; Biden has dropped 16.

Sanders definitely seems to be the guy Trump wants to run against, even though Sanders beats Trump one-on-one in all major polls taken this month. I reckon the president feels that he can easily sell the anti-socialist line.

12 thoughts on “Bernie surges to a big national lead

  1. Well it’s clear Bloomberg wasn’t prepared last night. I don’t understand why with all his paid staff no one was able to come up with better answers to attacks everyone knew was coming. Maybe they did and Bloomberg really is so arrogant he wouldn’t use them? If not maybe he should hire me. For example, on Stop and Frisk. “Stop and Frisk took “X” guns off the street which lead to a “Y” percentage drop in gun violence. That reduction in gun violence was overwhelmingly in minority communities. I understood that the policy was causing pain in those communities, but I feared that ending it would lead to a resurgence in gun violence that would cause far greater pain. But I am a big enough man (pause for laugh) to admit when I was wrong. The policy was ended and gun violence didn’t surge. Therefore in retrospect the pain the policy caused wasn’t necessary and I sincerely apologize.” I am sure Bloomberg has access to the X and Y numbers. Why he didn’t give an answer like that, I don’t know.

    1. Probably because the entire policy has proven ineffective and wrong. There isn’t much defense of it and it even inhibited officers to do stop actual suspects:

      A 2016 study found no evidence that stop-and-frisk was effective. One of the authors of that study, Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University, said that “you can achieve really very positive crime control, reductions in crime, if you do stops using those probable-cause standards. If you just leave it up to the officers, based on their hunches, then they have almost no effect on crime.” Fagan “found stops based on probable cause standards of criminal behavior were associated with a 5–9 percent decline in NYC crime in census block groups.”

      “A 2017 study in The Journal of Politics found that the introduction of a mandate in 2013 that officers provide thorough justifications for stopping suspects led to far fewer stops, far fewer detainments of innocent people and increased the ratio of stops that ultimately produced evidence of the crime that the police stopped the suspect for.”

      Like everything else, stereotypes and anecdotal dogwhistling drive a conservative mindset that has no basis in objective fact. Bloomberg is about as conservative as it gets, and if he wanted to run in the primary he should have done so against Trump.

      1. My point above was less about defending Stop and Frisk and more about providing a more politically palatable justification for Bloomberg’s change of heart. I am pretty sure my answer above would have been better than his “but that was 5 years ago” answer.

        Legally, Constitutionally, officers were always required to be able to articulate the reasonable suspicion that lead them to stop the subject, whereupon (for the officer’s safety) they were permitted to frisk the subject before questioning them. Police should not have been permitted to stop a person, of any ethnicity, without that articulatable reasonable suspicion. They should have been required to justify each stop all along.

        I haven’t read the studies you cite above, but I know one often offered criticism of the policy was that weapons were rarely found. Though that could be seen as a success of the policy because the threat of being searched combined with the enhanced penalties for illegal possession of a firearm drastically reduced the frequency that many criminals would carry guns. In other words, many criminals would not carry a gun unless they expected to use it. That in turn lead to fewer shootings. That is my understanding of what happened, though I am not an expert on the policy.

        I am 52-years old an have lived in the Bronx most of my life. I remember what it was like to live here in the 1980’s where the city was so fed up with crime on the subways that a jury acquitted Bernie Goetz of all charges except illegal possession of a weapon even though Goetz shot one boy a second time after he was already on the ground. In 1990, there were over 2,600 murders in NYC. In 2018 there were 562, a reduction of over 75%.

        One of the side effects of success is that many people forget what it was like before. There was a time when Bloomberg’s policies were widely supported in minority communities. The Clinton crime bill that Joe Biden has been attacked for voting for had wide support in the Congressional Black caucus. But crime is down nationwide, not just in NYC and people have much less desire for tough on crime politicians. It has been almost 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union broke up and our economy is doing so well, that there is now significant support for a socialist candidate for president. If failure can have a silver lining, then success can certainly have a dark one.

  2. These polls don’t align with the electoral college anyway. I’m sure they have detailed internal state by state polling. I have no doubt that sanders wins California/New York by a far larger margin than Hilary did.

    1. Yeah, it’s kind of a fact of life that only about ten states really matter now. DC, California and Hawaii are not going to vote Trump, while Alabama, Utah and West Virginia are not going for Sanders.

      I wonder if Bloomberg realizes that if he’s going to pour advertising into the general in 2020, that he needs not to waste any money in California (for example), but to pour it all into the purple states.

      1. Ummm…he needs the California delegates to get the nomination. After he’s nominated he can ignore California.

        1. after this debate he found out he won’t get this nomination and if they let Bernie get it Trump will win.And those national polls at this time don’t mean jackshit.not one of these candidates will come close

          1. like i said the national poll means nothing at this time and really not ever just ask Hillary about polls.Tanner you don’t have to be clairvoyant, just watch the debate if you think anyone of these people can beat Trump you are delusional or in a dream like state

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