Posts by David Hood
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I do not think Sanders can win against the Democratic Party establishment.
But on the getting things done, I would note that when he headed the Senate's Veteran Affairs committee, he got a lot more bipartisan legislation passed (including new spending) than was typical for veteran affairs committees in other sessions, in a congress that got much less legislation overall successfully passed than other congresses.
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Speaker: Data Love or: How I learnt to…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
While from the distance of left wing socialist NZ that might seem like a good thing, the fact is the US system works only because of balance. A democrat party dominated congress senate president and supreme court is possible if still unlikely. I don't think anyone knows where that might lead.
They used to say that about California State- That the gridlock between republicans and democrats and binding referendum kept things in balance. Then the democrats got a supermajority so could actually sort out stupidities in the tax system brought on by the binding referenda, and the state has done much better since.
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Speaker: Data Love or: How I learnt to…, in reply to Nik Dirga,
And while I like a lot of Bernie Sanders’ ideas, I have yet to see a single sentence from him that acknowledges how he’s going to make them happen against a congressional firewall that would be even stronger than the one Obama’s faced.
As far as I can see from this distance, Hillary Clinton would face just as much resistance for her approach, and has explained how she would make it happen either.
In both cases, against a Republican congress, it would boil down to veto + appointments + willingness to engage in military action + directives to federal agencies.
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Looking at the responses, it looks more to me like confusion than bloody mindedness- particular since people who support the same party tend to share misidentification with other members of the party (for example Green voters say Labour rather than ACT or National). I think it is just that we don't normally get to see how much memory is constructed.
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Polity: Poll Soup, in reply to BenWilson,
I might look into it- but I don't think it will be uniform on jinterest. For example there may be different levels of interest between people getting confused over did they vote for Labour or National, and the people who forget they voted strategically for National by actually voting for Act.
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It's a world of laughter, a world of fears....
https://boingboing.net/2016/02/25/disney-offers-to-deduct-contri.html
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Overal about 70% of voters in the 11 survey gave the same answer for who they voted for in the last election compared with who they said they voted for in the 08 one.
My impression is it is a lot about the "distance" people place parties from each other in the reconstruction of memory. National voters seemed to see it as a party by itself in '11, so were pretty good remembering if they voted National last time, but a majority of Act voters thought they had previously voted for National (but then a majority of Act voters liked National better than Act, so I suspect were just trying to vote strategically and don't remember the details). Green voters tended to think they voted for Labour, and Labour voters think they voted for National or Greens (among those remembering incorrectly). New Zealand First and United Future had National and Labour memories.
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Note that you can link NZES surveys together to create a time series of sorts.
What struck me was the frailty of human memory- the people who gave different answers to the question "who did you vote for in 2008?" between when they were asked the question in 2008, and when they were looking back on 2008 from 2011.
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Here is another way of visualising it- comparing the results between liking National and Labour, for those non-voters that expressed a liking rating for both National and Labour.
There are 2 big clusters-
A bunch (42/367) of non-voters feel the same about National and Labour, neither liking nor disliking them.
A smaller bunch (20/367) of non-voters despise National and love Labour
Then, smaller again come a closely matched bunch of neither like nor dislike National while loving Labour (11/367), despise Labour and love National (10/367), despise National and like Labour (8/367) and despise National and neither like nor dislike Labour (7/367). Then we get a whole bunch of mild feelings nearish the middle.
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Reinforcing this, if we go to the "I would never vote for" questions, among non-voters in 2011:
23.4% would never vote National
9.5% would never vote Labour
15.4% would never vote Green
27.0% would never vote NZF
