Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Sanders' Michigan win "one of the greatest upsets in modern political history"

Gay nerd Nate Silver's blog, fivethirtyeight.com, correctly called 49 of 50 states in the 2008 election and all 50 in the 2012 election. But Bernie Sanders' victory in Michigan yesterday fooled 538, which is now calling his win "one of the greatest upsets in modern political history."  Here's what Harry Enten wrote:
     Bernie Sanders made folks like me eat a stack of humble pie on Tuesday night. He won the Michigan primary over Hillary Clinton, 50 percent to 48 percent, when not a single poll taken over the last month had Clinton leading by less than 5 percentage points. In fact, many had her lead at 20 percentage points or higher. Sanders’s win in Michigan was one of the greatest upsets in modern political history.
     Both the FiveThirtyEight polls-plus and polls-only forecast gave Clinton a greater than 99 percent chance of winning. That’s because polling averages for primaries, while inexact, are usually not 25 percentage points off. Indeed, my colleague Nate Silver went back and found that only one primary, the 1984 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, was even on the same scale as this upset. In that contest, the polling average had Walter Mondale beating Gary Hart by 17 percentage points, but it was Hart who won, with slightly more than 9 percentage points over Mondale.


     Michigan's third biggest city is Warren and its independent mayor, Jim Fouts, is the latest critic of Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, considered by many to be a secret ally of Hillary Clinton and by Fouts to be a "totalitarian." Here's what the Unity Progressive Party website had to say:
The mayor of Michigan’s third largest city says he was threatened with expulsion from Sunday’s Democratic Debate at the Flint Cultural Center after he complimented Bernie Sanders within earshot of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.  Warren, MI Mayor Jim Fouts, a registered independent told Buzzfeed News that he was speaking at a “normal” decibel level, encouraging the Vermont Sanders by saying “Great Job Bernie” and “We need more debates”. At the next commercial break, he was confronted by security...

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