Although I never claimed to be a hard-bitten data analyst, and was responding to the claim made by another. I made no claims myself, although you seem to imply I did, in my questions, but rather started with a request for clarification of the extensive analysis that was strongly implied by the person I replied to. Well, that person did not respond to my questions, which would have been productive, and you simply turned my questions around on me. So - not really much of a dialogue there, but if you are willing to participate in one, I'll gladly answer your questions, well, my questions, mostly, and hope that we might just see some mature and meaningful dialogue.
I ask that you please keep this in mind - again, I do not claim to be a serious data analyst (and I need to drive several hours to hook up with family for Fathers' day stuff), and my answers will merely be starting points.
1) I don't claim that Hillary Clinton has no realistic path to General Election victory. Period. She has substantial popular support, at least at this point. She also had approximately the same level of popular support 7 years ago but lost the Democratic nomination for the office of the President to Barack Obama, a virtually unknown junior U.S. Senator, who became a two-term President. This strongly suggest to me that a significant extent of her support is somewhat unreliable. I don't know what the extent is, and just how unreliable, but the general conclusion is based on hard facts.
One quite different problem is she has a serious handicap when it comes to policy discussion dealing with past presidents. If she discusses in any way the positives of her husband's presidency, she opens herself up entirely to all of the right-wing propaganda that has been built for years around Hillary-hating. In addition, there is the high probability that she would not have gained any sort of political prominence in the U.S. if her husband had not become the President of the United States. If she attains the Democratic nomination, and ends up running against 'Jeb' Bush, there will be a lot of suppression of discussion of the past, and this may be less of a handicap than otherwise. However, this means that the policies of George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush will be almost entirely ignored by campaign and party machinery, meaning that the only President whose policies that are fair game for discussion are those of Barack Obama. 'Jeb' Bush was not formally involved in his brother's government. Hillary Clinton, however, was very much involved in Obama's. Al Gore learned the lesson of distancing himself from his very active involvement as Vice President in the prior president's administration by (sort of) losing the General Election to George W. Bush. Will Hillary Clinton be able to use her experience as Secretary of State (during which she was involved in more high-profile failures than successes) in any positive way? That is a wild card. Ultimately, it seems to me, that her primary asset in such a scenario is a 'cult of personality'-type following, not based on past political successes, but rather on less tangible substance, and, if that is the case, it may be very unreliable.
Also, the right-wing propaganda machine has demonized her for years, with great success among much of the Republican core constituency. There are a great many Americans who absolutely won't vote for her, not because of her party affiliation, but because of the simple fact, in their minds, that she is evil incarnate. That's how deep it goes.
I don't claim to have a 'data analyst's' capacity to evaluate with great accuracy the degrees of certainty of the effect of these factors with respect to what happens on the day of the General Election, and I'm pressed for time, but I'd be grateful for others' perspectives on the prospective magnitude of these factors and whether they are positives or negatives.
Well, crap - I've got to go, and there's much more that I would discuss on question one if I had the time, but I'll have to pick it up in a couple of days. Also, please note that I did not imply that Bernie Sanders had a realistic path to General election victory by asking the questions I did. I was directly responding to someone else's strong assertion that he did not with a request for why he/she held that perspective. It may be that he does have such a 'realistic path,' and it may be that he does not. I'll put some of my thoughts on that out there for analysis shortly, then I hope to have time to address question three properly.
Fair Enough?
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