I will say this to the Bernie campaign: You need to motivate your huge crowds to go out and vote!

[reformist2]

I don't think it can be denied - Bernie gets way more people showing up to his rallies than Hillary, but they don't convert into voters as much as they should. Based on the crowds he was getting, I really was expecting that he would win handily last night.

At his rallies, Bernie needs to thank his supporters for coming, but he needs to start telling them that they can't just passively stand in the crowd - they have to become active participants in the process if they really want Bernie to change the system!

[cascadiance]

1. Bernie was probably hurt by the last election's caucus being held during student winter break...

... which affected the attendance numbers THEN when students were away THEN, but affected how many delegates were allocated to them in THIS election! Read the following:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/02/02/hillary_clinton_won_the_iowa_caucus_says_state_democratic_party.html

...
Despite some controversy over short-staffed precincts late Monday, the Sanders campaign says that it doesn’t foresee contesting the final results—though it is calling on the state party to release the raw vote count from the night. It’s unclear if the party will release the vote—or even if they have an accurate tally given how the chaotic caucus process works—but Bernie is hoping that a raw vote total will allow him to claim his own qualified victory despite his narrow loss in the delegate column. There is a strong case to be made that more Iowans showed up to caucus for Sanders on Monday night than did for Clinton. That’s because a precinct with seven county delegates awards seven county delegates regardless of whether seven people show up to caucus or 700 do. Given that Bernie’s support appeared to be concentrated around college campuses—while Clinton’s appeared more evenly spread out across the state—it’s possible that he was short-changed by the system. In one Sanders-heavy precinct near the University of Iowa, for example, 646 people showed up to caucus on Monday, a roughly 70 percent jump from 2008. (That caucus occurred earlier in the year, when many students were still home for winter break.)
...