Election Update: Why Warren Needs To Play To Win -- And That Includes Beating Sanders

[comradebillyboy]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-the-warren-sanders-fight-may-help-warrens-chances-in-iowa/

We’ve officially entered silly season in the Democratic primary, which means we’re at the point where you can get pretty far by just stating the obvious. So here are a few rather obvious truths about the Democratic primary:

Only one candidate can be nominated.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of the more likely people to be nominated, have heavily overlapping bases of support.
But Warren narrowly trails Sanders in the national polls (both candidates trail Joe Biden) and Sanders is perceived as having momentum.
There are less than three weeks to go until Iowa.

So some of the assessments of Warren’s recent strategy toward Sanders have seemed off-kilter to me. For instance, people on Twitter — where both candidates have lots of support — seem shocked that Warren would escalate conflict against Sanders, first over the relatively minor matter of a script that Sanders volunteers were using that described Warren as a candidate of the “elite,” and later, over the more serious accusation that Sanders allegedly told Warren that a woman couldn’t be elected president.1

In fact, this is all pretty normal at this point in a presidential campaign — especially for a candidate in Warren’s situation. And there’s even some initial evidence that her strategy is working! Voters in our post-debate poll with Ipsos gave Warren the highest grade of any candidate for her debate performance — which mostly featured a positive, policy-oriented message along with a couple of chilly moments between her and Sanders. Meanwhile perceptions of Warren’s electability improved among voters in the poll after the debate, while Sanders’s favorability ratings worsened.

This Is better than usual article from Silver, in my opinion. Of course this is only an excerpt.

[delisen]

1. The script is the serious matter. That Sanders would claim

a woman cannot win in 2020 is standard Sanders. His attitude toward women has been consistently retro.

The script was a definite attack on Warren personally and trying to label he as an elitist is using

Republican talking points and Trumian behavior to attack a Democratic candidate and basically a lie.

It is what I expect of Sanders based upon previous behaviors and reinforces the fact that he is not a Democrat and is likely to continue to tear down our party.

We need parity for women in all political offices.

Sad.

[SunSeeker]

2. Yep. We've all familiar with this behavior from Sanders. nt