Bernie and Tulsi and polls

Will Tulsi qualify for the next debate? That depends on how it's measured.

Since then, Gabbard has shot past the 130,000 donor threshold, and as of Aug. 11, she was sitting at 159,514 individual donors. That took care of one-half of the qualification criteria for the next two debates.

Where Gabbard is seeing some struggles is in the polling numbers. Well, sort of.

The reality is that since June 28 (the first day of the time in which polls can be counted towards September qualification), Gabbard has hit 2% or higher in eight different polls, which is more than the already-qualified Klobuchar and Yang.

Yet, the DNC only counts one of those as an approved poll, meaning Gabbard still needs three more polls to her resume.

Something tells me that Tulsi isn't going to qualify according to DNC rules.
Not if DWS still has any influence.

Meanwhile, the "unelectable" Bernie continues to beat Trump in every poll.

So why would people think that Bernie is unelectable? It certainly isn't because the news media has it in for him.
That would be konspiratorial.

"Sen. Sanders is a member of a large club of politicians — of every ideology — who complain about their coverage,” Marty Baron said in a statement to CNN. “Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor, Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”

Baron’s response came after Sanders knocked Bezos, who also owns Amazon, during a campaign speech in Wolfeboro, N.H.

"I talk about [Amazon's taxes] all of the time," Sanders said. "And then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn't write particularly good articles about me. I don't know why."

In fact, even suggesting that the WashPost has it in for Bernie makes him no different from Trump.

On Tuesday morning’s edition of New Day, the network cast the net a bit wider. Co-host Erica Hill introduced a package featuring clips of Sanders and senior Biden adviser Symone Sanders by saying “Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign and Senator Bernie Sanders taking a page from the Donald Trump playbook.”
by lumping Sanders and Sanders together, CNN has elevated the premise from mere false equivalency to a dangerous and offensive normalization of Trump, and one which CNN in particular should know better than to make.

32 users have voted.


the influence of people with tons of money running very big companies is substantial. Those folks probably recognise Sanders as being very bad for their type of country which they've had free reign to promote for quite a long time. I remember when Obama made the rounds talking to the big guys in 08, all of a sudden the media didn't portray him as being scary anymore, the idea was "here is a guy who is not too outrageous, we can work with him". I don't think they figure Sanders can be controlled. Then again they didn't want Trump and Trump won.

22 users have voted.
Hawkfish's picture

In the NYT this morning. Surprise, surprise.

17 users have voted.

- Greta Thunberg

Shahryar's picture

Jill Stein sat at a table with Putin! Bernie notices the Post is biased...just like Trump did!

Did critical thinking ever exist in the United States? I mean, as a general thing?

28 users have voted.
Azazello's picture

a long, long time ago, before TV.

18 users have voted.

@Shahryar For utter intellectual dishonesty nothing beats guilt by association. Maddow is the master of it to the point she inferred Russian badness because she discovered that Russia had a border with North Korea. Now there is some guilt by association. Democrats forget that the gop tried to smear Obama because of some very loose association with Bill Ayers through the U. of Chicago.

20 users have voted.
Azazello's picture

What will it take for the Democratic establishment to abandon Biden?

I for one cannot see this ever happening. This is not because it would not be a good thing for the party and its fortunes but because Democrats value unity and loyalty and knowing one's place in the pecking order more than they do anything else, including winning elections. We saw this in 2016, when at least 10 of today's candidates running against a non-incumbent Trump would have had a better shot than Hillary Clinton, whose serious weaknesses were as apparent long before Iowa as they were on November 9.
Hillary wanted for her turn. Now it's Joe's.

There's a lotta' truth in that.

29 users have voted.
gulfgal98's picture

The DNC chose to put more weight on polls from "their polling partners" (whatever that means) over unique donors as the top criteria for qualifying for the debates. First polls use a very small sample, as little as 400 persons from one of the most recent qualifying polls. This means that for a candidate to get 2%, at least eight people out of the four hundred must name that candidate. With a statistical error of 4-5% in most polls, that can mean that a candidate could easily not qualify due to the statistical margin of error. Second, most polls only use land lines which means the demographic being polled tends to be older, therefore, not representative of the electorate at large.

Unique donors is a far better metric to determine a candidate's support. Tulsi has easily exceeded the unique donor requirement, and yet if she does not get the polling numbers she could very well be left out of the next rounds of debates just as Mike Gravel was.

I remember reading that Bill de Blasio had a really low number of unique donors and yet was allowed to compete in the debates.

Personally, I believe that any candidate meeting the current unique donors threshold should be in all debates going forward. The American people deserve the right to see and compare all the candidates against one another.

24 users have voted.


"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." John F Kennedy



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Not by running for president, but by financing real debates, with sensible moderators. If he did that, the DNC threat of excluding candidates from their “debates” would ring hollow.

14 users have voted.
Wally's picture

I came across an excellent twitter thread that goes into it in great detail:

Well worth the time (maybe 15 minutes) and effort to delve into it in earnest.

8 users have voted.
ludwig ii's picture

Suffolk U. poll counted when it was sponsored by USA Today. Tulsi hit 3% in a Suffolk poll, but not one sponsored by USA Today, so it didn't count.

Tulsi hit 3% in a YouGov national poll, which doesn't count, but YouGov counted when it was sponsored by CBS News in Iowa.

WTF? It's all a Byzantine shell game to prop up the MSM approved choices. If I were a candidate I would be filing a lawsuit.

28 users have voted.

I would be surprised if she makes the next debates. Looks like the establishment is coming after her with sharpened knives. Stop her before she turns the big proverbial guns on Biden.

20 users have voted.
Shahryar's picture


The DNC decides who it wants, then picks and chooses criteria that bring that choice about.

If it really, really wants someone excluded it uses polls that don't ask about all the candidates. As in "we'll use this poll that doesn't list Gravel and then keep Gravel out because he didn't reach our required percentage."

24 users have voted.

More accurately, the DNC is told who it wants. After that, you've pretty much got it right.

13 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
AGCC is happening.

@UntimelyRippd because money equals free speech. The saying used to be that "money talks", today it barks orders and the DNC is all ears.

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Bollox Ref's picture


'study' journalmalism?

As bad as that other NYT nincompoop, Bari Weiss (see Joe Rogan takedown).

16 users have voted.

from a reasonably stable genius.

Centaurea's picture

@Bollox Ref @Bollox Ref

Study journalism, that is.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Sydney Ember has an Ivy League (Brown U) undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature.

After graduation in 2012, she went to work as a financial markets analyst at BlackRock. Yep, BlackRock. A couple of years later, in 2015, she was hired by the NYT as an advertising reporter. She married the son of the former Bain Capital CEO. Yep, that's Mitt Romney's Bain Capital.

From a Jacobin piece about Ember:

Ember came to the New York Times with a resumé limited to the finance industry: She was an analyst for BlackRock, the biggest global investment management corporation and the largest investor in coal plant developers in the world. (Her husband, Mike Bechek, is also in the investment business; he was a senior associate consultant at Bain Capital, where his father was CEO.)

Ember was hired by the Times in 2014 to cover advertising and marketing for the paper’s business vertical Dealbook. She started covering politics in May 2018 and immediately got the enviable assignment of covering one of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

The Dem candidate, of course, was Hillary Clinton. Ember immediately embarked on the same shenanigans against Bernie that she's using again now: smear, obfuscate, misreport.

Basically, she's a Mean Girl. So is the other NYT "journalist" you mentioned, Bari Weiss. Ignorant, insulated in their little bubble with a limited worldview, and mean.

This is what the New York Times has devolved into.

5 users have voted.

"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."

"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone

Lily O Lady's picture

7 users have voted.
