More here:Bernie Sanders Is Currently Winning the Democratic Primary Race, and I’ll Prove It to You
Nobody cares how well a politician does at the ballot box when he or she is running for an office unopposed. What matters is how a politician performs in contested primaries and general elections, as when it really matters — like it will, for instance, this November — you can be certain of a contested election.
With that said, let’s make an important observation: Bernie Sanders has tied or beaten Hillary Clinton in a majority of the actively contested votes this election season.
You doubt it? Okay, let me explain.
Bernie Sanders has terrible name recognition in states where he hasn’t advertised or campaigned yet; meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has universal name recognition everywhere. Realizing this, the Clinton camp pushed hard to rack up the early vote in every state where early voting was an option. They did this not primarily for the reason we’ve been told — because Clinton performs well among older voters, and older voters are more likely to vote early than other age demographics — but rather because they knew that early votes are almost always cast before the election season actually begins in a given state.
That’s right — in each state, most of the early primary voting occurs before the candidates have aired any commercials or held any campaign events. For Bernie Sanders, this means that early voting happens, pretty much everywhere, before anyone knows who he is. Certainly, early voting occurs in each state before voters have developed a sufficient level of familiarity and comfort with Sanders to vote for him.
But on Election Day — among voters who’ve been present and attentive for each candidate’s commercials, local news coverage, and live events — Sanders tends to tie or beat Clinton.
In fact, that’s the real reason Sanders does well in caucuses.
It’s not because caucuses “require a real time investment,” as the media likes to euphemistically say, but because caucuses require that you vote on Election Day rather than well before it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abra ... 28076.html
I have long argued that extensive early voting is thwarting of the democratic process, because the voters are not acting with access to the same information, which is what one should really want to be the case. People voting as much as a month or more before the actual election are voting with access to far less information to make a judgement with, than those who vote on election day.
In this election cycle, early voting has hurt Sanders and helped Trump. In the Democratic primaries the voters should all have had an opportunity to learn something about Sanders before being permitted vote, and on GOP side, all the voters should have had the opportunity to weigh the most recent outrageous things to spew from Drumpf's gob...
I believe I've mentioned this before but my proposal is this:
1.Eliminate all the early voting, except for the Saturday and Sunday before the scheduled Tuesday vote. On those two days, I would have all the polls open, and for the general election I would also make the Tuesday election day a federal holiday.
2.Restore absentee voting to what it was intended to be; an opportunity to vote for those with a legitimate reason (health, being out of state, etc.) to be unable to get to the polls. (with three possible days to vote on, there shouldn't be a lot of excuses for not being able to vote.)
I would also require that ballots being mailed in not be sent any earlier than one week before election day, and I would not count any that came in with an earlier post mark. (Obviously this policy would need to be widely publicized.)
For the democratic process to work properly, everyone who's participating needs to be doing so in at least a roughly contemporaneous fashion, with the same available information. In many states this is no longer the case.
