Is he actually real though? Or is he like Ron Paul - who polled pretty well and had the internet presence but when it came time to vote he was seemingly invisible?
I hope that he is real - I just have a hard time believing he will excite people enough to actually vote in the primaries.
He was able to gather a crowd of 10,000 in Madison last week, and a crowd of 7,500 last night in Maine. Of course his rally turnouts are not definitive prove of his validity, but it is a good start. With his polling numbers growing every week, Bernie will be likely be a direct contender to Hillary by the time of the primaries.
I too hope that Sanders wins the Democratic nomination (and if he does, likely the election), but it has been historically shown that those who gather crowds are still often outvoted in the actual election. NPR discussed how this happened years back in one of Nixon's campaigns - his major opponent gathered humongous crowds while he got later, but he yet ended up getting elected.
When Ron Paul ran, he ran a rather moderate, sensible platform at a time it seemed like his party's base wanted crazy, loud, angry and hateful. And they ended up running the most electable version of crazy, loud, angry and hateful (which was more duplicitous, out of touch, and rich but Romney's another story entirely). He picked a bad time to run.
Bernie Sanders is running at a time when democrats are sick of tea party ideology, hate, and inability to govern. He's got a solid, consistent voting record in a time of deep distrust of politicians and the government in general. I believe he picked a good time to run, where his base is receptive to his message, or maybe when we're simply sick of picking the lesser of two evils, or maybe we just want to know what we're getting when we vote for someone. I believe that he picked the right time to run, and he's got a much better shot than Ron Paul did.
He also doesn't have about 12 big names running against him and splitting the vote. Which helps. Ron Paul wasn't so lucky there either.
Is Bernie really polling well though? He has a strong internet presence, but my program based purely on latest polls has Sanders at ~1% of receiving the Democratic nomination.
No, he is not. As others here have noted, he is polling at numbers comparable to people who aren't running. His winning the nomination with the way his campaign is currently running is all but impossible: short of a giant scandal or massive unforeseen event, his winning would be absurdly unlikely. Like Ron Paul, he has a small, very vocal group of supporters who have a very strong Internet presence, and push him very aggressively on social media.
Whether this form of campaigning can actually translate into meaningful gains in polling is, I think, dubious. I'm particularly curious as to whether such aggressive social media campaigning could end up being harmful, causing audience fatigue or even backlash; the latter, I think, may have been a significant problem for Ron Paul, with his supporters coming off as so fanatical and aggressive that even people who would have agreed with Paul's stances were driven away. The same may happen with Sanders. On snapzu, for example, despite having all politics tribes removed from my subscriptions, I still am subjected to two of these Sanders posts, and on reddit, r/politics has been taken over the extent that a majority is either Sanders puffery or Clinton-bashing. The comment here by radixius of "I tell everyone... for some reason the don't buy it" makes me wonder whether this sort of fatigue and backlash is at play in their campaigning.
Is he actually real though? Or is he like Ron Paul - who polled pretty well and had the internet presence but when it came time to vote he was seemingly invisible?
I hope that he is real - I just have a hard time believing he will excite people enough to actually vote in the primaries.
He was able to gather a crowd of 10,000 in Madison last week, and a crowd of 7,500 last night in Maine. Of course his rally turnouts are not definitive prove of his validity, but it is a good start. With his polling numbers growing every week, Bernie will be likely be a direct contender to Hillary by the time of the primaries.
I too hope that Sanders wins the Democratic nomination (and if he does, likely the election), but it has been historically shown that those who gather crowds are still often outvoted in the actual election. NPR discussed how this happened years back in one of Nixon's campaigns - his major opponent gathered humongous crowds while he got later, but he yet ended up getting elected.
When Ron Paul ran, he ran a rather moderate, sensible platform at a time it seemed like his party's base wanted crazy, loud, angry and hateful. And they ended up running the most electable version of crazy, loud, angry and hateful (which was more duplicitous, out of touch, and rich but Romney's another story entirely). He picked a bad time to run.
Bernie Sanders is running at a time when democrats are sick of tea party ideology, hate, and inability to govern. He's got a solid, consistent voting record in a time of deep distrust of politicians and the government in general. I believe he picked a good time to run, where his base is receptive to his message, or maybe when we're simply sick of picking the lesser of two evils, or maybe we just want to know what we're getting when we vote for someone. I believe that he picked the right time to run, and he's got a much better shot than Ron Paul did.
He also doesn't have about 12 big names running against him and splitting the vote. Which helps. Ron Paul wasn't so lucky there either.
Is Bernie really polling well though? He has a strong internet presence, but my program based purely on latest polls has Sanders at ~1% of receiving the Democratic nomination.
No, he is not. As others here have noted, he is polling at numbers comparable to people who aren't running. His winning the nomination with the way his campaign is currently running is all but impossible: short of a giant scandal or massive unforeseen event, his winning would be absurdly unlikely. Like Ron Paul, he has a small, very vocal group of supporters who have a very strong Internet presence, and push him very aggressively on social media.
Whether this form of campaigning can actually translate into meaningful gains in polling is, I think, dubious. I'm particularly curious as to whether such aggressive social media campaigning could end up being harmful, causing audience fatigue or even backlash; the latter, I think, may have been a significant problem for Ron Paul, with his supporters coming off as so fanatical and aggressive that even people who would have agreed with Paul's stances were driven away. The same may happen with Sanders. On snapzu, for example, despite having all politics tribes removed from my subscriptions, I still am subjected to two of these Sanders posts, and on reddit, r/politics has been taken over the extent that a majority is either Sanders puffery or Clinton-bashing. The comment here by radixius of "I tell everyone... for some reason the don't buy it" makes me wonder whether this sort of fatigue and backlash is at play in their campaigning.