My Prediction: Bernie Sanders Will Win the White House

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

On May 12th, I presented my analysis of the polling as of that time, headlining, “The Early Signs of Whom The Next U.S. President Will Likely Be: Presidential Polls Look Confusing Regarding Bernie, But Downright Bad Regarding Hillary & All Republicans.” Based on the net-favorability ratings of candidates in the first poll that had really meaningful results on that most important of all factors (which poll had just been published), and also based on the latest available reliable poll of Americans’ ideological preferences (which had been taken in 2011, but that’s okay because ideology changes only very slowly), I concluded that Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders was likely to surprise on the upside at the start of his contest, and that, “Sanders would probably be able to crush any Republican except perhaps Rand Paul, if he were to win the Democratic primaries.” He is already surprising on the upside (though pundits haven’t yet caught on that Hillary’s a dud), and so I am now predicting that Sanders will win, first, the Democratic nomination, and then the White House. But, first, to summarize:

The crucial net favorabilities were shown and documented in that May 12th article to be outright terrible for every candidate except Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and Bernie Sanders; they were merely bad for Walker and Rubio; and they were probably marginally good for Sanders, but the latest poll hadn’t even included Sanders’s name, and so for him I extrapolated from ideologically the only candidate, who had been named, who was at all similar to Sanders ideologically, and this was Elizabeth Warren; and she had a slightly positive net favorability rating, which was by far the best of any of the named candidates (either male or female). Based on information that I’ve been provided access to, she will not be entering the contest, and Senator Sanders will be the only progressive candidate running in the Democratic primaries.

The 2011 ideological poll showed that of the five ideological orientations that were named, the one with the highest net-favorability — the ratio of “positive” to “negative” ratings — by the American public, was “Progressive,” at 67%/22%, or 3.05; and the second-highest was “Conservative,” at 62%/30%, or 2.07. Like Senator Warren, Senator Sanders is one of the U.S. Senate’s three leading (if not the Senate’s only three) progressives. He clearly represents the most-widely-shared ideology: progressivism. If he wins the Democratic nomination, then the nation will be in for its first clear ideological choice since 1932 in a two-major-Party contest between a progressive Democrat versus a conservative Republican. That time it was FDR versus Herbert Hoover.


http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/06/my-prediction-bernie-sanders-will-win-the-white-house.html