I love the whole new election analysis approach of saying that a majority of voters voted for the losing candidates, which by definition is what happens in a democracy, since it's very difficult for winners to clear the 50% threshold
In other words, it's precisely their ability to lose well that makes the losers winners, or something
It's like when Macron came first with "only" 24% in the first round of 2017 French elections, and people were like, French people don't like Macron: 76% of them voted for other candidates. Macron actually lost by 52%!
Or when Ennahda, Tunisia's main Islamist party, won the 2011 elections with around 40% of the vote, and people were like: the Islamists lost, because 60% of voters voted for non-Islamists! If only the secular parties could unite, they'd be the true winners!
Best case scenario is that pundits (and apparently many members of the Democratic party) don't understand how democracy works. I worry, though, that it's more likely these people are acting in bad faith, twisting results to fit their own preconceived ideological preferences
This is probably the single worst take of the entire Democratic primary season, courtesy of NYT politics reporter @jwpetersNYT
Losing is winning, and winning is losing
Then there's the argument that Bernie won New Hampshire by a lot less this time than he did in 2016. Well, yes, he was facing only one other candidate in 2016. This time, it was a 7 candidate contest, 5 of them being serious competitors
There's also this bizarre assumption that a vote for "moderates" is a vote against Bernie. As an empirical matter, we know this is simply not true. Many Biden supporters favor Bernie as their second choice: fivethirtyeight.com/features/lanes…
In short, much of the "objective" analysis and reporting on the New Hampshire results, including from respected outlets, was based on faulty assumptions and incredibly basic misunderstandings of both politics and political science
