27 May 2016
Independent voters and Bernie, pithy prose by Gazette’s Lutey
More on the myth of the independent voter. Self-identified independents comprised 44 percent of the respondents to a recent Gallup poll, reports Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight, but only 23 percent of the SIIs had no partisan preference when asked if they leaned Democratic or Republican. Therefore, only 10 percent of the poll’s respondents were true independents.
That number, 10 percent, is consistent with the findings of other polls and for decades has been common knowledge among savvy students of politics.
Bernie Sanders, Enten reports, does not do significantly better than Hillary Clinton among true independents (who tend to be low information voters), but both Sanders and Clinton do twice as well as Donald Trump.
Both Enten and New York's Ed Kilgore conclude that a very high percentage of the SIIs who support Sanders will vote for Clinton if she’s the Democratic nominee.
Is Donald Trump the scat jazz king of political discourse? Yes, reports Tom Lutey of the Billings Gazette:
Before a crowd of several thousand, Trump riffed on oil, immigrants, trade deals and guns, never sticking with one subject long enough to see it to the end. He was the current champion of political scat jazz, the crowd floating The Donald’s stream of consciousness.
That’s some of the best political writing of the year. The Gazette should give Lutey a hefty bonus just for that paragraph, which may well infuriate Trump’s worshippers.