Bernie is Up!

~ Laura

Bernie is polling well. Quinnipiac has him at 41%, Hillary at 40%, and Biden at 12% among likely Iowa caucus voters. Now, primary voters are always more extreme than regular voters, but those are good numbers.

Jonah is addicted to Reddit. It’s kinda funny that Reddit, which is an Internet 1.0 thing, appeals to my teenager, but it does. Last week, he used some random tidbit that he learned on Reddit in his Physics lab. The teacher had them use paper and tape to create a structure strong enough to hold their textbook a few inches off the ground. Just the week before, he had read an article about the stength of paper on Reddit, so he knew how to create IKEA-style legs for the book by cutting strips of paper and rolling them into tubes. He was the first one to finish, and came home gleefully triumphant. I had been mocking him for his Reddit reading, saying that nobody but lonely 30-years with Aspergers wrote posts on Reddit. Jonah 1; Mom 0.

And through his Reddit reading, Jonah has developed a passion for Bernie. I guess the Aspergery, Reddit dudes love Bernie, too.

There’s a lot of people who have no interest in another Clinton or another Bush. Hence, Bernie and Trump. We’ll probably still end up with Clinton and Bush in the end, but at least right now, everybody wants a little fun.

Published by Laura

10 thoughts on “Bernie is Up!”

  1. My 16 year old also reads Reddit, and today I mentioned it in class (as the place where I get my news, that and Twitter) and most students knew of it. And S also loves Bernie and berates me for not being as excited about him as she is. I like him, I like his ideas, I know his job is to pull Hillary to the left, but I don’t think he will ever be president, so I don’t waste too much time thinking about him.

    Also, I try to play it cool in class, but Donald Trump has come up a few times, and a student even asked me today if I liked him. (I said I wanted to study his public speaking style – as that was a public speaking class.) Then another student said his public speaking style has been shown to be comparable to that of Hitler. Then I shut down that conversation because Godwin was knocking at the door….

    But my point is that I’m getting major anti-Trump vibes from my students.

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    1. I think people either love him or hate him.

      A friend’s husband is quite smitten with Trump. Friend’s husband is an up-and-coming scientist–and rather unfiltered himself.

      I haven’t encountered anybody else in real life who loves Trump.

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  2. My 20-year-old loves reddit as do some of my students. It is a fount of information, for sure. I poke my head into Tales From Tech Support sometimes. But it makes me sad about the state of society.

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  3. For various words of wisdom, or at least knowledge founded on historical experience, check out Nate Silver. Sanders might have a ten percent of capturing the nomination, because every once in a while an extremist insurgent captures a major party nomination. See, e.g., Goldwater, McGovern. They go on to overwhelming defeat in the general election. Trump surely has less than a five percent chance, since basically no extremist outsider has captured a major party nomination in living memory.

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    1. I would like to think Trump’s chances are that low, but the rest of the Reep field is so diffuse that I wonder if he can make it by just being the last man standing. The voters in each party are really unenthusiastic about the dynasty candidates.

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  4. It’s really early, and never, ever would I have thought either has a chance. However, I know lots of real life conservatives who like Trump and are becoming vocal about it. Each week it’s like more an more of them gain courage to come out of the closet and admit it. And I know lots of my daughter’s friends who are very excited about Sanders. I think for him to get the nomination, all that excitement of youth would really have to get out and vote. I don’t know if they’ll follow through like they need to.

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      3. “I’ve pointed out to my kids that this “revolutionary” is an elderly white guy.”

        Pol Pot was unavailable.

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