http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/08/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-says-he-consistently-beats-donald-t/

There are no “independents”– or very few, as I recall the numbers.

This is one of those areas where we kind of know the answers based on fundamentals but people keep trotting out numbers as if they are relevant.

In 2008, Obama/Biden faced McCain/Palin. People who mostly vote R but are not crazy/self-destructive had an easy choice. With the more reasonable Romney/Ryan ticket, they went back to their normal pattern of voting R.

Calling this group “independents” is useful to make headlines and rhetorical arguments to support one’s position, but not really helpful. It’s like the meme that African-American voters “deserted” Hillary in 2008. Nationally, AA voters were not some kind of fan-base for her, so there was nothing surprising about what happened once Barack Obama was seen as a very good candidate.

And now we will perhaps hear that the probably misogynistic Jim Webb is “deserting” Hillary because he is such a liberal populist.

And so it goes….

Also we know young people don’t vote, if they did Sanders would be leading. I say this as a Sanders supporter let me be quite clear.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1500319856 Code Red does an excellent job of detailing the problem and supporting it with historical results and empirical studies.

I have a website set up http://www.ShowMeTheVotes.org that details my own analysis, which confirms what others like Simon (wrote the Code Red book) have done. It also details my struggles and failure (to date) to be allowed to examine the paper records that exist where I live (Sedgwick County Kansas) and determine the accuracy of the official results compared to an audit of the paper records.

As Simon details in his book, exit polls are ‘adjusted’ to match the outcome of the official vote count. If the official vote count has been rigged, then the population statistics of the exit polls are skewed when this adjustment is made. The bizarre population data that results becomes another piece of evidence that our voting systems has been compromised.

The lack of transparency that results from the use of electronic election equipment isn’t acceptable even if we assume that no one is successfully taking advantage of that darkness.

But I would like to know what sorts of effects you are thinking about.

I’m very certain that the method of doing the voting affects things very strongly here in Minnesota, but that isn’t specifically about equipment.

See: http://mnprogressiveproject.com/how-to-fix-the-minnesota-presidential-caucus/

“In other words, the economic basis for voter anger has been building over forty years. Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes.

First, that year marked the end of net upward mobility…

The second adverse trend is that trade with China, which shot up after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated, according to recent studies. And the costs of trade with China have fallen most harshly on workers on the lower rungs of the income ladder…

The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.

If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.

If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/opinion/campaign-stops/why-trump-now.html?src=me

On a previous occasion I noted that Trump wasn’t a fascist, but that he had much in common with a populist right-wing party like the Danish People’s Party. A commentary in today’s Washington Post picks up on that:

“Well, actually, the package Trump offers — “save Social Security without cuts,” a vaguely pro-single-payer position on health care, plus temporarily banning Muslims and walling off Mexico — bears an eerie resemblance to the Danish government’s current policy mix.
His astonishing success selling it to the Republican base may portend ideological convergence between the U.S. right and Europe’s…
Not surprisingly, the recent Rand Corp. Presidential Election Panel Survey of Republican primary voters found that Trump supporters are more likely than others to feel threatened by immigrants and resent demands for equality by African Americans and women.
But that’s not the whole story. Trump also led among the 51 percent of GOP voters who support tax increases for those with incomes over $200,000; the 47 percent who favor a higher minimum wage; the 32 percent who favor “government paying necessary medical costs for every American citizen”; and the 38 percent who like labor unions.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-wants-to-make-america-more-like-denmark/2016/03/02/6bfc935e-dfd9-11e5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html

I’d also mention that Trump has no program aiming at replacing liberal American democracy (flawed though it may be) with an authoritarian system, that he has no ideology, that he is far less militaristic than members of the Republican establishment, that his positions change opportunistically and are often self-contradictory.