I wanted to make this post last night just before I went to bed, but a
thunderstorm kept me off the computer. So I decided to do it first thing
in the morning. I have seen no news this morning, so this is based on
the eleven o'clock news last night. It appears that Sanders beat Clinton
in West Virginia with fifty-three percent to Clinton's forty-one
percent. There was no mention of Keith Judd or Martin O'Malley, but
after adding up the other percentages I suppose they split less than one
percent between them. Candidates who have already dropped out and
candidates who do not campaign or take any positions on any issues
usually get a low percentage, but this is unusually low. They usually
get at least between one and two percent. Keith Judd seems to have
suffered a precipitous decline since 2012 when he got forty-eight
percent of the vote against the only other candidate on the ballot,
Barack Obama. Anyway, I said it would be interesting to see how
candidates who did not campaign or take any positions would do since
Sanders poll numbers had declined so much since last month. One of them
did do rather well. There is a lawyer from Huntington West Virginia who
put his name on the ballot. The filing fee in this state is two thousand
dollars, so I suppose he just had a couple of thousand dollars lying
around to throw away. When he filed he said that he did not expect to
win; he just wanted to give West Virginians a choice. In other words,
his candidacy was just a lark. I keep forgetting his name. I think it is
Howard something. Well, he got six percent. That is unusually high for a
lark candidate. I suppose that represents the anti-Clinton/anti-Sanders
vote. Even so, Sanders did much better than the latest polls before the
election predicted that he would. He also did much worse than the polls
indicated that he would do as of last month. I still maintain, though,
that his win in West Virginia was not because of a pro-Sanders vote,
but, rather, because of an anti-Clinton vote. I heard another poll
figure last night that backs that up. It seems that forty-four percent
of the Sanders voters intend to vote for Donald Trump in November if the
Democrat Nominee is Clinton.
