I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at here. Those polls only show Biden and Sanders, so they're not an accurate look at the race from about the Iowa caucuses to Super Tuesday. And results matter more than polling anyway, and all the results prior to South Carolina showed Biden dead in the water.
OK, clicking through a bit more I can see the other candidates.
He was losing in early voting rounds and was a nonfactor alone after them, until centrists merged, but he was the front runner out of the gate, and Sanders did not attack him until after the centrist merged.
Agreed on all of this, but I don't see how it makes not attacking Biden indefensible. If anything, Biden polling well out of the gate and then getting nothing out of the first few states suggests the polls overestimated his support, and focusing on him was not needed.
In hindsight it might have been better had Bernie attacked Biden earlier, but his actual approach was justifiable, and the evidence is that he won the first four states while Biden was sagging hard.
Bernie won those early contests in spite of not attacking Biden.
But he really needed to attack Biden, and it was a major fuckup not to...? The fact that he swept the early primaries and Biden didn't even get a single delegate means Bernie probably made the right call up to that point. If it takes an rare degree of ratfucking to derail your campaign, your early campaign decisions were at least defensible, if not good.
the REASON that he was not attacked is indefensible, because it was due to their personal friendship and not strategy
We don't really know this. Maybe he thought a collegial tone was a better look than "you're not really a threat so I'm not even going to waste time on you."
I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at here. Those polls only show Biden and Sanders, so they're not an accurate look at the race from about the Iowa caucuses to Super Tuesday. And results matter more than polling anyway, and all the results prior to South Carolina showed Biden dead in the water.
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OK, clicking through a bit more I can see the other candidates.
Agreed on all of this, but I don't see how it makes not attacking Biden indefensible. If anything, Biden polling well out of the gate and then getting nothing out of the first few states suggests the polls overestimated his support, and focusing on him was not needed.
In hindsight it might have been better had Bernie attacked Biden earlier, but his actual approach was justifiable, and the evidence is that he won the first four states while Biden was sagging hard.
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But he really needed to attack Biden, and it was a major fuckup not to...? The fact that he swept the early primaries and Biden didn't even get a single delegate means Bernie probably made the right call up to that point. If it takes an rare degree of ratfucking to derail your campaign, your early campaign decisions were at least defensible, if not good.
We don't really know this. Maybe he thought a collegial tone was a better look than "you're not really a threat so I'm not even going to waste time on you."
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