Okay so looking back I miscommunicated my shit real bad. Particularly the part on why Bernie's "not qualified" remark was a terrible move on his part. The gist of that bit is that "qualified" was a terrible terrible word to use, and undermined the entire point he was trying to make. I get that he was saying that this year we need an outsider instead of an insider to reform the system, but saying that anybody else is unqualified to be president gives the wrong impression and makes people think Bernie has gone too far, and endorsing the unpopular #BernieOrBust movement (remember, 80% of Bernie voters like Hillary, and vice versa). The easy rebuttal is "Hillary is unqualified for president? By the same logic, so is Obama. So was Bill. So was FDR. So was Teddy fucking Roosevelt". There's valuing integrity over political expediency and then there's shooting yourself in the foot. And his poor phrasing shot him in the foot. I don't know if that was a bad off the cuff thing where he was trying to turn "qualified" back around on her, or if it was pre-planned, which would be horribly embarrassing. I think it was the first directly negative attack (or at least the first attack that comes across as directly negative) that Bernie's made this campaign. And it got a lot of attention, meaning it looks like he's finally coming out swinging. It's a problem. Of course, the news cycle is now dead because Bill fucked up with BLM, and both candidates have recanted their attacks after Obama told them off, but still. Was a bad move for Bernie, and he was the one having the tough time, not Hillary.
Aaaaaanyway. Let's talk about Wyoming. I realize that I said "Bernie wins, nobody cares", but something weird actually happened. He won... but by about same amount he did in Wisconsin. And that's kinda odd. His original target was 9 delegates, and his revised target was 11, and he fell short 2-4 delegates. An 11 delegate win would've asked for like a 57 pt margin, which sounds like a bit much but not unthinkable given that's how well he did in Idaho. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about Wyoming, but this is pretty odd and not good for Bernie. Not just a "falling behind his targets" thing. Upside of rural states is that they're worth so little it's easy to make up the shortfall in bigger states. Caucuses are something of amplifiers. They give advantage to candidates with good ground organization/get out the vote efforts, and candidates with strong grassroots enthusiasm. Bernie crushes in the latter, and while Hillary's winning with the former, it hasn't helped her a lot in the past. Bernie should've taken it rather handily and with all the strength he typically takes his caucuses. But he didn't.
Good sources of speculation on why this happened are hard to find because nobody cares about Wyoming. It's either something fluke-y about Wyoming... or the closed nature really fucking Bernie. Probably a mix of both, though if you're a Bernie supporter you want the latter to be as minimized as possible because of all the big closed primaries coming up. A few other factors I can think of are a particularly robust GOTV effort by Hillary, Wyoming having odd caucus rules, an atypically unenthusiastic Sanders base, overall low turnout because even Wyoming doesn't care about Wyoming, and a very sparse population inhibiting caucus efforts. idk what it is, but it's definitely something odd. Bernie's now hoping that Massachusetts and Wyoming were flukes going forward.
Also the 7-7 delegate split was rather bullshit, should've been 8-6, but because of how caucuses are dumb and there's the state convention and bullshit, there's potential for Bernie to make that up. Particularly if something dumb happens like in Nevada, or if there are shenanigans like we've seen in several cases on the GOP side. The real thing is the vote margin.
