Quote (ThatAlex @ Nov 15 2015 12:21pm)
Yeah. Bernie Sanders is an independent who caucuses with the Democratic Party. Not technically a Democrat.
Personally, I think the DNC messed up by anointing Hillary too soon. They should have waited on many of the endorsements and slowly trickled them in.
It's bad for a party to pretty much only have one candidate. And that's what the DNC has.
The Republicans have the opposite problem. They have let their field be a little too big for a while now. They needed to cut people polling at less than 4% a couple debates ago to give the debates a little more quality.
Where is the competition though? Only 5 people (I'm not even going to count Lessig) decided to run whereas nearly 20 decided to run for the GOP. The fact of the matter is that that Clinton, outside of Biden, had tremendous name recognition earlier this year and the others did not. Who is dumb enough to go against that?
You can say that the DNC favors Clinton (which is true) all you want but the fact is that Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley simply have less support. Less people want them to be president instead of Clinton. That's really all there is to it.
As for an advantages/disadvantages...I'm not too sure. Hillary can focus on the general election at this point now whereas the GOP won't be able to do that until July of 2016 most likely. That's a pretty big advantage.