New Yorker: Bernie Sanders Is Gaining Ground on Hillary Clinton and It Matters

[mhatrw]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/cassidys-count-bernie-sanders-is-gaining-in-iowa-and-it-matters

In Iowa on Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders said that his rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign was in serious trouble, and claimed that this explained why she was attacking him on such issues as gun control and health care. “I think a candidate who was originally thought to be the anointed candidate, to be the inevitable candidate, is now locked in a very difficult race,” Sanders told reporters. “Obviously, what people in that scenario do is start attacking. . . . That is not surprising when you have a Clinton campaign that is now in trouble and now understands that they can lose.”

Obviously, Sanders isn’t privy to the minds of Clinton and her top aides. Nonetheless, his analysis makes sense. In the past few days, three new opinion polls have been released in Iowa. They all show Sanders closing what had been a considerable gap between him and Clinton, and two of them show him edging ahead. As recently as the end of last week, the RealClearPolitics poll average, which combines recent surveys, had the former Secretary of State retaining the double-digit lead she held for most of 2016. By Tuesday afternoon, the poll average was showing the race as a virtual tie: Clinton 45.5 per cent; Sanders 45.3 per cent.

Iowa is a quirky state, and, because of the primary calendar, what happens there matters quite a bit. For months now, most of the polls in New Hampshire, which will be the second state to vote, have shown Sanders with a narrow lead. Four of five polls released in the new year confirm this picture, and one of those four, from Monmouth University, shows Sanders fourteen percentage points ahead. If Sanders defeated Clinton in Iowa, he would have an excellent chance of following up with another victory in the Granite State—at which point questions would be raised about Clinton’s electability. She could well answer them by scoring comeback wins in Nevada and South Carolina, which will vote later in February. But, still, the sight of the longtime front-runner losing the first two Democratic votes would be pretty shocking.

Adding to the impression that the contest is now in flux, a new CBS News/New York Times national poll of likely Democratic voters also shows Sanders surging. Last month, this survey put Clinton ahead by twenty percentage points. In its latest iteration, her lead was reduced to seven percentage points. (Clinton is at forty-eight per cent, and Sanders is at forty-one per cent.)

...

[Dustlawyer]

1. People are waking up to the real problems in this country and who, not what, is the cause!

Feel the Bern!!!

[Still In Wisconsin]

8. Hillary's biggest financial backers and, by extension, Hill the Shill herself, are the cause.

Down with the Clintons and down with the Third Way.

[Betty Karlson]

2. The small trickle of media attention for Sanders is suddenly swelling to a cascade.

Is it coincidence?

Is it the media realising that of they failed to report on the likely winner of two imminent primaries, they'll have a lot of egg on their faces?

Or is it that some elite Democrats with media powers have told journalists that on second thought, the interests of the party come before the interests of Saint Hillary of Walmart, the Annointed and Inevitable One?

[mhatrw]

3. The corporate media does not want to be rendered politically irrelevant.

Last edited Wed Jan 13, 2016, 09:08 PM - Edit history (1)

Otherwise, how will they stoke us all into overseas war fever the next time Halliburton wants them to?

[kath]

6. This. sadly.

[Betty Karlson]

7. Yeah... that will be tough anyway, if millennials stop subscribing to MSM at the current rate

MSM have become elite projects, and hence they are quickly becoming irrelevant unless they change their format. That means opening their columns to viewpoints not in line with 1 % interests.

And that will be difficult, seeing as their parent companies are hopelessly devoted to the investors/ shareholders/ hedgefunds.

[ozone_man]

11. And Hillary's no fly zones.

I didn't realize that ISIS had planes. What a war hawk she is, but I think the tide is turning against the MIC and Wall Street.

[99th_Monkey]

4. I'm confident that Obama's epic SOTU speech underscoring much of Bermie's platform

will soon be giving Bernie another bump-up in the polls, and not just in Iowa & NH.

[beam me up scottie]

5. I expect her negative campaigning to get worse in the next few weeks.

The lie about Bernie wanting to dismantle Medicare is just the beginning.

[ozone_man]

12. Negative campaigning doesn't work

against Bernie. It hasn't so far anyway. People turn that off, they know when they hear the truth. For example, consider the McCarthy era. It took a while, but that right wing hysteria all came down. And so it will again.

[beam me up scottie]

13. I agree.

I remember the sleazy attack ads his opponents aired in Vermont and I think this will backfire too.

[Helen Borg]

9. I expect a Dean Scream ambush!

But I'm sure they are vigilant.

[SusanCalvin]

10. Even if they try,

in this day and age no one would buy it. If social media of the Dean time had been where it is today, the M$M wouldn't have been able to do what it did to Dean.

[mhatrw]

14. That's what Datagate was.

This dog don't wag!

[sorechasm]

15. This from the New Yorker? I thought Hillary was a New Yorker?

Everybody seems to like Bernie.

Evidently, the shift in voting intentions reflected a rise in positive feelings toward the Vermont Senator, who has been attracting big crowds throughout Iowa. P.P.P. noted that, over the past month, Sanders’s favorability/unfavorability rating “has shot up from a 65/23 spread to now 79/13 so his popularity is clearly growing as the voting nears.” The firm said that Clinton’s score was holding steady, at seventy-two/twenty-two. The pollsters from Quinnipiac University found that Sanders’s rating was a stunning eighty-seven/three, compared with seventy-four/twenty-one for Clinton.

This contrasts slightly from Hillary's debate quote that: "Everybody loves me."