Bernie advanced a stupid argument today on This Week:
“She’s getting more votes,” the host pressed.
“Well, she is getting more votes. A lot of that came from the South,” Sanders parried. “But if you look at the polling out there, we do a lot better against Trump and the other Republicans in almost every instance — not every one — than she does. And the reason is that we both get a lot of Democrats, but I get a lot more independents than she does.”
A link to the Raw Story overview of the interview.
It’s an argument that a lot of his supporters won’t realize has been made before this election. In all quarters of the internet, partisans for Clinton and Clinton herself made the argument that some states matter more than others:
As Clinton's prospects dim, her preferred metrics grow more rococo. The Democrats, Clinton now argues, can't afford to nominate someone who can't carry the big, industrial states that matter in the Electoral College. Never mind that, after the 2000 election, Clinton said the Electoral College should be abolished (she never followed through, alas), or that in the midst of an economic recession, it's hard to imagine Clinton supporters in hard-hit places like Ohio and Pennsylvania voting for the party in power. Obama's on the ropes, Clinton argues, because he spent three times as much as she did and still lost Pennsylvania to her by 10 points.
As I’ve said repeatedly, the Sanders campaign and their stupid arguments regarding the math, states that matter, electability and so forth hew closely to the equally bone-headed transgressions of the ‘08 Clinton campaign.
Who can forget Bill’s stupid comment regarding the meaningless of winning South Carolina?
Said Bill Clinton today in Columbia, SC: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ‘84 and ‘88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”
Bernie Sanders doesn’t get a pass on dismissing the hundreds of thousands who turned out in the south for Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is the legitimate front-runner in both the popular vote and pledged delegate counts.
Further, and to give a sense of how meaningless quoting general election polls are in April, here’s a snippet from an AP article dated May 2008:
Obama has also faced questions about his association with 1960s radical William Ayres and about why he doesn’t wear a U.S. flagpin.
The Illinois senator said those issues had hurt his campaign but did not “knock us off stride.” The fact that the impact from those problems was not greater was a sign that his candidacy was strong, he said.
“Despite all that, if you look at it, we’re still fundamentally tied with John McCain,” Obama said, responding to a question from an undecided voter who asked him about the electability question.
It’s not like Hillary Clinton is tied with the front-runner of the Republican party; she resoundingly beats him in almost every poll. People clinging to the polls to bludgeon home the idea of Sanders’ electability are quick to dismiss a recent slew of polls showing Hillary winning New York comfortably (a new Fox poll gives a +16 spread; a less recent Emerson poll shows an +18 spread). It shows astounding doublethink capabilities on the part of those supporters.
Further, another argument beseeching superdelegates to overturn the will of the people relies on Clinton’s dismal performance against Cruz or Kasich. It is disingenuous for one simple reason: both Cruz and Kasich would become the nominee through the candidate with the most votes and delegates being denied the nomination at a contested convention, a fundamental earthquake like event in modern politics. Polling can never accurately reflect what the fundamentals of a race where a nominee that won that way would be like.
And that’s all extra fluff. Simply put, Obama was running close to McCain in ‘08 and there’s almost seven months to go for Hillary to improve wherever she stands today.
Most importantly though, the south matters. Black voters in the south matter. Democrats, and yes, independents and Republicans allowed to vote in any of those primaries, matter.