Rick Perlstein has been visiting voters in the "Fox-loving red states" and he says the pundits and pollsters have it all wrong:
The media’s lying to you about Bernie Sanders: This is why a socialist can win the Fox-loving red states
I spent days with Sanders fans across red states. They watch Fox, live in the heartland, and are voting for Bernie
If you’ve already decided that “liberals” are the people who prefer locally sourced arugula to eating at McDonald’s, or are the people who don’t watch Fox News, it is a reasonable conclusion that there aren’t enough “liberals” out there to elect Bernie Sanders. Yet political categories shift. One of the things the best politicians do is work to shift them.
Sanders has been extraordinarily clear about the kind of shift he’d like to effect: Republicans “divide people on gay marriage. They divide people on abortion. They divide people on immigration. And what my job is, and it’s not just in blue states. . . [is] to bring working people together around an economic agenda that works....
The theory suggests that when upwards of 60 percent of voters consistently agree that rich people should have their taxes raised, a candidate who promises to do so might be identified as what he actually is: middle of the road. That if Democrats give Democratic speeches on economic issues, voters suckered into Republicanism by refrains like Jihad! Jihad! Jihad! just might try something else. And that new voters might be attracted into politics if they could just hear a candidate cut to the radical quick of the actual problems that are ruining their lives. My new Republican friends didn’t know they were not “supposed” to like a “liberal” like Bernie Sanders. Then they heard what he was saying, and liked what they heard. How many are there like them? That’s what I’ve been trying to begin to find out.
It's an extraordinary account by a political historian documenting a political realignment taking place under the very noses of both the Democratic and Republican establishments, and why they're missing it; and it's being driven by the grassroots, populist presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders.
There's a lot of personal stories and examples in the piece that show the rationale for why the shift is underway. I don't have time to excerpt -- just go read it all.
I just hope a healthy proportion of those Red-Staters for Bernie are being signed up to vote in the Democratic primaries. He might have a better chance in the general election than Hillary does if he can only get there, past the rigging of the primaries for HRC by the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.