He's already won.
Believe it or not (I didn't at first), Hillary's primary poll numbers are
improving as of late:
In addition to Clinton's uptick, Elizabeth Warren's and Bernie Sanders' numbers are also up. How can that be? Well, since mid-February, Joe Biden is down five and undecided/other is down four.
Clinton's uptick shows that Sanders' surge (from 3 percent to 10 percent since mid-February) isn't coming at her expense. And it's not coming from Warren either, at least not yet (although we should assume that he'll grab a big chunk of her support). And while it's impossible to tell for sure, we can probably guess that Clinton is picking up Biden people and Sanders is picking up undecided/other. So if we extrapolate out (again, an imperfect method), we could guess that Clinton could end up in the 70s and Sanders in the mid-20s.
I've long maintained that Sanders' ceiling is 25-30 percent. These latest poll numbers suggest that I'm on the right track, but there's another factor that I hadn't considered until Sanders' announcement speech yesterday.
In short, Clinton has fired up Latinos with her robust call for strong executive action on immigration, while she has also been clear in her support of the Black Lives Matter movement (and condemning her own husband's policies on crime during his presidency). Yet Sanders' announcement speech yesterday mentioned neither of those seminal current issues.
That's not to imply that Sanders is bad or uncommitted on those issues. He's been perfect on them. He even took part in the 1963 March on Washington. But given that 40 percent of Democrats are people of color, it was noteworthy seeing this (rhetorical) ommission. While Clinton has been solidifying his support among communities of color, Sanders seems to have completely ignored them in his coming out party. And that was weird and unexpected.
Now Sanders staked out a strong left position on economic issues, as we assumed he would. It's the reason we love him. While Clinton's uncomfortable silence on TPP is an improvement over her past support for such trade deals, it's still not as convincing as Sanders' strong and strident opposition. But at this point, there is very little RHETORICAL difference between the two candidates, and that makes Sanders' ability to move beyond the crowd Chris Hayes identifies above very difficult. The Hillary of eight years ago wouldn't be caught dead
tweeting "I agree with Bernie." While the Bernie of today doesn't seem to realize that the modern Democratic Party doesn't look like Vermont.
More below the fold.
Still, the party's activist base is important not just for Clinton next November, but for Democrats up and down the ballot. So the Clintonistas better take heed.
Insiders familiar with the thinking of the Clinton campaign described it as “frightened” of Sanders — not that he would win the nomination, but that he could damage her with the activist base by challenging her on core progressive positions in debates and make her look like a centrist or corporatist.
There's one way to deal with that: don't be a centrist or corporatist. Keep staking out the left on issues important to base constituencies. Agitate against TPP (no matter how loath she might be to undermine Obama directly). Refuse to take money from the big banks and other Wall Street interests. (Her advisors keep saying she's just as liberal as Elizabeth Warren, but the banks are only donating to one of those. ...)
And finally, keep repeating, at every turn possible, "I agree with Bernie." None of the issues he supports are unpopular with the broader electorate, so she runs no electoral risk in doing so. And if she does that, she won't alienate the Sanders constituency and can take a unified and motivated base into the general.
We as liberals need to understand that Clinton's current campaign trajectory means we've won the war for our party's soul. When the party's standard-bearer is running an explicitly liberal campaign, it means that the establishment has realized that national victory runs through the issues we care about. Be happy!
And if Bernie Sanders is there to provide an exclamation mark on that victory, all the better. I can think of no better validation for Bernie himself, once on the fringe, now (mostly) in line with our party's presumptive standard-bearer.
