Anyone who is a student of politics knows that Bernie will not win the Democratic nomination. This column from NYTimes number cruncher Nate Cohn is a must read.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Bernie Sanders is surging. He trailed Hillary Rodham Clinton by as much as 50 points in the polls a few months ago, but he has pulled within 10 points in New Hampshire, according to some surveys. He has doubled his support in Iowa over the last month. The signs of his support are palpable: Last week, about 10,000 people attended an event in Madison, Wis., and he announced that he raised $15 million in the first three months of his campaign.
But the Sanders surge is about to hit a wall: the rank and file of the Democratic primary electorate.
Mr. Sanders is now doing nearly as well as Barack Obama did among liberal voters in 2008. That makes him competitive in relatively liberal contests, like the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary.
But Mrs. Clinton still holds a huge lead among moderate and conservative Democrats — white and nonwhite alike. Whether Mr. Sanders can close the gap among these voters will determine the seriousness of his candidacy and whether he can pick up more delegates in other primaries. There aren’t many reasons to expect he will break through, and he certainly isn’t doing it yet.
His appeal is very limited. Now that the media has started the process of actually looking at his past, he will start to lose support from the real base.
Mr. Sanders could hope to do even better than Mr. Obama among liberals, but realistically there are limits. Mrs. Clinton is a liberal Democrat by any measure. Her favorability ratings among “very liberal” voters remain very good; the Quinnipiac poll, for instance, put them at 88 percent favorable and 8 percent unfavorable. Her advantage among women also helps. And this is leaving aside any of the other plausible reasons — electability, experience — for preferring Mrs. Clinton.
To close the gap with Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders will need to make big gains among less liberal Democratic primary voters. Nearly half of the Democratic primary electorate is moderate or even conservative.
This might seem surprising if you live in a liberal enclave like Madison, Wis., or in places along the coasts, like Marin County, Calif., or Montclair, N.J., where the Democratic Party seems uniformly liberal, where someone’s Facebook newsfeed could be mistaken for a Bernie Sanders advertisement, and where both Bill and Hillary Clinton struggled in the 1992 and 2008 Democratic primaries.
But the Democratic primary electorate is nothing like Madison or Burlington, Vt. It’s not even much like New Hampshire or Iowa, where a liberal Democratic primary candidate can compete or even win. Elsewhere, the party includes a large number of less educated, more religious — often older, Southern or nonwhite — voters who are far from uniformly liberal. That’s true whether judged by ideological self-identification or by their actual policy views.
In other words, those hijacking the DKos rec list with trivial diaries are not the base. Those threatening to not support HRC? Definitely not the base. New numbers out of Iowa today shows that one poll with Bernie within 10 points is an outlier.
Mr. Obama beat Mrs. Clinton in 2008 in large part because he prevented her from running up the score among moderates, who voted for her by five percentage points.
There were two types of these voters that allowed Mr. Obama to stay so close to Mrs. Clinton, and Mr. Sanders doesn’t naturally appeal to either one. First, Mr. Obama did well among moderates in affluent and well-educated areas, often with the help of self-described independents and Republicans. Nationally, Mr. Obama won independents by 12 points and Republicans by 8 points. Second, he won more than 80 percent of black voters, perhaps the least liberal demographic group in the Democratic Party.
Bernie will never be confused for Barack Obama. Please tell me what states he can carry outside of Iowa, NH and Vermont? Georgia? California? Florida? Tennessee?
What is his road map to the nomination?
Please take the time to read the entire column.