It happens in every political cycle.
Candidates’ prospects rise and fall, with the conventional wisdom written by new and old media pundits, and smugly stated as certainty by television political pundits. And then if they’re wrong, they discreetly sweep the remains of the old certainties under the rug and unveil new ones. Another reality is that as a candidate becomes a serious prospect for the White House they come under extra scrutiny and more critical analysis.
You can see it now happening with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who the many in the media and many polls suggested was going to deliver a grave blow to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by winning the Nevada caususes or losing by a hair. In the end, he lost by five points — and Sen. Harry Reid is now credited with pulling out all stops in helping Clinton over the edge.
Now you can see the extra scrutiny of Sanders kicking in. Did he really win the Hispanic vote in a way that showed Clinton’s weakness? Do political realities suggest that no matter how many assertions his campaign or supporters state he faces a tough couple of weeks? And are we now seeing signs of what happens to all candidates who are seen as major players and serious possibilities for the White House: aspects of his political past that will make the opposing party smile?
Four examples suggest he’s shifted into this new era.
The New York Time’s Nate Cohen says polling data does not show that Sanders won the Hispanic vote in Nevada:
One of Saturday’s biggest election surprises was the entrance and exit polling measuring Hispanic voters in the Nevada caucus. It found that Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton by eight percentage points among Hispanic voters, overturning months of conventional wisdom about Mrs. Clinton’s strength among nonwhites.
But there are a lot of reasons to question the findings from the polls. They have a small sample of precincts and voters, and they simply were not devised to provide precise estimates of the Hispanic vote.
The actual election returns in Las Vegas’s Clark County hint at a different story. Analyzed neighborhood by neighborhood, they suggest that Mrs. Clinton might have won the Hispanic vote by a comfortable margin. She won about 60 percent of delegates in heavily Hispanic areas, a result that calls the finding of the polling into question.
There is not much evidence, though, that Mrs. Clinton won Hispanic voters by the sort of landslide margin that she did eight years ago. That’s a good sign for Mr. Sanders, who needs to make up for the huge swing among black voters, who have gone from uniformly for President Obama to uniformly for Mrs. Clinton.
But the finding that Mr. Sanders won the Hispanic vote is at best extremely questionable — and, at worst, wrong.
Clinton Won Heavily Hispanic Areas
The Hispanic vote in Nevada is overwhelmingly concentrated in Clark County, home to Las Vegas. In particular, Hispanic voters are concentrated on the east side of the city, where they make up the vast majority of the population but only a slight majority of registered Democrats. (For a rough map, see this tweet.)
In the 76 precincts in Clark County where we believe that a plurality of registered Democrats are Hispanic, Mrs. Clinton defeated Mr. Sanders in the delegate count by a margin of 58 percent to 42 percent. In the smaller number of majority Hispanic precincts, she seemed to win about 60 percent of the delegates, and she won perhaps 65 percent of the delegates in the precincts where Hispanics appeared to be a particularly large share of registered Democrats. (For details on the estimates, see my note at the end of the article.)
Similarly, it was widely reported that Mrs. Clinton fared extremely well in the precincts along the Las Vegas Strip.
Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign press secretary, tweeted that the campaign estimated that Mrs. Clinton won 61 percent of the vote in Hispanic precincts throughout the state.
He notes that polls aren’t perfect, but concludes with this:
It’s tough to give a poll subsample of some 200 respondents much weight, especially when it’s for a clustered group like Hispanics.
It’s even harder to give it credit when there’s so much reason to wonder whether it’s right. Mrs. Clinton fared well in majority Hispanic precincts. National polls show Mrs. Clinton faring well among Hispanic voters — and Mr. Sanders basically finished in line with national polls among both white and black voters.
All evidence considered, and although we can’t know for sure, I’d err on the side of a Clinton win among Hispanic voters.
But it would be hard to argue that she won Hispanic voters by a lot. Sixty percentage points could easily be too high if she indeed fared better among Hispanic voters in non-Hispanic areas. The entrance-exit poll result may not be perfect, but it certainly seems consistent with this possibility. If I had to bet, I’d say she won Hispanic voters by a somewhat more modest margin.
It would still imply that Mr. Sanders made big gains over the last month. But it would still be short of what he would need to overcome Mrs. Clinton’s vast strength among black voters. She won them by a huge margin, whether you look at the entrance-exit polling or majority black precincts.
The Washington Post looks at the same issue.
Meanwhile, The Politico has a story saying Sanders once called on abolishing the CIA. Even if it’s not his position now (and it is NOT) its the kind of tidbit that will enrich campaign ad producers being paid by the Republican party.
In his most recent debate with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders befuddled some viewers with an arcane reference to a 1953 U.S.-backed coup in Iran, which Sanders called an example of America’s history of “overthrowing governments.”
It turns out that the Vermont senator has railed against that coup — assisted by the Central Intelligence Agency against Iran’s primeMinister, Mohammad Mosaddegh — since he was a young radical activist in the mid-1970s.
One big difference between then and now: Forty years ago, Sanders didn’t just complain about CIA interventions abroad; he called for abolishing the spy agency altogether.
The CIA is “a dangerous institution that has got to go,” Sanders told an audience in Vermont in October 1974. He described the agency as a tool of American corporate interests that repeatedly toppled democratically elected leaders — including, he said, Iran’s Mosaddegh. The agency was accountable to no one, he fumed, “except right-wing lunatics who us it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”
At the time, the 33-year-old socialist was running for U.S. Senate on the ticket of the Liberty Union Party, an anti-war group that likened the draft to “a modern form of slavery” and called for reducing the U.S. military in favor of local militias and the Coast Guard.
One big difference between then and now: Forty years ago, Sanders didn’t just complain about CIA interventions abroad; he called for abolishing the spy agency altogether.
The CIA is “a dangerous institution that has got to go,” Sanders told an audience in Vermont in October 1974. He described the agency as a tool of American corporate interests that repeatedly toppled democratically elected leaders — including, he said, Iran’s Mosaddegh. The agency was accountable to no one, he fumed, “except right-wing lunatics who us it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”
At the time, the 33-year-old socialist was running for U.S. Senate on the ticket of the Liberty Union Party, an anti-war group that likened the draft to “a modern form of slavery” and called for reducing the U.S. military in favor of local militias and the Coast Guard.
The sourcing of this story suggests it could come from other sources, or be info from the Clinton camp. Partisans will say without evidence it comes from one side or the other. The reality is we do not know and (as someone who worked as a journalist for a good many years) we will never know. Already some conservative and talk show hosts are calling Sanders a “Communist” even thogh any high school senior now knows a)Communists and socialists aren’t the same b)Socialist more often than not hate communism. Many millennials are embracing socialism (because they know what it truly is and agree with government helping others). But that doesn’t matter in painting a “high concept” image of a candidate in a national campaign. This is a key factor Sanders will have to be prepared to handle, if he gets the Democratic Party’s nod. MORE:
While Sanders’ extreme leftist past is well known, many of his specific views from the 1970s and ’80s remain unfamiliar even to Democratic insiders. And while those views have mellowed considerably over time, Sanders’ unexpectedly strong performance in the presidential race has party leaders increasingly alarmed that Republicans would make devastating use of his early career should he win the Democratic nomination.
For now, it’s Democratic allies of Hillary Clinton who are on the attack. “Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength,” said Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff to CIA director Leon Panetta and now advises Clinton’s campaign. “If this is a window into Sanders’ thinking, it reinforces the conclusion that he’s not qualified to be commander in chief.”
Sanders allies bristle at questions about his views from four decades ago, saying they have little to do with his current candidacy.
“I think people should look at his 25-year congressional career,” said one person who worked for Sanders in the House of Representatives, and whose employment circumstances prohibit him from speaking on the record. “You don’t have to look at some speech from the early ’70s to know where he is on issues. There’s a very clear congressional record. I think he should be measured and judged on that.”
But that isn’t how a general election will work. Opposition ads aren’t about nuance or fact; they’re about painting an image quickly and hoping (usually with justification) that voters are too lazy to research if an assertion is true.
And here — speaking as a former journalist — is the Sanders’ campaign’s big error in this story:
A Sanders campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Any working journalist will tell you that usually means a source doesn’t like a story and hope it’ll go away or be weakened by not answering. It’s always a huge mistake.
At the same time, last week’s narrative of Clinton on the verge of being mortally wounded and rejected, has suddenly evaporated among many of the conventional wisdom spreaders.
Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin (one of the high priests of conventional wisdom) says it’ll be Trump and Clinton:
Only suckers bet on presidential politics or professional wrestling, especially in this most tumultuous campaign cycle in recent memory. But if you were playing the odds, you would have to say that the weekend’s electoral results have, for now, put Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in extraordinarily commanding positions to become their parties’ de facto nominees as early as mid-March.
The two New Yorkers arrived here by different routes. For Clinton, her solid victory over Bernie Sanders in Saturday’s caucuses in Nevada provided a circuit breaker on her rival’s weeks-long run of momentum, punctuated by his landslide win in the New Hampshire primary.
Such is the inexorable power of the expectations game in determining the meaning of election results that what would have, only a few weeks ago, been seen as a miraculous showing by Sanders in Nevada (losing to Clinton by just 5 points) is now a potentially candidacy-ending loss. The Vermont senator’s campaign compounded some bad luck with some bad judgment. First, after a long period without any credible polling in the Silver State, a CNN survey released three days before the caucuses showed the race effectively tied. Then, Sanders’ team made it clear to reporters that they were playing hard to win on Saturday and their body language suggested they thought they would prevail. Thus, Clinton’s victory was seen as a reassertion of her hold on non-white voters, seniors, and other elements of a majority coalition that can be replicated in almost every upcoming contest.
It is crude and irrational, but the impact of the CNN poll and Team Sanders’ misplaced display of confidence was to take the full measure of his momentum and transfer it to the former secretary of state in one fell swoop Saturday night. Now, Clinton has regained the Big Mo just in time for a three-week stretch after South Carolina and created a potential killing field for Sanders.
Of course, Sanders will pick up delegates in many states voting in March, and could conceivably win a contest or two. “We have a good chance of winning a number of those states,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday as his campaign sought to temper expectations in South Carolina.
But Clinton, coming off her victory in Nevada and expected win in South Carolina, will almost certainly garner more delegates, and in some states substantially more. Between now and mid-March, 1,928 (of the 2,382 needed to be nominated) will be awarded. Twelve states and territories, including delegate-rich Georgia, Texas, and Massachusetts will vote on March 1. Michigan’s 130 delegates are up for grabs on March 8, while Florida (214) and Ohio (143) anchor a covey of five contests on March 15.
Democratic Party rules don’t allow for winner-take-all states, so while it is harder to build a lead, it is nearly impossible to overcome one, as Clinton learned against Barack Obama in 2008. As one candidate pulls ahead in a two-person race, it is mathematically unfeasible for the trailing contestant to catch up. Each passing week means fewer and fewer opportunities to cut into a lead.
The Daily Beast’s Goldie Taylor echoes Halperin’s conclusion:
Not only will the revolution not be televised—at least in the case of Senator Bernie Sanders—it appears to have an expiration date.
Despite collecting millions in small-dollar donations and packing thousands of people into arenas around the country, despite topping Hillary Clinton for the first time in a national poll of likely Democratic voters, the path to victory has narrowed sharply for Sanders. Some would argue that a window of opportunity slammed shut Sunday night in Nevada and that the upcoming race in South Carolina is the proverbial kitty-bar.
Sanders may well have the volunteers and the money to keep going, but after March 15 he’ll have to grapple with a new set of questions. Does he still haveUndoubtedly, Sanders will lose the South Carolina primary set for Feb. 27. The bad news is—with the exception of possibly Vermont, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin—he’ll likely keep losing though April. The polls are not kind and, with less than two weeks before Super Tuesday, pulling off wins in states like Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas seem all but impossible. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, Clinton holds a 50-99 percent likelihood of winning some of the most delegate-rich and highly diverse states on the calendar.
Sanders, the self-professed anti-establishment candidate, has run on a platform that attacks income inequality, as well as promises to expand access to healthcare and college education. His message has attracted support from mostly white progressives who are convinced that Sanders is the best candidate to carry the Democratic banner in the fall campaign. For them, Clinton represents all that is wrong in Washington.
The problem for Sanders is that he has nowhere to grow. Black voters, who will dominate many of the coming primaries, have not responded to his message. Even black millennials, thought to be good prospects, are breaking in favor of Clinton. They are, it appears by the ballots cast in Nevada and polling in upcoming states, voting with their parents and grandparents. It must be said that Clinton won the Nevada black vote by a 3-to-1 margin and that crossed age and income. And despite what entrance polling data said in Nevada, according to analysis published by NBC News, she may have won Hispanics as well.
After Sanders won New Hampshire and nearly bested the former secretary of state in Iowa, many began to challenge the notion of Clinton’s inevitability. There were cracks, they said, in the “firewall.” Expectations were managed downward ahead of Nevada, even by the Clinton campaign—which started organizing in the state last April. The Sanders camp appeared to be stunned by their good fortunes. By comparison, they did not put boots on the ground until late winter when it became clear that he could be competitive there.
But then Hispanic civil-rights leaders and members of Congress, including California Representative Xavier Becerra and Dolores Huerta, rang in and openly challenged Sanders on past immigration policy votes. Then, too, endorsements began to roll through the piedmonts of the Palmetto State. Black pastors and elected officials began digging a trench around South Carolina.
Taken together, if the trend holds, there is no path to victory left for Sanders. At this late stage in the campaign, unlike Republicans, there is limited growth potential for either candidate in such a small field….
AND:
Taken together, if the trend holds, there is no path to victory left for Sanders. At this late stage in the campaign, unlike Republicans, there is limited growth potential for either candidate in such a small field.
More critically, one rationale for the Sanders candidacy dries up under scrutiny. Turnout numbers and the anticipated brief nature of the primary mean he has not and will not drive increased voter participation. The wave never arrived and there is no sign of it on the horizon.
The Huffington Post has a huge lead headline “BERNING OUT?” It has a Reuters piece. Some excerpts:
Bernie Sanders’ high-flying Democratic presidential campaign fell back to Earth on Saturday in Nevada.
If the Vermont senator cannot quickly find a way to broaden his appeal to minorities and union members, last week’s 22-point rout of Clinton in New Hampshire could prove to be his campaign highlight.
The race moves next week to South Carolina, where blacks make up more than half of the Democratic electorate, and on March 1 to a string of southern states with big blocs of African-Americans, who strongly support Clinton and have been slow to warm to Sanders.
The rush of March contests in big, diverse states — Democrats in nearly two dozen states will vote between March 1 and March 15 — could leave Sanders grasping for political life.
“This was a bad day for Sanders,” said David Woodard, a political scientist at Clemson University in South Carolina. “He needs to find a way to cut into Clinton’s base, and I don’t think he is going to find it here.”
Although Clinton’s 5-point win was relatively narrow, it was enough to blunt Sanders’ momentum. Recent voter surveys had shown a tight race in Nevada, raising the prospect of another damaging setback for Clinton.
Entrance polls in Nevada showed Clinton trounced Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, by 3-to-1 among black voters, and also beat him in union households by 11 percentage points.
The enthusiasm of younger and liberal voters who rallied around Sanders’ calls for reining in Wall Street and reducing income equality was not enough in Nevada to counter Clinton’s union and organizational clout, allowing her to reclaim front-runner status as the race shifts to more friendly turf.
After the New Hampshire setback, Clinton’s campaign was banking that Sanders would be unable to breach a
so-called “firewall” of Hispanic and African-American support for the former Secretary of State in southern and western states.
AND:
In a sense, Sanders was a victim in Nevada of his own success. His ability to close the gap on Clinton in Iowa and rout her in New Hampshire, nearly all-white states, raised expectations that he could ride to another upset in Nevada.
“Nevada put out the Bern,” said Ken Tietjen, a Clinton supporter who stood outside her Las Vegas victory rally at Caesar’s Palace. “Hillary has all the momentum going forward.”
But Sanders’ strong showings in the first three contests, along with his formidable fundraising, suggest staying power. That could help extend the Democratic race beyond the cluster of early March contests and into April and May, when a string of contests in whiter and more liberal states could help him.
Sanders has money for the long haul, although Clinton had more on hand at the end of January. Federal election reports filed as the Nevada results were announced showed Sanders had raised $21.3 million in January and had $14.7 million on hand. In January, Hillary raised $13.2 million from individual donors and had $32.9 million on hand.
Some black voters said on Saturday they did not see a reason to switch their loyalty away from Clinton, a fondness that dates back to her husband Bill Clinton’s presidency but which was strained by her bitter primary battle with Barack Obama in 2008.
Asked who he was backing, Thomas Anderson, an African-American in Columbia, South Carolina, said on Saturday: “Hillary, of course.”
Nevada’s result appeared to support that view.
The good news for Sanders, his campaign and his supporters?
If circumstances change, this new conventional wisdom will be quietly tossed away and a new one suggesting he’s poised to get the nomination will flower and bloom.
But he better be ready for GOPers to negatively define him.
They haven’t event started yet — but the initial hints of what’s to come suggest he better be ready to counter it.
And not by not by not returning the calls of reporters who seek comment from the campaign on unflattering coverage or charges.
UPDATE:
Ezra Klein in Voz:
As someone who pays quite a lot of attention to campaign policy processes, here’s my answer: Watching a candidate run his campaign’s policy processes is one of our best ways of predicting how he would run his White House.
The key word there, by the way, is run. Some of the most important decisions the president makes are about how to run the processes that translate vision into policy. Those decisions include whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas make sense, which strategies are likely to work. The presidency is one damn decision like that after another. Obama, famously, is so exhausted by the decision fatigue of the job that he wears the same color suit every day so he has one less thing to decide in the morning.
This is one way in which campaigns give us insight into presidencies. Presidential candidates also have to decide whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas are truly good ones, which strategies are likely to work. To make those decisions well, they need a sound philosophy, yes, but they also need to want to hear good advice, they need to want advisers who will tell them when they’re wrong, they need to have good instincts for when something they want to believe is true simply isn’t, and they need to be realistic about the strategies that are likely to work and the ones that aren’t.
My worry about Sanders, watching him in this campaign, is that he isn’t very interested in learning the weak points in his ideas, that he hasn’t surrounded himself with people who police the limits between what they wish were true and what the best evidence says is true, that he doesn’t seek out counterarguments to his instincts, that he’s attracted to strategies that align with his hopes for American politics rather than what we know about American politics. And these tendencies, if they persist, can turn good values into bad policies and an inspiring candidate into a bad president.
The reason I care about the puppies-and-rainbows promises of his single-payer proposal is that I think Sanders believes them — I don’t think he’s a cynical politician simply eliding the weaknesses of his plan. The reason I care about his campaign’s circulation of fairly outlandish economic projections is that it makes me worry there’s no one around Sanders with the sense to say that those results don’t pass the smell test. The reason I’m frustrated by Sanders’s promise that a political revolution will overcome all opposition to his plans is I think he believes it, and so I’m not sure he has a real plan B for when the political revolution doesn’t happen. The reason Sanders’s persistently superficial answers on foreign policy matter to me is that they’re a test of his ability to learn on the fly about topics he’s not terribly interested in.
In a democratic polity, wonks are the help. But that only underscores the importance of electing someone good at hiring and managing them. A President Sanders could hire excellent technocrats to help him make policy, but would he want to? A President Sanders could surround himself with experts who know the shortcomings of his ideas, but would he listen to them? A President Sanders could become deeply engaged on foreign policy, but would he decide to?
Photo by By AFGE (AFGE Participates in #StopFastTrack Rallies) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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