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Sci Tech    H2'ed 4/18/16

Sanders Can Win. Here's Why.

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Sanders would be killing it this election season if he hadn't spent all his time and energy just trying to get a single surrogate on CNN or introducing himself for the very first time to a middle-class housewife or union plumber in Missouri.

My point is, you're damn right Sanders supporters are angry.

And you're damn right they think that Sanders -- facing the longest odds it's possible to imagine any politician in the contemporary era facing -- can win.

Here's why.

Despite all her pre-election and ongoing advantages, Hillary Clinton is nearly as disliked as Donald Trump (-24 favorability/unfavorability rating), even as Sanders is, per the most recent polling, the most popular presidential candidate in either party (+9). She's performed worse than Sanders -- over and over and over again -- against all of the remaining GOP candidates in head-to-head polling. In the battleground states that will decide the November election, Sanders consistently outperforms her against the Republican contenders. Already under federal investigation by more than 100 FBI agents for running a private, unsecured email server out of her basement -- an investigation which will cripple her for the rest of the election season no matter where it goes -- she's now added to that a public refusal to release even a single transcript of the numerous $225,000/hour speeches she gave to the same Wall Street criminals who nearly sent the nation into another Great Depression just five years ago.

Clinton's background is that of a moderate Goldwater Republican whose positions continue to be to the right of the Democratic base -- and where they're not, it's only because she's changed her positions over the past six months to curry favor with Democratic voters. Her judgment, throughout her professional life, has been poor -- everywhere from Iraq to Libya, from her inexplicably off-grid email server to the speeches she gave for cash at a time she was expecting to run for president, from dodgy conflicts of interest relating to the Clinton Global Initiative to trying to become a carpet-bagging New York Senator before she'd even moved to the state. She did little in the Senate that anyone remembers -- she certainly did nothing whatsoever about the housing crisis -- and had a checkered record at the State Department. She's not seen as honest or trustworthy by a majority of general-election voters, and she herself bears a substantial part of the responsibility for that state of affairs.

And that's why she can't win the nomination with the voters.

That's why she'll need to clinch the nomination using the "unpledged super-delegates" whose loyalty to her was purchased beforehand via private big-money fundraisers she attended.

Despite nearly a year of false delegate counts that included unpledged super-delegates as though they were pledged -- thus scaring off Democratic challengers and, later, potential Sanders voters -- and a news media that has given her surrogates a voice in the daily news cycle that Sanders' people have never enjoyed, Clinton won't be able to close the deal exclusively through an appeal to the people who matter most: voters.

She leads by 28 points among African-Americans in New York? It's a miracleSanders is performing even as well as he is, given the structural disadvantages he suffers relative to his opponent because of how we run elections in America.

She has a 2.4-million vote lead in the popular vote? That this is an eight-point race (54 percent to 46 percent) is an absolute indictment of Hillary Clinton as a candidate. Anyone with her advantages would be up on an old socialist Jew from Vermont with rumpled suits and unruly hair by fifty points right now.

Let's stop kidding ourselves.

Hillary is holding on by a thread, because she's a terrible candidate.

Sanders is only tied in the national polls, rather than way ahead -- and 194 delegates down in the pledged-delegate race rather than 200 ahead -- because we have a system that makes it a jaw-dropping Mystery of the Universe that he's doing as well as he is.

In New York, Sanders faces a primary he almost certainly would win -- and everyone knows it -- if same-day party registration were permitted. And even without it, he'd win if he had two more weeks to campaign, as the polling in New York has gone from Clinton +48 to Clinton +22 to Clinton +13 to Clinton +6 in just the last three weeks.

So how can Sanders win?

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Seth Abramson is the author of several books: DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016); Metamericana (BlazeVOX, 2015); Thievery (University of Akron, 2013); Northerners (Western Michigan University, 2011); and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). (more...)
 

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