The Sanders campaign is right now marshaling hard data for their summer pitch to super-delegates. They can already claim that they out-perform Clinton among independents; in national polling vs Trump; in battleground-state polling vs Trump; among working-class men; and among millennials. This article adds to these powerful arguments: that in battleground states, Bernie Sanders more often wins the Election Day vote.

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My guest today is Seth Abramson, Assistant Professor of English at University of New Hampshire.

JB: Welcome to OpEdNews, Seth. You recently wrote an article with a surprising and tantalizing title: Bernie Sanders Is Currently Winning the Democratic Primary Race, and I'll Prove It to You. Why did you write this piece?

SA: I think it's because I'm equal parts pragmatist and idealist. I first became intrigued by Sanders because his brand of idealism spoke to my own; I became a Sanders voterbecause all the data I had available to me suggested that, while either Sanders or Clinton could very well beat Donald Trump in the fall, Sanders defeating the most dangerous politician of my lifetime was in fact a far more certain bet than Clinton doing so. And I thereafter became a columnistcovering the Sanders campaign because of a third realization: that Hillary Clinton is unlikely to win the Democratic nomination via pledged delegates alone. This means that Sanders and Clinton will be making their respective cases directly to super-delegates at the convention in Philadelphia. I felt like that was a story deserving of attention and coverage.

I wrote the "Bernie Is Winning" article because I thought our national discussion of the presidential election needed an article laying out (at least in part) Sanders' upcoming case to Democratic super-delegates. And the upshot of Sanders' case is, "When voters come to know both Democratic candidates intimately, they vote for me rather than Secretary Clinton more often than not." Add that to his standing among independent voters and his head-to-head national and state-by-state polling against Trump--all better than Clinton's--and it seems clear it's a winning argument. But will it actually win the day? We don't know yet. But it certainly should.

JB: Bernie has been either ignored or discounted consistently in the corporate media. Not just contrasted with Trump's coverage, which is off the charts, but any other candidate. During one 24-hour period, the Washington Post had 16 articles about Bernie, all but two of them critical, the other two neutral. So, I wouldn't say that your opinion is shared by many, if any of your colleagues. How does that lopsided coverage affect the race, the voters, etc? Your thoughts?

SA: Look at it this way: even if the Democrats do the (small-d) democratic thing and insist that super-delegates vote for the Democratic candidate who wins more pledged (voted-upon) delegates, the national media's obsessive coverage of the horse-race--and its decision to cover that race with an emphasis on super-delegates--has grievously harmed Sanders' campaign. From the start, the DNC said that super-delegates could not be "earned" until the convention in Philadelphia, and therefore should not be tallied; instead, the media made super-delegates the focal point of its election coverage and thereby helped make a Sanders win seem impossible from day one. How many prospective Sanders voters decided not to vote because they'd been told by the media that Clinton's super-delegate "lead" made a Sanders nomination a non-starter? We'll never know.

By the same token, the media has decided to "data-dump" early votes on cable-watchers at the moment each state's polls close. If you look at the "How the Votes Came In" section of the New York Times website, you'll see that in nearly every election the first votes counted, reported, and used to determine the winner of a state's delegates were early votes. What this means is that most viewers turned off their televisions while all the Election Day votes were being counted--the votes favoring Sanders, at least in the majority of states that have voted thus far.

Add to this that Sanders has been outperforming nearly every pre-election poll, and the result looks something like this in, say, Illinois (using actual data here): in the week leading up to Election Day, Sanders voters heard on TV that their favored candidate was down 42 points; as soon as the polls closed, an early-voting data-dump made it appear like Clinton was winning the state by over 30 points; and then, long after Sanders voters had gone to bed, the final tally showed Sanders losing the state by just 1.8%.

The best part: when those Sanders voters awoke, the only headline they saw was, "Hillary Wins Illinois!" So the real narrative got buried at all stages. In fact, Sanders over-performed the pre-election polling to an historic degree; won a clear majority votes in Illinois, Hillary's home state, on Election Day; and didn't lose Illinois so much as tie it--as Hillary only ended up with three more delegates than the Senator, out of 149 awarded in total.

JB: It's an interesting perspective, to be sure. And you're absolutely right: the way the results are reported totally psychs out Bernie supporters. So is this just the nature of reportage or is this a purposeful way to discount Bernie's candidacy one way or another and assure Hillary gets the nomination?

SA: I'm not very interested in the question of motivation, to be honest. Two things, however, are clear: the media has undertaken certain actions over a prolonged period of time; they've maintained these behaviors despite legitimate outcry; these behaviors have had certain effects that should be abundantly clear--indeed superlatively clear--to the very persons responsible for them; and nothing whatsoever has been done to mitigate these effects, even as they've worsened over time.

What this means is that, at a certain point, the actions of the media become not merely negligent but willful. Seen from this perspective, the question of whether there was nefarious intent from the get-go becomes immaterial.

So the pillars of journalism--accuracy, fairness, objectivity, and transparency--have all been violated by people paid a great deal of money never to do so. And for that they should be ashamed of themselves. Failing that, they should at least start doing their jobs. I see no evidence it will happen, though; when you read the Twitter feeds of the most high-profile abusers of journalistic integrity--I'm thinking of certain people who class themselves as pollsters and reporters (not mere columnists) at The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, FiveThirtyEight.com, and elsewhere--you see nothing but scorn and snark being thrown the way of Sanders supporters. And all of it's happening shamelessly and in public, which somehow makes it all the more odious and unsettling.

JB: Agreed. Let's go back to the novel premise of your article. You talk about the difference between early voting and Election Day voting as far as Bernie's numbers are concerned. Many of our readers have not yet read your article so can you fill us in a bit on this and why it matters, and how it can affect the primaries yet to come?

SA: The most succinct summary of the article would be this: in states that will be battlegrounds in a general election fight against Donald Trump, Hillary either loses outright, loses on Election Day, or dramatically under-performs her pre-Election Day polling.

The first is true, of course, in every battleground state (or potential battleground state) Sanders has already won (New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado, Kansas, Utah, and Maine). The second is true in states where Hillary's lead in early voting--born in part of voters' lack of familiarity with Sanders at the time--evaporated once Election Day came and Sanders had become a known quantity (North Carolina, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio). And the third is true in several states that didn't go Sanders' way on Election Day but might well have done so had the Senator had even a week more to raise his profile still further from the absolute obscurity of a year ago (Iowa and Nevada). So when the fact that Sanders becomes more popular with voters the better they know him is coupled with the fact that Clinton generally--outside the Deep South, at least--becomes less popular the more voters know her, it becomes clear that the real shape of this race is not what we've been led to believe.

While some percentage of Clinton's success in early voting is certainly due to older voters being more likely to vote early, just today Brianna Keilar of CNN noted that the Clinton people have been saying for months that, in their view, the nation still doesn't know Sanders well. And that's exactly the point of my "Bernie Is Winning" article: the Clinton people pushed the early-voting vote as much as they could because they knew that, with each passing day, voters were getting to know Sanders better. And as I've noted was the case in the roster of states above, the better voters know the Senator, the more they like him.

JB: Please clarify something for me, before we go on. You mention North Carolina in your list of Election Day evaporating leads, but Sanders got trounced there. So, how does that figure into your theory?

SA: Sanders only lost Election Day voting in North Carolina 52% to 48%. When you consider that the recently passed voter-suppression statute in North Carolina led to thousands of college students being turned away from the polls--and Sanders wins that demographic, nationally, roughly 80% to 20%--it's clear that the "live" voting in North Carolina (i.e., the voting that happened on Election Day) was more or less a tie. That's why Clinton won in North Carolina by ten points less than the polls pre-election were predicting.

JB: Okay. That was helpful. Can the Sanders campaign use your findings to their advantage somehow? Does your article have practical application for them? And if so, how?

SA: Absolutely. The Sanders campaign is right now marshaling hard data for their summer pitch to super-delegates. They can already claim that they out-perform Clinton among independents; in national polling against Trump; in battleground-state polling against Trump; among working-class men; and among millennials. What this article does is add to these powerful arguments an additional one: that in battleground states, Bernie Sanders more often wins the Election Day vote.

This matters because it fits a theme: Clinton becomes less popular with voters over time--which is saying something, given that she's already far less popular than Sanders is (her favorability rating is -21, whereas his is +11). But this same theme is also in evidence in the way the election season has played out: Clinton did best in the first half of the calendar, when Bernie was less well-known and the states voting were largely states the Democrats can't possibly carry in November, and Bernie is out-performing Clinton in the second half of the calendar, at a time when the states voting are the ones the Democrats will be most clearly targeting in the fall election. So this fourth dimension of analysis being added to the political equation--how the candidates perform over time, both in individual states and across-the-board--should and I believe will be a critical feature of the Sanders campaign's argument to super-delegates in Philadelphia.

JB: Anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up?

SA: Just that I hope everyone in the states that have yet to vote will make sure to come out and do so when it's their turn. This thing isn't over by a long-shot.

JB: Not according to those pesky pundits! Any plans to get your article in the right hands, aka the Sanders campaign?

SA: No specific plans, but I'm happy to say that the eleven articles on the presidential election that I've written for The Huffington Post over the past three weeks have thus far been shared on Facebook more than 40,000 times. They've also received sufficient coverage in the mainstream media--by The Washington Post, Politico, FiveThirtyEight.com, and others--that I'm hopeful someone in the Sanders campaign has seen them and (as applicable) found a way to make use of them.

JB: I'm delighted that your articles are gaining traction; This one was a real eye-opener and antidote to the corporate media's mistreatment of the Sanders campaign, Seth. Thanks so much for talking with me today.

SA: My pleasure! Thanks so much for your questions.

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Seth's website

His archive on HuffPo

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.