Many political pundits see Bernie Sanders’s New Hampshire landslide as a fluke and look to Hillary Clinton’s Southern “firewall” to bring the Democratic race back to its expected course. But Lisa Pease has examined the Sanders campaign and sees an opening instead for a national course correction.
By Lisa Pease
Bernie Sanders can absolutely win the Democratic Party’s nomination. He’s still way behind Hillary Clinton in a number of Super Tuesday states. But you have to have worked on or followed presidential campaign politics to understand the power of momentum. If you ask any campaign leader which they’d rather have, the lead or momentum, they will usually choose momentum.
Leads can dissolve quickly in the face of momentum. Nationally, Hillary Clinton used to lead Sanders by an average of about 20 percentage points. But in the wake of Sanders’s surprising performance in Iowa and his 22-point margin of victory in New Hampshire, the latest Quinnipiac poll shows he and Hillary are statistically tied across the country.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
How did this happen? Did people suddenly remember they didn’t like Hillary Clinton? No. Many are suddenly finding out that they actually like Bernie Sanders — a lot.
Where Sanders has actively campaigned, he’s closed, to borrow his Brooklyn vernacular, “Yuge” polling gaps to tie or pass Clinton in several states. For most of last year, Sanders was behind Clinton in New Hampshire by a large margin. These were, we were told, the people who “knew” him “well” because he was their “next-door” neighbor. But that wasn’t true. People really didn’t know him. When they found out who he was, not only did he win, he got more votes in New Hampshire than any other candidate — Democrat or Republican — in history.
The polls in South Carolina currently show Clinton well ahead. But guess what? Sanders only personally entered the state as part of his official South Carolina campaign this week. And Sanders is now running a powerful four-minute ad featuring Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who was tragically choked to death in New…