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Thursday, May 5, 2016

WHY BERNIE IS THE VOTERS CANDIDATE

The political Establishment is terrified of Bernie Sanders; and rightly so.



He is the voters candidate; not special interests and the political apparatus that represents them.



The Establishment politicians, who Hillary Clinton is the "inevitable" choice, are complaining that Bernie is hurting the cause because he is taking on the more "sensible" candidate (Hillary).



More sensible? If that's the best reason to nominate Hillary then the Establishment is selling the American voter out which is all the more reason Bernie Sanders is exactly where he needs to be.




Sanders’s determination to press on is causing consternation in the Clinton camp, and in the Democratic Party establishment. Eager to avoid alienating Sanders’s large body of supporters, most Party figures have avoided publicly calling on him to quit, but some are citing Trump’s victory as a reason to unify behind Clinton. “If [Sanders] wants to stay in and discuss the platform, that’s obviously his right,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served in Bill Clinton’s Administration, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “But at this point, we’re on the verge of a choice between someone eminently sensible and qualified, and someone who is a real wild card. It’s a little frightening having him out there trying to take down the sensible candidate.”

In the weeks ahead, the calls for Sanders to wrap up his campaign are likely to become more explicit. He seems certain to ignore them, and he has at least four reasons to do so. First, most of his supporters want him to keep going. Second, he still has a (very) slim chance of obtaining the nomination. Third, there isn’t much evidence that his dropping out would affect the result in November. And fourth, back in 2008, Clinton herself did something very similar to what Sanders is doing now, extending her primary contest with Barack Obama well beyond the point at which most commentators had concluded that she had no chance of winning.

The result in Indiana confirmed what we already know: Sanders is very popular among younger Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, and particularly among white voters. 

According to the network exit poll, he carried the under-forty-five demographic by sixty-eight per cent to thirty-two per cent, and he won independents by seventy-two per cent to twenty-eight per cent. (The Indiana primary was an open one.) As usual, Clinton performed strongly among older and non-white voters, and among self-identified Democrats.

Since the primary season began, Sanders has won more than nine million votes and finished ahead of Clinton in eighteen states. (Clinton has won more than twelve million votes and won twenty-three states.) Sanders continues to attract large crowds—on Thursday he will be campaigning in West Virginia—and he seems likely to win more primaries in the coming weeks, including in West Virginia, on May 10th, and Oregon, on May 17th. If he were to end his campaign now, many of his supporters would be furious, and even some Democrats who aren’t necessarily backing him would be disappointed. 

According to new poll from NBC News/Survey Monkey, fifty-seven per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners want Sanders to campaign until the Convention, and just sixteen per cent think he should drop out now. Eighty-nine per cent of Sanders’s supporters said they wanted him to keep going until July. More surprisingly, perhaps, twenty-eight per cent of Clinton’s supporters agreed.

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