Questions for Sanders Campaign
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is drawing big crowds and a level of media attention that has to please the campaign. The Washington Post offers some interesting observations on his campaign so far, starting with it's conclusion that Sanders can't actually win the nomination but will have an impact.
The Daily 202: 5 takeaways from Bernie’s bounce
THE BIG IDEA: Bernie Sanders will not be the Democratic nominee, but he is tapping into an emerging liberal tea party movement...
Despite that conclusion, the piece cites three specific reasons for Sanders' rise to become, at least at this point, the primary challenger to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic nomination process:
–Sanders is winning over the Draft Warren crowd. Polling shows that the same folks who wanted the Massachusetts senator to run earlier this year are backing Bernie now...
–Sanders was always better suited to rise in New Hampshire than anywhere else: A Suffolk University poll last week found Sanders at 31 percent there, 10 points behind Clinton. He won 39 percent of self-described liberals. Post pollster Scott Clement notes that, because he represents the neighboring state of Vermont, Sanders is much better known there than in the other early state of Iowa. He and Clinton are roughly on par at this point on favorability among Democrats in the Granite State (62/9 for him and 72/19 for her in the Suffolk poll). In Iowa, 40 percent of Democrats had no opinion of Sanders in the most recent Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll and less than half viewed him favorably...
–Voters crave authenticity, and Sanders is tapping into that. He exhausts crowds with meandering speeches and by taking every question. On Twitter, @berniesanders does mini-tweet storms with no links (which makes it harder to harvest emails or raise money). He’ll post five or six tweets in a row that resemble a direct speech. Usually one or two of those tweets goes viral. It fits his style well, they’re in his voice and most importantly they don’t sound message-tested...
Most intriguingly, the analysis suggests that Kentucky Senator Rand Paul may be hurt the most by Sanders campaign, because Sanders could draw large numbers of independent-minded college-age voters to vote for him in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, instead of supporting Paul in the Republican primary.
Whatever the impact of the Sanders campaign turns out to be, it is almost certain that it will be significant.