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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with Clinton’s congratulatory tweet to Bernie Sanders after his victory in Wisconsin, with added commentary from Tom Watson:
xCongrats to @BernieSanders on winning Wisconsin. To all the voters and volunteers who poured your hearts into this campaign: Forward! -H
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 6, 2016 xIt's what you do when you don't win that often defines how you'll lead when you do. https://t.co/oCOGj1CM6q
— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) April 6, 2016Clinton is gracious in losing, but probably a bit relieved by the margin, too. She lost Wisconsin by a wider margin in 2008, proving once again that the Clinton coalition from that year has been augmented by African-American voters. That’s kept the delegate margins tighter than they otherwise would’ve been.
Washington Post reports:
The recipe he used is the recipe he’s used elsewhere: beat Clinton with white voters enough to offset her strength with black voters. He was aided by Wisconsin having a relatively small black population — a population that preliminary exit polls reported by CNN suggest gave Clinton 7 of every 10 votes. Clinton and Sanders appear to have tied with Democrats, but Sanders won 7 in 10 independents, a group that made up nearly 30 percent of the electorate. So: Sanders wins.
He was supposed to. Those demographics suggested that he would. After Super Tuesday, a night in which Hillary Clinton vastly expanded her delegate lead, FiveThirtyEight outlined the odds of a Sanders victory in each of the next eight states. In seven of the eight, the demographics and past primary results suggested, Sanders would win. He’s won six of the seven that have voted. In most cases, it seemed like he’d win by wide margins. He did.
Sanders, as we’ve repeated frequently and to the consternation of Sanders’s fans, simply can’t make up the delegate deficit against Hillary Clinton. We made this graph to that point last week. It takes a smaller win than Sanders’s in Wisconsin to make up the delegates he bit off tonight — but Clinton doesn’t really need to make those delegates up anyway. Her lead is very, very well padded.
Momentum feels important. It feels important to win states, just as it feels important to string together a number of singles and doubles in an inning even if you’re trailing by 11 runs. It feels like you’re getting somewhere. All of this feels like it’s offering more than it ever should have, that it’s positioning Bernie Sanders to be a candidate in a way that no one ever dreamed — perhaps including Sanders himself.
But here, in the hard math of the Democratic delegate process, in a series of contests where Clinton has still gotten millions more votes than Sanders — that momentum is mostly a mirage. It looks like water, shimmering there in the desert.
It’s not.
And the problem for Sanders is bigger than just delegates, especially as he makes the case that superdelegates should switch their allegiance to him. (Side note: Yes, I know what Jeff Weaver said on CNN. He’s doing his job. I’m not going to pile on.)
FiveThirtyEight reports:
Sanders Has a Raw Vote Problem, Not Just a Delegate Problem
Most Sanders supporters are focused on whether their guy can close the lead Clinton has in pledged delegates between now and June. A narrow victory in Wisconsin tonight would be unlikely to put much of a dent in her current 220-delegate lead. But perhaps just as importantly, it wouldn’t put much of a dent in Clinton’s often-overlooked 2.5-million popular vote lead.
Sanders supporters hypothesize that Clinton’s 469-to-31 lead in superdelegates will vanish if their candidate can win a majority of pledged delegates and claim the “will of the people.” But thanks to his reliance on low-turnout caucus states like Idaho and Washington, Sanders has won just 41 percent of votes, even though he’s won 45 percent of pledged delegates.
Even in the very unlikely event that Sanders erases Clinton’s pledged delegate lead by June, Clinton would probably be able to persuade her superdelegates to stick with her by reminding them that she still won more actual votes than Sanders.
Narrowing her popular vote lead by 120k in what should be one of Sanders’ strongest primary states is not going to help him, as that will be erased by even narrow wins in the mid-Atlantic states.
Again, not going to pile on. Being a Clinton supporter in 2008 meant celebrating big wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Texas, only to find she fell further behind because they weren’t as big as they needed to be. It’s not a fun place to be.