The sometimes wild haired old timer watched Elizabeth Warren become a media flavor of the month in the Democratic Presidential race coming out of the summer….
Bernie Sanders has been here before…
Four years ago it was Hillary Clinton he ran against…
Sanders, who is NOT actually a registered Democrat is a unabashed Social Democrat….
Warren is anti-BIG business ….
They pull from the same progressive left of the Democratic party.,.
And her ‘anger’ played much better in media…
So by a month agon… October?
Warren has pea led in the media nod poll numbers…
But?
ThenWarren under pressure came to introduce how she would play for her all in comparing healthcare/immigration/education government reorganization….
The reaction was a flop..
About that time Bernie Sanders had a heart attack…
Sanders took some time off and the thought was he was done…
But?
THAT has not happened…
Ole Bernie has done the opposite…
He has jumped back into campaigning
Slowly….
And slowly?
According to the RealClear Politics averages?….Bernie Sanders has climbed back into second place in the race….
Go figure?
Joe Biden leads most polls; Elizabeth Warren has sometimes been considered the real frontrunner; Pete Buttigieg is surging in Iowa. Where does that leave Bernie Sanders? I spoke with politics editor Ezekiel Kweku and senior writer Eric Levitz about whether the Vermont senator has been underestimated in recent weeks, and what his path to the nomination might look like.
Ben: Just a few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders suffered a heart attack and told a reporter he’d be cutting back on his vigorous campaign schedule — a remark he quickly took back. Since then, he has shown no sign of physical problems, had probably his strongest debate yet, and done quite well in early-state polls, consistently bunched up near the top in Iowa and New Hampshire. In the lefty lane, Elizabeth Warren has gotten a lot of the attention lately, what with the billionaires arrayed against her. Are (some) people now underrating Bernie’s chances to actually win this thing?
Ezekiel: My feeling is that his relative strength with black and Latino voters compared to Warren makes him a tier-one candidate, which is what I’ve always believed, and putting him below that is underrating him.
Ben: Indeed, there have been multiple pieces recently about his solid Latino support. And in a South Carolina poll released this week, he was second only to Biden among black voters (granted, there was a 34 point drop-off).
Eric: Some surely are underrating him. I think Warren has lost steam due to her front-runner status triggering more skeptical media coverage (her related decision to dig into Medicare for All financing may have also played some role). That, plus Sanders’s surprisingly robust (ostensible) health, plus the firmness of his core support, plus strength of his fundraising, plus new centrist candidates coming out of the woodwork to split the vote have all made his odds look a bit better in recent weeks. The more crowded the field in Iowa, the more plausible it is that Bernie rides the devotion of his core base to a narrow plurality win, which could then boost him to victory in New Hampshire, which would probably force Warren out of the race…..
“Bernie Sanders’s most adamant backers expect that he will be the Democratic nominee for president, but if it ends up looking like someone else may take that title, they want Mr. Sanders to put up a fight,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Sanders’s campaign has made it clear that to win the nomination, he would have to pull off an ambitious expansion of the electorate. His campaign says it is banking on turning out a coalition of young, working-class and minority voters.”
“But polls show the Vermont independent’s base is more loyal than that of any other 2020 Democrat, and in interviews over the last four months, Mr. Sanders’s supporters told The Wall Street Journal that they wouldn’t support any other candidate as long as he is running. “…
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