SANDERS’ N.H. WIN AN EMPTY VICTORY
Voters spurned the Bern this time around
Yeah, Bernie, you won New Hampshire, but big deal.
You’re only the front-runner now because of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s stunning collapse and because moderate Democratic voters haven’t united behind a centrist candidate.
The Vermont socialist’s “movement” — as he likes to call it — has hit a ceiling of less than 30%, and it’s not likely to grow anytime soon.
The real news coming out of the Granite State is that two-thirds of the Democratic voters there rejected farleft candidates Sanders and Warren.
Sanders got an astounding 60% of the vote in New Hampshire four years ago, amassing nearly 153,000 votes.
But this time around he could only scrape together barely over a quarter of Democratic voters, a total of about 76,000 votes.
What happened to the 77,000 voters who abandoned Sanders this time around?
They went with either Warren or some of the other Democrats running, like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. Or they just stayed home. While it looks like Democratic turnout did break the record from 2008, that’s largely because New Hampshire has thousands more eligible voters than it did 12 years ago.
And while it’s true that there were a lot more candidates this year than in 2016, when Sanders and Hillary Clinton were the only real choices, it’s still fair to ask Bernie: Why did 77,000 of your supposed Bernie Bros and Gals decide to jump ship? And in a New England state that shares a long border with Vermont?
If the media had any backbone, they’d be confronting
Bernie today over his razorthin margin of victory on Tuesday, and asking him how he’s going to put together a winning coalition when more than 70% of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire chose another candidate.
The media should also be asking Sanders tough questions about his Medicare-for-all financial disaster. Who’s going to pay for this boondoggle and exactly how much are you going to raise taxes? In the next contested state of Nevada, the major union there of culinary workers is dead set against the Sanders health care plan. Wait until Sanders gets to Michigan, where auto workers don’t want their health care taken away from them.
It’s time to get tough on Sanders and his inflated claims about his supposed revolution. Bernie so far has dodged any challenges to his health care plan, but that should end soon.
The reality is most Democratic voters don’t want a revolution and they especially don’t want Bernie.
If moderates can get their act together in the coming months and unite behind a candidate like Buttigieg or Klobuchar or former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Sanders will go back to Vermont a loser for the second straight time.