Bernie Sanders seems to be taking campaign advice from Dylan Thomas these days. He will not go gentle into that good night.
With his startling, come-from-behind victory Tuesday in Michigan, the underdog senator from Vermont pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Democratic primary history — just as his hopes of catching up to frontrunner Hillary Clinton seemed to be fading.
It’s a result that may spell trouble for Clinton, as other Rust Belt states — Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — head to the polls in the weeks ahead.
“What tonight means is that the Bernie Sanders campaign — the political revolution that we are talking about — is strong in every part of the country,” Sanders said during an impromptu late-night press conference outside his hotel in Miami, where he had rallied supporters earlier in the evening. “And frankly, we believe our strongest areas are yet to happen.”
Thanks to a streak of resounding victories in heavily African-American primaries across the South — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Louisiana, South Carolina — Clinton swept into Tuesday’s contests in Mississippi and Michigan with a seemingly insurmountable advantage over Sanders in the all-important battle for Democratic delegates.
The polls showed Clinton with massive leads in Michigan and Mississippi as well: more than 20 percentage points, on average, in the former, and more than 40 percentage points, on average, in the latter. Her campaign argued that a one-two punch in the North and the South would reinforce the former secretary of state’s strength with minority voters, while also proving that she can win in precisely the sort of big, blue-collar, non-Southern states that will define the rest of the Democratic primary calendar.
Mississippi, where nearly two-thirds of the primary voters were black, played to type, awarding Clinton a huge 83 percent to 16 percent win. Michigan, however, defied expectations, and the polls.
With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders was edging out Clinton by two percentage points, 50 percent to 48 percent. The last time a Democratic candidate lost on primary day after claiming such a sizable lead in the polls was in 1984, when Gary Hart upset Walter Mondale in New Hampshire.
The Sanders campaign fought hard for its win. Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, recently called the Michigan primary “a critical showdown,” and Sanders visited again and again over the last week. In a debate and a town hall, and on the stump in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, Dearborn and Ann Arbor, Sanders argued that he was a better fit than the former first lady for working-class Michiganders. He continued to criticize Clinton’s ties to Wall Street and to insist that she release the transcripts of her paid speeches to big banks. He even added a regional twist to his repertoire, hammering Hillary over her husband’s support, as president, for the “disastrous” North American Free Trade Agreement, which many Michiganders blame for decades of manufacturing job losses.
Clinton was, as usual, ready with a riposte. During the March 6 CNN debate in Flint, she accused Sanders of “being against the auto bailout” — the program widely credited with saving the largest industry in the region in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.
“In January of 2009, President-elect Obama asked everybody in the Congress to vote for the bailout,” Clinton said. “The money was there and had to be released in order to save the American auto industry and 4 million jobs and to begin the restructuring. We had the best year that the auto industry has had in a long time. I voted to save the auto industry. He voted against the money that ended up saving the auto industry.”
By Andrew Romano.
Culled from Yahoo News.
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