Michigan Was Once Bernie's Resurrection. Now It Could Be His Burial.

[RandySF]

ANN ARBOR, Michigan—When Bernie Sanders scored the biggest upset of the 2016 primary, defeating Hillary Clinton in Michigan after late polls showed him losing the state by an average of 30 points, he celebrated it as a turning point in the campaign.

Where the Vermont senator saw a sudden groundswell of support for his insurgent candidacy—a narrative that proved irresistible to much of the media—Democrats on the ground in Michigan saw something very different. They saw disturbingly low turnout. They saw Clinton failing to energize black voters. They saw young people and independents rebelling against the Democratic front-runner. They saw white working-class voters abandoning her, and the party, in numbers that were once unfathomable.

In other words, they saw a sneak preview of November 2016.

Clinton’s loss to Sanders in Michigan resembled a giant, mitten-shaped red flag. She won only 28 percent of self-described independents. She performed just as dismally among young voters, winning 32 percent of those under age 45. She was beaten in rural and exurban counties across the state, losing whites without a college degree by 15 percentage points. Even Clinton’s 40-point victory among black voters couldn’t make up for these deficits, because turnout of black voters—as with Democratic turnout across the board—was so underwhelming. (There were 130,000 more votes cast in the GOP primary, a fact Democrats shrugged off at the time.)

Sanders’ team has long trumpeted his Michigan triumph as evidence of his ability to assemble a unique coalition and defeat the Democratic establishment. But a closer look at that contest, taken in the context of this year’s primary results, suggests that Sanders’ own weaknesses are about to be exposed. And that, in turn, means winning Michigan will be far more difficult this time around. Not only do party insiders expect Democratic turnout will spike among groups unfavorable to him—blacks and suburbanites, in particular—but he now faces an opponent in Joe Biden who comes into the state with a head of steam, who benefits from Democrats’ desire to coalesce behind an alternative to Trump, and who will compete for independents and working-class whites in a way Clinton never did.

It’s possible Sanders could offset these dynamics, and these demographic headwinds, by galvanizing record-breaking numbers of young people to vote. He stressed as much Sunday night during a rock-star rally at the University of Michigan. With an estimated 10,000 people in attendance—whipped into a frenzy by his ace surrogate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—Sanders acknowledged that Michigan’s primary is the whole ball of wax on Tuesday and predicted a win on the strength of his youth-anchored coalition.

But the odds are increasingly stacked against him, here and across the country. If he doesn’t pull off another Michigan miracle—if he loses in lopsided fashion, as many Democrats here now expect—the state responsible for his 2016 resurrection could mark his 2020 burial.




https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/09/michigan-bernie-sanders-primary-unfriendly-123898

[George II]

1. Cory Booker just said at Biden's rally that the high school mascot where they are is the Phoenix!

[empedocles]

3. fox news saying biden would debate sanders on sunday. Don't know why

biden would do that?

[AlexSFCA]

4. Tomorrow is the end of BS and his BS