Sanders closing in on… Hillary?
Has the liberal insurgent arrived?
Hillary might have her work cut out for her after all. A new poll shows Sen. Sanders narrowing Hillary’s gap in the sparsely populated Democratic presidential primary field… at least in New Hampshire.
According to a poll released by Morning Consult, Hillary’s lead in New Hampshire has dwindled to 12 points over the Vermont’s socialist hero. The same percentage of respondents indicated they’re currently undecided.
Is New Hampshire within Sanders’ reach? As Morning Consult pointed out:
No matter who captures the Democratic nomination, that candidate will have to contend with voters’ impressions of President Obama. And in New Hampshire and Iowa, two states solidly in the swing column, Obama’s approval ratings are worryingly low.
Just 43 percent of New Hampshire voters say they approve of the job Obama is doing, while 56 percent disapprove. In Iowa, 43 percent approve and 54 percent disapprove.
Hillary’s scandalous service in the Obama administration might make the task of distancing herself difficult. Clinton maintains large leads in South Carolina and Iowa, but Sanders managed to come within 8 points of Clinton in a Wisconsin straw poll last week.
According to The Hill:
Clinton finished with 49 percent support among those who voted at the state party convention; Sanders finished in second place with 41 percent. Vice President Biden and former Gov. Martin O’Malley (Md.) tied at third with 3 percent. Former Sen. Jim Webb (Va.) followed with under 2 percent, and former Gov. Lincoln Chafee (R.I.) closed out the poll with 1 percent.
Hillary has the Clinton machine at her disposal, but Sanders’ well-loved populist tendencies might prove troublesome for Mrs. Clinton. On Charlie Rose’s show last week, Sanders floated an egregiously high tax rate of 50% on America’s top income earners. Sanders’ hard core supporters (see also: Occupy endorses Sanders), love the tax the 1% into oblivion! rhetoric.
We’re working right now on a comprehensive tax package, which I suspect will, for the top marginal rates, go over 50 percent,” Sanders said on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” program. The current top rate is 39.6 percent.
The self-described democratic socialist said he is running on a platform of “redistribution of wealth,” citing “grotesque levels of wealth inequality in this country.”
“It is time to redistribute money back to the working families of this country from the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and tax policy is one of the ways we do that,” Sanders told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt on the show.Sanders also said he would raise the corporate tax rate, the highest in the developed world, even as the White House and many Republicans push to lower it. Sanders also said he wanted to close loopholes.
“If you look at the collective percentage of revenue coming in from corporations today, it is significantly lower than it was back in the 1950s,” he said. “I think it’s about 10 percent today.”
Whether or not Sanders can reach beyond the left-wing of the Democratic party into the blue center remains to be seen. But if anyone currently in the Democratic primary field can cause trouble for the Clinton’s, Sanders seems the best bet.
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Comments
I think it’s just the difference between polling when Clinton had no opponent, and now, with one opponent. Those two pollings cannot be compared and derive anything useful from the effort. Apples/oranges thang.
It means previous polled measures of her strength were based on no other choice, and that given a choice, even, ahem, Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s numbers come back to earth. Her support has been wide but weak, like cellophane paper.
That Sanders gal(?), guy(?), trans-jenner(?) sure is pasty white. Is he claiming to be black like Obama?
Sanders may be a socialist hero in the Granite State, but he is not, “the granite (sic) state’s (sic) socialist hero.” He is the Green Mountain State’s socialist hero. He is of Vermont.
I don’t mean to sound rude, but I used to come to this site to find all sorts of well-written and seriously considered analysis. Now it seems that the majority of the pieces are intended solely to rehash news with some opinion attached. Plus the writing is not where it once was. I hope the site returns to the more deeply considered and well-edited content it once produced when it offered some of the most intellectual daily thought on the conservative internet. I especially hope so if Lizzie Warren runs, because no one covers Warren like Legal Insurrection.
An editor was hired but became seriously ill before she could begin. LI now goes with no apparent editor, and yes, I would agree it sometimes shows.
Hm. I notice this poll does not have the Voldemort option that the MSM likes to add into the Republican polls, just so they can say “X polls worse than Voldemort.”
(Darn it, now I need to photoshop the Hillary ‘H’ as a ‘V’ with a red right-facing arrow for his campaign for the Democratic nomination.)
And now, folks, the Sanders vs Clinton debate … brought to you by the makers of Geritol …
Who will really win…???
Depends.
Sanders endorses “Depends?”
Figures…..
Bernie Sanders would be the first Jewish President.
Interesting.
No no no! Obama is!
Amazing what Obama has wrought. Just a few years ago the prog drone’s hair would catch on fire if you called them “socialist.” Now they’re openly backing a self-avowed socialist. It seems the progs have finally come out of the Lenin Closet.
Don’t get too overheated. 41% to 49% percent is NOT a close contest.
That”s just about how well Eugene McCarthy did in the New Hampshire primary in 1968:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_1968
And this is a poll almost eight months before the primary.
The only thing is, Independents can vote in either primary.
There will probably, or possibly, be more interest in the Republican primary than the Democratic primary, so the voters will be mostly registered Democrats, except maybe for people who either realy hate Hillary Clinton or dishonesty in politics or who love Bernard Sanders or want more liberalism. Perhaps people who were against the Iraq war.
Write-in votes are also easy, so people stuck in one party’s primary may vote for candidates from the other party and the leading ones usually get, I think, around 2% each.
Actually it’s a TKO for Sanders when you consider Hillary’s edge in money, name recognition and the whole inevitability thing.
Sanders is just a place holder for Warren.
Let me see if I understand, the hard core of the liberal base is banking on an older WHITE GUY to save them?
Or whoever will have he courage to run.
Almost all the candidates being talked about seem to be over 70 and older than Hillary: Bernard Sanders, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and even Jerry Brown.
Elizabeth Warren is younger, being born on June 22, 1949, but she won’t and can’t run and was the chimera being held up by Clinton people.
Martin Joseph O’Malley was born on January 18, 1963. So he’s younger.
(Hillary Clinton waas born on October 26, 1947)
Hillary has a few things in common with the inevitable Democrat nominee in June, 1967, LBJ- a reputation for corruption, a hard to like personality, a foul mouth and a failed foreign policy.