Why Is Hillary Having Such A Hard Time Closing The Deal In A State That Elected Her To The Senate Twice?

Ben Norton's post at Salon Wednesday-- Hillary Clinton rakes in Verizon cash while Bernie Sanders supports company’s striking workers-- sums up the Democratic primary better than anything I've seen in a long time. If he's the solution to the country's problems, she's very much a part of those problems. It's insane for any Democrat to vote for her other than people obsessed with electing the first female president regardless of how ill-suited she is for the job.

Later, if she's the nominee, she'll be the lesser-of-two-evils between herself and Trump or Cruz or Ryan or whomever. But right now, she's just a horribly flawed candidate with a miserable record running against a candidate the likes of whom doesn't come along more than once in a lifetime. Fortunately, as Philip Bump reported in the Washington Post Bernie has cut her New York lead in half as voters have become more familiar with them. "Sanders," he wrote, "has benefited as people have made up their minds. Some of the shift since March comes from Clinton losing support, but some also comes from fewer people being undecided... Sanders has also seen a huge increase in support from younger voters, which is not a surprise, while Clinton's lead with other demographic groups has fallen. Black voters still strongly prefer Clinton, but only by a 2-to-1 margin in the most recent Siena survey. Among whites and among men, the two are now basically tied."

A post at The Nation this week, from D.D. Guttenplan, credits Sanders with staging more than a presidential campaign and turning his race into a modern-day secular revival. Hillary is drawing hundreds of enthusiastic supporters. Bernie is attracting thousands in the same towns.

Although Sanders criticized Clinton for accepting money from Wall Street-- and pointed out that Goldman Sachs, the bank that paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches, had just the day before agreed to pay a $5 billion settlement for defrauding investors-- never mentioned the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Alice Walton has donated to Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC. Instead, as he did in Buffalo the night before, Sanders gave the crowd a brief tutorial on the issues involved in the Verizon strike-- which saw 36,000 workers walk off their jobs this morning-- connecting their fight with the history of the labor movement. And as he does in every stump speech now, he followed that with an invocation of the civil-rights movement, “when brave people stood up together and decided to fight back against hundreds of years of racism.” Then he moved on to “the feminist movement, when millions of women stood up together,” adding, as he always does, “and I know every man in this room is going to stand with the women in their fight for pay equity.” Then, when the cheers died down, he reminded the crowd of the victories achieved by “the gay rights movement, who stood up, with their straight allies, to demand the right for people to love one another regardless of gender.”

On paper this may sound like mere genuflection, or virtue-signaling. But in the room it felt more like a revival-- of a peculiarly, determinedly secular kind perhaps, but with the same mobilizing effect on its audience as any tent meeting. It made visible their own power-- in this case the power to change, not themselves but society. By invoking radical history, Sanders is summoning up radical hope. “The American dream is that parents work hard so their kids can do better,” he tells his audiences, pledging “we will not allow the American dream to die.”

GoodCall's Education News ran an interesting piece comparing educational attainments of the voters for the 5 remaining candidates-- Hillary, Bernie, Kasich, Cruz and Trump. Not surprisingly, these days, Democrats perform better in districts with more highly-educated populations. In districts with the highest numbers of people with graduate degrees Bernie does best (12.08%), followed by Hillary (11.37%) and Kasich (11.14%), with Trump (9.57%) and Cruz (9.29%) lagging. And in districts with the fewest college graduates Cruz and Trump do best, followed by Hillary, then Kasich and Bernie does worst.

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