Sanders Can Win.

Sanders Can Win. Here's Why. 4/18/2016:
 The truth is that less than a year ago Bernie Sanders had absolutely nothing, and Hillary Clinton was better positioned to win the Democratic nomination for President than any Democrat in the year before an election since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Bernie Sanders entered the 2016 primary election a superlatively old Independent socialist Jew with a bevy of Old-World tics (like talking with his hands), no fashion sense whatsoever, unruly hair, no super-PACs, and no national name recognition.     The Democratic Party felt no loyalty to him, at either the state or national level.   He was at three percent in the polls.     He was from one of the smallest states in the nation, one of the ones that few outside New England ever talk about or think about. He had no money. He had no friends in the media.    He had surrogates, indeed a diverse cast of them, but somehow they never got invited onto major-media political panels.  He had no way to force Clinton to do more than four or five debates, all of which would be held, per the decree of the Democratic National Convention, at the most inconvenient hours.   He had a penchant for blunt talk that seemed certain to sink him in a political climate where every mental lapse quickly becomes a meme.   He had a “fringe-candidate” sign on his back that it seemed he would never get off.

It’s now April 18th, and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been statistically tied in every single national poll taken in the last month.

That we pretend that any measure in which Sanders comes up short — say, in his support among African-Americans — is somehow a fatal flaw in the man and not a sign that absolute nobodies don’t become household heroes in under six months is an insult to America’s collective intelligence.

(And the sign that it’s well past time for somebody to just say what most of America already knows to be true is that today Philip Bump of The Washington Post wrote a scathing editorial complaining that Bernie Sanders says his average contribution is $27 when it’s in fact $27.89.)

It’s a miracle Sanders is performing even as well as he is,  given the structural disadvantages he suffers relative to his opponent because of how we run elections in America.

In almost every state, Sanders performs better with voters the more they’re exposed to him, and Hillary worse the more voters are exposed to her.

So when both Clinton and Sanders fail to clinch the nomination via pledged delegates alone, and both head to Philadelphia with an eye toward wooing the (still completely unpledged) super-delegates, Clinton will win if her advantages are treated as assets rather than signs that she should have been beating this old socialist Jew from Vermont with the rumpled suits and unruly hair by twenty or more points all along. And Sanders will win if the Democrats pick the better candidate — which, given the harrowing dangers of a Trump presidency, I damn well hope they do.