Good, good. Let the hate flow through you.
The cat is out of the bag. The corporate wing of the Democratic Party is publicly "anybody but Bernie." They know our progressive agenda of Medicare for All, breaking up big banks, taking on drug companies and raising wages is the real threat to the billionaire class. https://t.co/zimci7JRO6
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 19, 2019
A wounded animal is apt to lash out. And Bernie has been wounded:
That’s the second poll in eight days in which she’s nudged ahead of him nationally. On April 27, a few days after Biden entered the race, Sanders led Warren by nearly 17 points in the RCP poll of polls, 23.0 to 6.5. Today? It’s Bernie 15.0, Warren 11.9. If the trendlines continue, she may pass him by the end of the month.
Weirdly, a separate poll suggests that Sanders might be retaining a slight edge over Warren right now due to his relative … electability?
Former Vice President Joe Biden took first place in the “horse race” question, with 29 percent saying they would vote for him if the primary were held today. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took second in that category with 17 percent, while Warren came in third with 16 percent.
But when respondents were asked to choose which candidate they preferred to automatically make president, 21 percent pointed to Warren, while 19 percent each tapped Biden and Sanders…
Part of Warren’s electability challenge may owe to gender, according to the Avalanche survey. Of the voters that chose a male candidate in response to the horse race question and a female candidate in the “magic wand” question, 24 percent cited gender as a quality they would change to make a candidate more likely to be elected.
Yeah, Bernie may choose to believe that he’s ahead of Warren because she’s tainted by her association with the, ahem, “corporate wing” but the uglier truth may be that it’s because she’s a woman. Two days ago the Daily Beast published a poll that found 20 percent of Democratic and independent men admitting openly that they felt women were “less effective in politics than men.” Just 74 percent said they were comfortable with a woman president, and a mere 33 percent said they thought that their neighbors would be comfortable with a woman president. Pollsters have found in the past that people are apt to be more candid in revealing their own secret opinions if you phrase the questions by asking how their “neighbors” are likely to feel about something. If only 33 percent of Democratic and indie men are inclined to vote for a woman, Warren has a huge — maybe insurmountable? — problem.
They’re called “Berniebros” for a reason, I guess.
But it’s early. Lots of Democrats doubtless would have claimed in early 2007 that their, ahem, “neighbors” weren’t ready for a black president. After watching Obama for awhile and coming around to liking him, their neighbors’ opinions changed. Warren isn’t a fraction as personally charming as Obama was but she’s been canny in positioning herself as a “capitalist” progressive alternative to Bernie’s unapologetic socialism, which seems to have made some centrist Democrats more comfortable with her as a potential nominee than they are with Sanders. If Biden’s too stale and squishy for some and Bernie’s too radical and abrasive, Warren may end up as the not-too-hot-not-too-cold middle option. But don’t count out her gender as a fatal perceived liability: Hillary’s failure to win a supposedly unloseable election seems to have convinced some Dems that nominating a woman is just too risky against Trump. It takes an alpha male to beat an alpha male, or so the theory goes. Advantage: Biden?
Anyway, Seth Mandel is right. After Bernie’s tweet, we have to get these two crazy kids together on the same debate stage soon so that they can decide who the One True Progressive really is. Not gonna happen next week, alas.