Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Bernie Sanders is to be taken seriously now. He is changing the Democratic Party

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/bernie-sanders-just-changed-the-democratic-party

Bernie had a great speech last night.

ter a remarkable night in Iowa, one that served as a rebuke to Donald Trump and to the opinion pollsters, the Democratic Party was faced with the prospect of confronting a youthful and articulate Republican candidate come November: Senator Marco Rubio, who finished a strong third in the G.O.P. caucus, behind Ted Cruz and Trump. Before then, though, Democrats have some messy internal business to deal with: Bernie Sanders, promoting an American version of “people power,” has confirmed his capture of the Party’s under-forty wing, which means trouble for Hillary Clinton.
Strictly speaking, the Democratic caucus finished in a dead heat. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, with ninety-nine per cent of the precincts having reported, the delegate count was six hundred and sixty-five for Clinton, and six hundred and sixty-two for Sanders. (For some reason, the Democrats release only their delegate counts, not the number of votes cast for each candidate.) In terms of percentages, it was 49.8 per cent to 49.6 per cent, which rounds up to fifty-fifty. Barring something unforeseen, Iowa’s forty-four delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be equally divided.
This result doesn’t mean that Hillary Clinton won’t win the nomination. Although she seems likely to lose in New Hampshire, next week, she remains a strong over-all favorite: on betting sites, even today, to win twenty dollars on Hillary emerging as the Democratic candidate, you would have to bet a hundred dollars. But for Clinton to unite her party and galvanize it for what could be a tough fight in the fall, she needs to find some way to appeal to younger voters, who have fastened onto Sanders’s anti-establishment message.

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