(Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.)
[A]fter the Kansas City Royals lost the first two games of the 1985 World Series in their home ballpark, a Washington Post columnist, apparently happy to be getting out of town, wrote, “At least we won’t have to come back here again.”
But he did, for games 6 and 7. The Royals won both of them.
It’s a useful story right now for Bernie Sanders supporters. Hotshot pundits sometimes get it wrong. In both sports and politics, they tend to exaggerate the importance of whatever just happened.
Just examine this year’s primary night and morning-after analysis. After Sanders trounced Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire on Feb. 9, the cable talking heads seemed to envision an impending Sanders juggernaut, or at least a Clinton implosion, a conclusion that lasted all of 20 days, at the end of which Clinton swept most of the primaries on Super Tuesday.
Presto! She once again became “the presumptive nominee.”
For a whole week. Then Sanders beat Clinton and flummoxed the pollsters in Michigan, giving his campaign “new momentum,” as one prestigious journal put it.
For another whole week, until he went, as any Kansas City Royal would put it, 0-for-5 on Tuesday, or maybe 1-for-5, depending on possible recapitulation in Missouri. Either way, a very bad night for Sanders, and grounds for the cable talking heads to proclaim that now he has no hope of being nominated.
So any sign that those talking heads might be wrong is welcome news to those who do not want to concede that Sanders has no hope of being nominated.
They’re right. He does have a hope. But just because one arrogant hotshot columnist made a fool of himself more than 20 years ago does not mean those pundits don’t know what they’re talking about. Most of them are smart enough to know how to count, and anyone who can count knows that Sanders’ hopes are very, very dim.
And dimmer as of Wednesday afternoon’s report in The New York Times that President Barack Obama privately told Democratic donors Friday that Clinton was likely to be the nominee and the time had come for Democrats to unite behind her.
In this game, the team that loses the first few games can’t catch up simply by winning most of the next few. It has to run up the score every time. To catch up with Clinton in pledged delegates, Sanders would have to win 58 percent of the votes in the coming primaries and caucuses. To call that a tall order understates the case.
He might get margins that big in some places, such as the caucuses in Idaho on Tuesday; Alaska, Hawaii and Washington state March 26; and Wyoming on April 19. Fewer people go to caucuses than vote in primaries, and the caucus attendees tend to be fervent devotees of their preferred candidate. So far this year, Sanders scores higher on the fervency meter.
But winning those caucuses will not be enough. Sanders can only do so much to change the numbers. What he has to do is change the psychology. To have any chance at the nomination, he will have to persuade hundreds of the 712 superdelegates who have already announced their support for Clinton to switch over to him.
And the only way he can do that is by winning primaries. He has to win primaries in the big states, and he has to win them big. On top of netting him most of the pledged delegates in those states, big margins might convince superdelegates that Sanders is the people’s choice and they had better get on his bandwagon.
His first opportunities to do that are Tuesday in Arizona, and then two weeks later in Wisconsin. The real test, though, will come in New York on April 19. If he can win there, he can take realistic aim at Pennsylvania the following week, Indiana the week after that, and then the biggest prize of all — California — on June 7.
The trouble is that except in Wisconsin, where polls show the two candidates running even, Clinton is ahead in polling in these states. Some of those results are several weeks old and might be outdated. And in primaries — think of what happened in Michigan — polls can be misleading.
(Michigan may have been a special case, though. For reasons too complex to deal with here — Google it if you’re curious — this was really Michigan’s first contested Democratic presidential primary, so the pollsters had only the flimsiest of baselines to use in creating their samples. They should have acknowledged that. But humility is not their strong suit.)
Still, it’s hard for Sanders and his backers to be confident he will win those primaries at all, much less by the big margins he needs.
This puts Sanders and his campaign advisers in precisely the dilemma they were always likely to face but clearly have been trying to avoid. His only real hope may be to attack Clinton more severely and more personally than he has, just as powerful Democrats — now including the president — are urging exactly the opposite course.
It’s a real test for Sanders. As he often notes, he has never engaged in personal attacks on his opponents. He’d prefer to win by convincing enough voters that his public policy vision for the future — his “political revolution” — is best for the country and for them.
But he would prefer to win. Among the errors of many of the cable talking heads is their assertion that Sanders is running to “get his message across,” to influence the platform. He is not. He is running because he wants to be president.
But it is hardly likely that he wants to go down in history — and that may well be decided by what he does in the next few weeks, even the next few days — as the guy who helped Donald Trump become president of the United States.
