Cracks in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign are beginning to show, and it’s starting to look as if she’s repeating her failed 2008 bid for the White House, according to certain members of the press.
Clinton’s only competition, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., soared to victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary Tuesday evening, winning 60 percent of the vote. For some in media, his gain and her loss marked a huge moment in 2016.
Bloomberg’s Megan Murphy called it a “devastating” setback for Clinton, adding that it is “just a disaster for her.”
ABC News reported that Clinton and her team are doing some “serious soul-searching” after the “embarrassing upset” in New Hampshire.
“I don’t know that they knew they were going to lose this badly,” NBC’s Savannah Guthrie said.
Several polls also show that a majority of Democrats trust Sanders more than Clinton. This has some pundits wondering if Clinton’s once “inevitable” nomination is no longer a sure thing, and if her team is aware they may be in danger of repeating her 2008 performance.
“Did you see the look on Bill Clinton’s face yesterday?” MSNBC’s Chris Jansing said Wednesday in reference to the former president’s body language during his wife’s concession speech in New Hampshire.
“So sad. Nothing happy there,” MSNBC Chris Matthews responded.
Jansing theorized, “Yeah. Almost a fearful like here we go again, right? I can’t believe we’re back there.”
Earlier, just after Clinton finished delivering her concession speech Tuesday evening, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell also noted the air of despair and defeat that supposedly emanated from the former president.
“I have to say Bill Clinton is freaking out the most,” she said. “He didn’t take questions tonight. He always takes questions. Not tonight.”
“Watching him watch her these last few days when they’ve been campaigning together because previously he was on his own and watching his face, he could not mask the recognition that oh, my gosh, this is happening again. She’s going to lose,” Mitchell added.
Sanders has the overwhelming support of Democratic and independent women ages 18 to 34, according to several national polls. In the Granite State specifically, the Vermont senator clobbered Clinton Tuesday evening by winning the overall women’s vote by 11 points. For New Hampshire women ages 18 to 29, Sanders beat Clinton by nearly 60 points.
This, too, has some in media sounding the alarm on Clinton’s campaign, which has focused much of its attention on courting women voters.
“If she loses women, it shows you how much of a shellacking she took,” conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer said during a Fox News panel discussion.
“Bernie Sanders won big last night and now new exit polls are painting just how painful the picture is for Hillary Clinton,” CNN’s Carol Costello said Wednesday in reference to exit polls showing Democratic voters trust the Vermont senator, and that younger women voters overwhelmingly support him.
And in terms of media having flashbacks to Clinton 2008, the New York Times is feeling it. The newspaper took a shot at the Democratic front-runner this week, and scolded her campaign for trying to “tar” Sanders in the same way that it went after Obama when he first competed for the party’s nomination.
“Hillary Clinton memorably ended one of the Democratic debates by invoking the ‘Star Wars’ tagline, ‘May the force be with you.’ Even before voting began Tuesday in New Hampshire, a primary she was long expected to lose to Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton was flirting with the dark side,” the board wrote.
“Eight years after she went over the line in attacking Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s team, notably her husband and some prominent supporters, were making tone-deaf attacks on Mr. Sanders, who has proved a tougher opponent than they had expected,” they added.
Clinton’s lousy poll numbers, and Sanders’ unexpected popularity, come as her campaign tries to downplay the scandal surrounding her use of an unauthorized private email server when she worked at the State Department.
Federal investigators announced in January that they found 22 emails containing top-secret information on the email private server that Clinton used when she worked the top desk at Foggy Bottom, and more than 1,300 others that were deemed as classified. Clinton and her team said originally that no classified information passed through her unauthorized email server.
The State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are now trying to determine just how much secret data Clinton and her team sent over the server, and whether they broke any laws in doing so.
