During a campaign stop in Maine, Bernie Sanders offered a contrarian take on his candidacy for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
The socialist senator from Vermont said that Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton had been “anointed by the pundits” from the start. “Well guess what?” he retorted. “It doesn’t look like she’s so inevitable now.”
Maybe that was true in the 48 hours after the New Hampshire primary. But after Super Tuesday, Sanders is probably the only person in the nation’s capital who believes Clinton’s nomination is anything but inevitable, barring a turn for the worse in the controversy over her private email server.
How did Clinton regain her status as the inevitable Democratic nominee? The same states and voters who rejected her in 2008 are embracing her against Sanders now. In 2008, Clinton was outhustled and out-organized in the caucuses and trounced in the Southern states as she received a percentage of the black vote more fitting for the Goldwater girl that she once was than the leading liberal figure she had long ago become.
Sanders has held onto many of the white liberals attracted to President Obama and fellow Vermonter Howard Dean in 2004 while cleaning up among young voters who weren’t of age for some of those earlier campaigns. But he has made no inroads in the black and Latino communities.
Consequently, Clinton has cut a decisive path through the South: 73.5 percent of the vote in South Carolina, 78 percent in Alabama, 66 percent in Arkansas, 71 percent in Georgia, 66 percent in Tennessee, 65 percent in Texas and 64 percent in Virginia.
In that group of states, only Arkansas and Virginia had predominantly white electorates. But the African-American vote was still significant in both of those exceptions. In Virginia, Clinton won 84 percent of it. In Arkansas, she took 91 percent.
Even in predominantly white states outside the South, nonwhite voters are helping Clinton win. In Massachusetts, the Democratic electorate was 85 percent white. Sanders won these voters 50-41 percent. But Clinton took the remaining nonwhite voters 59-41 percent, beating Sanders by one point statewide and dealing the Vermonter his first New England loss in a state where Obama beat her in 2008.
Now Sanders is winning a percentage of the black vote more fitting for Barry Goldwater circa 1964 than the civil-rights activist he once was.
The fact that Clinton was so heavily favored in 2008 and ultimately didn’t win causes even many Democrats to forget how well she actually did in her first presidential campaign. Even in defeat, Clinton won most of the big states: California, New York, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, for example.
While running a campaign in which virtually everything came together for him, Obama edged Clinton by only 0.4 percent of the popular vote under the most favorable scenario and required superdelegate defections to win. Sanders hasn’t put together a campaign that has worked as well or a coalition that is as diverse, even though he has exceeded initial expectations.
The main issue that doomed Clinton in 2008, the Iraq war, has faded into the background eight years later, though Sanders has tried to make it central to his foreign-policy critique of the front-runner. Libya hasn’t become an issue among many Democrats.
“Once Joe Biden decided not to run, she was always going to be the nominee,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told the Washington Examiner. “The only question was when.”
Clinton is already looking to the general election and leading Republican candidate Donald Trump. “America never stopped being great,” she said. “We have to make America whole.”
And this time around, Hillary may be likable enough.
