Leading in New Hampshire and gaining in Iowa, the socialist candidate poses a real threat to Clinton’s campaign.
The aura of inevitability surrounding Hillary Clinton is suddenly looking more fragile. As Democrats prepare for the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, opponent Bernie Sanders is giving the front-runner a run for her money in both states, raising the possibility that Clinton could face another 2008-style defeat if she doesn't act fast to solidify her support on the left.
Speaking with reporters on Monday, Sanders touted his competitive poll numbers against the Clinton machine: not only does a new poll place Sanders within three points of Clinton in Iowa, the self-described democratic socialist Vermont senator is actually winning by a slim margin in several New Hampshire polls. A new Monmouth poll released on Tuesday puts Sanders a whopping 14 points ahead in the Granite State. At this point, Clinton’s best New Hampshire strategy might be to simply make it a close race.
“Secretary Clinton and her campaign is in serious trouble,” Sanders said, adding that she was no longer the “anointed” one. “So obviously in that scenario what people do is start attacking. Suddenly Bernie Sanders is not a nice guy. That is not surprising when you have a Clinton campaign that is now in trouble and now understands that they can lose.”
Given Clinton’s recent activity, Sanders might be right: perhaps looking to stave off an embarrassing repeat of 2008, when she surprisingly lost Iowa by a wide margin to a first-term senator with a weird name, Clinton has racked up several prominent gun-control endorsements in the past few days from the Brady Campaign and former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, highlighting Sanders’s alleged weakness on the issue. Clinton has also stepped up her attacks against Sanders on the campaign trail, pointing out in stump speeches that the Vermont senator has voted several times for pro-gun legislation—notably a 2005 bill that protected gun manufactures from criminal action when their firearms are used in crimes. (In the press release announcing their endorsement, Brady Campaign president Dan Gross called the bill “truly evil.”)
But Sanders still has the advantage on income inequality, a central concern of his campaign and an issue that Clinton has struggled to talk about as fluently. It doesn’t help that Clinton only revealed her plan to tax the mega-rich this week, and from a solely populist standpoint, it certainly won’t help that her tax increases aren’t as drastic as Sanders’s proposal.
Clinton might not be able to count on help from the White House on this one, either. In a recent interview with CNN, Vice President Joe Biden observed that it’s “relatively new” for Clinton to talk about Sanders’s pet issue: “Hillary’s focus has been other things up to now, and that's been Bernie's—no one questions Bernie's authenticity on those issues.”
Still, there are 20 days until Iowa, enough time for any and all scandals to strategically tank a campaign. Major banks have collapsed in less time.
_Update (2:45 P.M.)__: A new Quinnipiac poll released on Tuesday afternoon shows that Sanders is out-polling Clinton by 5 points in Iowa. This is a good time to imagine what Hillary Clinton keeps in her Panic Room.
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