Why does media ignore polls showing Dem base still prefers Hillary not Bernie?
Press cannot admit Hillary’s popularity with key demos makes her a 2020 favorite.
Hillary-haters, particularly those of a certain demographic, dominate the American media left and right.
When not either ignoring the historical importance and historic success of Hillary’s bestseller What Happened, or scapegoating her for the sexual misdeeds of men in her orbit, the press is still bombarding the airwaves with anti-Hillary propaganda while promoting its favored pale sons: gleefully writing-up any and every summer poll showing Hillary was then less popular than Donald Trump; uncritically advocating for Joe Biden 2020; and promoting the outdated fiction that Bernie Sanders is the nation’s ‘most popular senator’ — a misleading metric based on downplaying Sanders’ mediocre national ratings, on playing up his polling within Vermont compared with that of other senators within their states, and on pushing disgruntled ex-Clinton pollster Mark Penn’s monthly Harvard-Harris poll, a survey given a poor C- in FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings due to its unreliability.
Listening to the corporate media’s anti-Hillary spin, nobody likes the woman who earned millions more votes than any other 2016 candidate, who has never lost an overall popular vote. And nobody ever did.
But buried within the crosstabs of a recent poll from YouGov/HuffPo — a pollster with a solid B rating from FiveThirtyEight — is data that not only neutralizes the media’s self-serving anti-Hillary yarns, but that also provides rationale for the center-left to back Hillary with confidence in 2020.
The YouGov/HuffPo data shows Hillary polling much, much better with Democrats and with the crucial black and brown votes than media favorite Sanders, even as Republicans and ex-Republicans in the press prematurely write her political obituary.
Hillary has a 78 percent favorable rating with Democrats, seven points higher than Bernie’s 71 percent. Her 69 percent favorable rating with blacks remains a whopping sixteen points better than Sanders’s 53 percent rating with that determinative demographic. Among Hispanics, Hillary’s 42 percent rating comfortably bests Sanders’s dismal 36 percent.
Political observers always temper discussion of Trump’s falling approval rating with reminders that as long as the Republican base stands by him, he is still electorally formidable. Those same observers never notice the Democratic base still likes really Hillary, providing her with a durable, reliable base from which to launch a 2020 offensive.
And if registered Democrats and ethnic minorities were to muscle Hillary through the primary, engineering the greatest comeback in the annals of politics, she would enter the general election with the wind at her back. She would know to redouble efforts at inspiring the center-left with big ideas and at fighting vote suppression in the Rust Belt and elsewhere, would benefit from Trump regret, and would not face the headwinds of Russian propaganda, Comey’s email intrusions, and liberal complacency.
If nominated in 2020 Hillary is poised to smash into the presidency, building on Democratic gains to actualize a progressive golden era, empowering historically disadvantaged groups and white men both.
It is therefore not shocking that within the media, the favorite demographics of Hillary’s main 2016 antagonists Trump and Sanders are still invested in denying her viability and erasing her coalition. Any poll showing Hillary’s enduring popularity with important constituencies is a grave threat to the status quo’s plan to coronate either Sanders or Biden.
The press knows the real 2020 heat will be in the Democratic primary, since without Putin’s help the increasingly unpopular White House incumbent has little chance of eeking out another electoral college win via 80,000 Rust Belt votes. Barring the potential presence of an unvetted neosocialist on the ticket, the 2020 Democratic primary victor is likely the next president.
A Hillary-Biden-Sanders primary is thus a nightmare scenario for mainstream journalists, accounting for their determination to frame Hillary as too toxic to even try. Sanders’s still-unlitigated rape essay and Biden’s creepiness with women and maltreatment of Anita Hill would blunt revived attempts to blame Hillary for her husband’s misconduct and to shame her for honoring her for better or worse marriage vows. The advanced age of these men renders useless any suggestion Hillary is too connected to D.C.’s old guard.
The only thing standing between Hillary and the nomination might be the ability of a Kamala Harris or a Cory Booker to peel away black voters.
However, blacks may still pick Hillary on the grounds she can will push for racial justice with a passionate anger society does not tolerate from black politicians. While Sanders and Biden both deny the racist white resentment behind Trump’s support, Hillary remains the only major Democrat defending black sports figures with gusto from bigoted attacks. She is the only high-profile Democrat openly rebuking Sanders’s dismissive language about minority identity, pointedly and powerfully telling black graduates:
“When they even try to dismiss your lived experiences, maybe they’ll call it ‘identity politics,’ stand up and say your identity is as important and valuable as the identity of anybody else.”
Hillary’s lifetime of fighting bigotry— even if it alienates some whites—fuels her polling strength with black, brown, and white Democrats.
In high school, she organized a childcare program for migrant mothers. As student body president in college, Hillary supported efforts to recruit more black students and professors and to create a black studies program. In law school, she traveled to Texas to register Latino voters. She then conducted undercover Alabama school segregation investigations for the Children’s Defense Fund before running Legal Services, combating Reagan’s attempt to defund this critical criminal justice legal aid program.
In 1993, she made Maggie Williams the first black First Lady Chief of Staff, while Sanders never hired a black staffer till he ran for president. Hillary helped create the Children’s Health Insurance Program, saving the lives of millions of poor kids, then in 2007 championed immigration reform while Sanders opposed it, instead voting in support of anti-immigrant border militas. She later created State Department initiatives to uplift women and girls in Africa and Asia, then in 2016 ran the most explicit anti-racist general election bid in history, hiring more black and black female staffers than any campaign ever.
That profoundly impactful legacy exemplifies why ethnic minorities are too savvy to drink the anti-Hillary Kool Aid, making her a strong bet to win the 2020 Democratic primary — and thus the presidency.
Journalists have resolved to hide that strength. The establishment cannot stand the thought of Hillary in the Oval Office, taking a wrecking ball to the status quo with her commitment to universal opportunity, liberal democracy, socioeconomic equality, and American inclusivity. They cannot bear that the voters who determine Democratic primary outcomes still recognize Hillary as a compassionate and accomplished progressive who would make a fantastic president.
Democrats, however, understand that Hillary’s multicultural coalition embodies real change and revolution — hence the crusade to silence her. The question for Democrats in 2020 is will they give into fear and manufactured Hillary-fatigue or will they refuse to be silenced.
There would be no greater act of refusal and resistance than nominating Hillary again in nomination in defiance of haters. Her nomination would demonstrate that liberals will not allow discrimination and fear to hijack our national narratives, nor concede our political process to unethical media double standards and hysterical slander.
Unsurprisingly, many who shaped the sexist anti-Hillary double-standards are now exposed for misconduct towards women. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly and Eric Bolling of Fox News, Glenn Thrush of the New York Times, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, Jordan Chariton of The Young Turks, Leon Wieseltier and Hamilton Fish of the New Republic, Mark Halperin of NBC, Sam Kriss of Vice, and Charlie Rose of CBS all contributed to the national Salem Witch Trial redux that butchered the lofty approval rating Hillary enjoyed after her Secretary of State tenure. And all are now accused of misogynistic harassment or assault.
The media is everything they accuse Hillary of being: craven, elitist, entitled, incapable of honest self-reflection, and too arrogant to admit the obvious connection between its Hillary-hate and the misogynists in their midst. Liberals can no longer trust the clickbait press to recognize extreme bigotry as an empirical evil. Should Hillary launch a 2020 bid, Democrats need to choose whether they will continue to accept the toxic lies of a sexist and racist status quo, or whether they get woke and stand in fearlessness with the people of color who wisely spurn the media’s anti-Hillary pathologies.
