"The status quo is the last place you want to be in 2016."
Bill Curry
When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza said he "isn't, really, concerned about winning." But winning is just what the U.S. senator from Vermont did Tuesday night in New Hampshire.
Despite his 22 point win over Hillary Clinton, doubts remain over whether his strong early showings in New Hampshire and Iowa will continue through the rest of the country.
Speaking on WNPR's Where We Livethe morning after the New Hampshire primary, Khalilah Brown-Dean, associate professor of political science at Quinnipiac University, asked about the importance of these early states. "Do we see this as a political moment or is this really the start of a movement?" said Brown-Dean.
Polling points to Clinton victories in the next two states, Nevada and South Carolina.
Listen to Brown-Dean discuss the Democratic presidential contest with Salon.com columnist Bill Curry, WNPR's Colin McEnroe, and host John Dankosky:
COLIN McENROE: Bernie likes to use the word, as he did [Tuesday] night: revolution, and there does seem to be a revolution taking place. It seems to me that the Bernie Sanders revolution is starkly incompatible with the Donald Trump revolution, when we get down to what the spirit of each thing is—except the spirit of, to the establishment: Up yours, someone else is going to be taking over here.
I find it more a sign that people haven’t really thought about this very much—that their reaction is essentially a visceral one. They like the unscripted guy, the guy who is telling it like it is. And they like the guy who wants to overturn the settled order of things.
HOST JOHN DANKOSKY: Bill Curry wrote about this same issue in Salon over the weekend in his regular column — and in many ways, you predicted this, Bill. Twenty-two percent, though?
BILL CURRY: No, I didn’t predict 22 percent. I assumed it would tighten some, but let me just say a little bit about why you wouldn’t predict 22 percent: This was the most votes anyone has ever received in the New Hampshire primary since the primary in 1952. This is the largest margin of victory in a Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire in history. In all competitive races, this is the first time a non-Christian has ever won a presidential primary in America. This was an historic victory when the Hillary spin machine tries to say he was from next door.
"For [Clinton], every state is a home state."
Bill Curry
First of all, to anyone who's listening, how many of the senators from Rhode Island can you name? There was a small advantage to Massachusetts senators because southern New Hampshire was in the Massachusetts market for a [Paul] Tsongas or a John Kerry. Even then, it didn't always work — Teddy Kennedy lost to Jimmy Carter. But the idea that because ten people in New Hampshire get their TV from Burlington, Vermont made this home field.
The reason Hillary started 30 points up in New Hampshire — possibly the biggest fall in the history of presidential primary politics, statistically — is that for her, every state is a home state. She’s the single individual in American politics that the most voters feel they know the best. And so where she starts out, all 50 states, she has home field advantage, in that sense.
What has happened here, and to try to explain, in a way, in terms of demographics: all the sort of the racial theories of the firewall, as if every American isn't making decisions here and taking in new information, and willing to weigh these things.
Hillary basically has been running for the last month as a kind of legacy admission.
People say Sanders drove her to the left. In some ways, he did. He drove her to try to co-op some more progressive themes: trade, climate change, etc. But mostly, he drove her back to the status quo. She wrapped herself in Obama and in Bill Clinton, from whom she’d been distancing herself all last year. In the last month, she made a bet that a kind of loyalty from Democrats to those two personalities would make it past her. And I would say that the status quo is the last place you want to be in 2016.
DANKOSKY: And as you’re talking about the spin coming out of this, about Bernie Sanders having this home field advantage, Khalilah, as we heard from our experts in New Hampshire who know, really, what’s taking place on the ground there -- from New Hampshire Public Radio -- they said the quickest way to get a piece of legislation defeated in the New Hampshire legislature is to say: they’re doing this over in Vermont. Literally, these are two politically incompatible states, and so that doesn’t really hold water. This is a big win for Bernie Sanders. Bill is saying it’s pointing at something much larger. Do you think it is?
"When you have 89 percent of young voters supporting someone like Bernie Sanders, you have to take notice of that."
Khalilah Brown-Dean
KHALILAH BROWN-DEAN: I think it is, and so I think the question is also: do we see this as a political moment or is this really the start of a movement, which is sort of what the Sanders campaign is saying. And I think to agree with Colin, you may not agree with his policies, but I don’t think anyone is questioning how genuine Bernie Sanders is, and the way that he’s connecting, particularly with young people.
Everyone said, young people go to rallies, they don’t go vote. Well they proved that wrong yesterday in massive numbers. When you have 89 percent of young voters supporting someone like Bernie Sanders, you have to take notice of that. And you heard it in Hillary Clinton’s concession speech last night. He has really pushed her to address these issues in a way that, I think, she thought going in, I don't have to. And so you hear these appeals to the people of Flint, you hear these references to mass incarceration that she wasn’t saying at the start of the campaign. So win or lose, Bernie Sanders has set the tone for the conversation on the left and the right, and that, to me, is powerful.
DANKOSKY: Something we talked about [Tuesday] in the program, and I put this to a few Bernie Sanders supporters who are women. Maria tweeted at me yesterday:
.@wherewelive Hillary Clinton does not represent me. I don't care what gender someone is, dammit. #feelthebern
— 🌻 Maria Unfiltered, Reserve 🌻 (@MariaUnfiltered) February 9, 2016
It actually turned out that Bernie Sanders won the female vote, too. I mean, this is a big part of this, Khalilah.
BROWN-DEAN: That’s powerful, and when you have surrogates like Madeleine Albright saying there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t vote for women, that doesn’t connect to people. That doesn’t encourage them to go out and vote at all. That old mindset of 'we're just going to appeal to identity, strictly based on identity without policy,' that does not work. That means she needs to regroup.
This transcript was edited for clarity. Karelyn Kuczenski is an intern at WNPR.
