And now the Monday morning quarterbacking has begun. Why did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton do better than many pundits thought, polls not withstanding? More importantly, how could it be that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders did so poorly in New York state, when he was drawing huge crowds at rallies, continued to be a magnet for younger voters, and his team even lowered the bar by saying if Clinton didn’t win by two digits it would be an embarrassment for her?
Clinton won in a double digit blow out. But why? Here are three possible reasons.
1. The Rick Lazio Effect. No Mister Nice Blog convincingly outlines this theory. When Clinton ran for New York Senate, Lazio was the Republican who opposed here and many pundits felt he helped Clinton by his aggressive treatment of her, even walking over to her in what many felt was an intimidating way during the airing of the debate. No More Mister Nice Blog notes Sander’s overall problem in New York was due to a perceptible shift:
My feeling is that it just came down to tone. As the campaign went on, Sanders increasingly seemed to despise Clinton. His anger seemed personal. I wonder how many voters felt as if they were watching a rerun of every attack on Hillary Clinton since the 1990s. You can say what you want about her policy preferences and the choices she’s made in her career, you can argue that she’s too conservative and too compromised, but when someone pounds on her, she seems human and vulnerable — and unless you loathe her, it’s hard not to feel something in response to that kind of pounding.
The race seems divisive, but polls show that the vast majority of Democrats would vote for either of the candidates in November — yet the Sanders message seemed to be that Clinton is history’s greatest monster. If you were an older voter who’d ever felt solidarity with Hillary Clinton at any time in the past quarter century, Sanders was asking you to repudiate yourself. If you’d ever been inspired by the thought of Hillary breaking through the glass ceiling, you were being told that you were a dupe and a Wall Street pawn, so snap out of it. Sanders has a vision of a better America, but anger was pushed into the foreground. That might work with Republicans. It didn’t work with New York Democrats.
2. Sanders demographic appeal was exceedingly weak. John Aravosis, owner-editor of the popular blog Americablog, notes that exit polls showed Sanders had a narrow appeal: mostly to white men. This further explains the kinds of states Sanders has generally won and lost in. He writes:
Now that Hillary has won the New York primary, CNN has published its exit polling for the New York primary today, and it’s devastating to Bernie Sanders’ attempt to shake off the perception that he’s the candidate of young white people.
In fact, CNN’s data shows that it is in fact unfair to call Sanders the candidate of white people. He’s the candidate of white men.
Hillary Clinton won every other demographic, including white women, black men, black women and latino women. (CNN didn’t have data for latino men.)
AND:
Overall, CNN showed whites voting for Sanders over Hillary (54% to 45%), while non-whites voted for Hillary over Sanders (63% to 37%) — that’s a 26 point lead.
Specifically, Sanders won whites over Hillary (54% to 45%), but got socked by the black vote, which Hillary won by a whopping 71% to 28% — that’s a 43 point lead. Latinos also went heavily for Hillary, by 59% to 41%.
The CNN exits also show that Sanders won 61% of those under 45, and Hillary won 61% of those 45 and over. But, and here’s the rub, the under 45 vote is only 41% of the electorate, whereas Hillary’s 45 and older vote is 59% of the electorate. So Hillary’s victory is much larger.Also, the exits show a gender gap for Sanders. While 54% of men supported Sanders, 57% of women supported Hillary, giving Hillary a 14 point lead in that category. But it gets worse — women are 58% of the electorate, so again it helps Hillary even more.
3. His position on Israel. I’m convinced this had a lot to do with some of his final numbers. Sanders was widely hailed on many fronts for the kind of Profiles in Courage that John F. Kennedy (or Kennedy’s ghost writer) wrote about: he criticized Israel during the debate, articulating what many younger voters feel who aren’t Greatest Generation or Baby Boomers who lived through all or part of Israel’s birth or struggle as a young nation. Fair enough. But in New York — final numbers will be interesting — it likely meant the bulk of Jewish voters would vote against him. One pundit noted that Sander’s went out of his way to visit Pope Francis but never publicly visited a rabbi. For instance, Sanders could have counterbalanced criticism by doing a splashy visit to the fascinating Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, an area with one of the world’s largest Orthodox Jewish populations. It would have been instant photo op showing him walking into in the stores against the backdrop of buildings with lettering in Hebrew, and many residents dressed Orthodox style.
Instead, he his nuanced position got lost in an age where nuance is ignored and cherry-picked and his sharper statements alarmed pro-Israel activists. And he had to suspend an aide for vilifying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which further undermined his image among that section of the Jewish electorate that votes for candidates who say they want to protect and defend Israel.
In the end Sanders poorly played the expectations game: at first saying he would prevail, then walking it back and have his team say if Clinton didn’t win by double digits it’d be an embarrassment to her. That sealed his fate in terms of a press narrative: Clinton won big and he lost big. A bit more caution on the expectations game would today have him still losing but not now thrust him into The Candidate In Trouble narrative that you see in each election campaign cycle.
He’ll have to win whoppingly in the remaining states, and that seems unlikely. And if his tone gets sharper any chance he has of winning over superdelegates — who are part of a party that he has not officially belonged to or worked to raise funds for — will evaporate before the doors of the convention are open.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.