Will Vermont Sen. Bernie Sander’s meeting with the Pope change the numbers? Will Sanders’ tougher line of Israel which actually mirrors an emerging (young versus) old split among American Jews change the numbers? Tuesday will tell, but the latest poll from New York shows former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton widening her lead:
Hillary Clinton slightly widened her lead against Bernie Sanders with just days left before the Democratic primary in New York, a poll Friday found.
Clinton edged the Vermont governor 57 percent to 40 percent, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist Poll found. That’s up slightly from the 14 percentage-point lead Clinton had in a Marist poll earlier this week.
“As the primary approaches, the back and forth between Clinton and Sanders hasn’t dramatically changed the New York contest for the Democrats in the last few days,” Lee Miringoff, the director of the Poughkeepsie-based polling institute, said in a statement.The former secretary of state and Sanders squared off in a heated debate Thursday night in Brooklyn in advance of Tuesday’s critical primary in New York.
The poll was conducted Sunday through Wednesday to 2,679 adults. It had a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.
This was day before the debate, when Sanders took a position on Israel unprecedented for a Democrat running in the state’s presidential primary — and two days after he flew to Rome and eventually met with the Pope. A win by Sanders in New York will change the narrative of the race definitively, a loss will keep it frozen where it is right now with Clinton having shown that she tends to do better in states that look like the Democratic party in terms of diversity and Sanders does best in states that don’t.
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.