Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton
Shocking?
Well, put it this way, election guru Nate Silver gave Hillary Clinton a better-than-99-percent-chance of winning Michigan. Some polls had her ahead by as much as 37 percentage points.
"The two big warning signs in Hillary Clinton’s shocking Michigan loss," says the headline on a Washington Ppost article by Phillip Bump, who says the loss is not a fatal blow to Clinton, but shows the race isn't over.
This analysis, now being nationally ridiculed, was by (previously?) respectedl blogger Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.
It also shows issues she needs to address::
One thing that happened is that Clinton under-performed with black voters in the state. In Mississippi, which Clinton won easily, nearly two-thirds of the vote was black and it went for Clinton 9-to-1. Preliminary exit polling in Michigan suggests that only about a quarter of the electorate in the state was black -- and that Clinton's margin was closer to 2-to-1. . . .
Part of the problem may be the economic issues central to Michiganders' concerns. We noted a few weeks ago that the state has shed a ton of manufacturing jobs over the last 25 years, thanks in part to free-trade agreements like NAFTA.
In exit polls, nearly six in 10 voters thought trade took away American jobs -- and nearly six in 10 of people who said that, backed Sanders. Those who thought trade created jobs were slightly more likely to back Clinton. This echoes the Republican side of the primary. More than half of voters thought that trade cost jobs; four in 10 of them backed Donald Trump. . . .
Race and money, though? These are warning signs -- warning signs that are still hard to read and maybe warning signs that come too late for Sanders's candidacy. But Clinton very much needs to hold onto strong black support and to avoid concerns over how progressive she'd be as president. (As we've noted, Democratic voters this year are consistently more liberal than in years past.) Black voters are her (ahem) trump card and economic issues her Achilles heel.
Making Michigan the exact opposite of what she wanted to see.
Michigan primary results [Via AP; 99% of vote counted]
Democrats
- Sanders: 49.9%
- Clinton: 48.2%
Republicans
- Trump: 36.5%
- Cruz: 24.9%
- Kasich: 24.3%
- Rubio: 9.3%
