Bernie Sanders is no Barack Obama: Even if he wins Iowa & New Hampshire, he’s unlikely to dethrone Clinton
Proclamations of a Bernie Sanders surge returned this week, with the release of a new poll showing the democratic socialist senator from Vermont trailing Hillary Clinton by a mere 6 percentage points in New Hampshire, home of the nation’s first presidential primaries. In the survey, from WMUR and the University of New Hampshire, Sanders took 36 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 42 percent; though that result marked virtually no change from a June WMUR survey showing Clinton ahead 43 percent to 35 percent, it confirmed that the Democratic front-runner is perhaps most vulnerable to a primary defeat in the state that revived her presidential prospects following her 2008 loss to Barack Obama in Iowa.
Obama’s victory in the Hawkeye State propelled him from long-shot challenger to viable contender, delivering crucial momentum ahead of the primaries in New Hampshire, where he only narrowly fell short of dispatching Clinton, and in South Carolina, where he thumped the erstwhile front-runner by a 29-point margin. Naturally, a series of better-than-expected polls for Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire raises the question of whether we’re in for a repeat.
