Today the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist Poll shows Bernie Sanders topping the Democratic field with 31%. Bernie's closest competitor is Michael Bloomberg, 12 points south, with 19%. No surprise, The New York Times leads with Bloomberg's second-place finish (see Reid Epstein's "Michael Bloomberg Surges in Poll and Qualifies for Democratic Debate in Las Vegas").
The poll was conducted Thursday, February 13, through Sunday, February 16. If you were to ask me I'd say the holiday weekend saw last week's Bloomberg surge crest and recede. Liberal columnists like Charles Blow, Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie have teed off on Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk terror campaign as well as his embrace of the right-wing conspiracy theory that black people caused the 2008 financial crisis. On Sunday, The New York Times ran a lengthy expose on how the Bloomberg political octopus operates (see "Bloomberg’s Billions: How the Candidate Built an Empire of Influence" by Alexander Burns and Nicholas Kulish). Endorsing a racist, sexist billionaire might be palatable to a shameless clown like Thomas Friedman (see "Paging Michael Bloomberg"), but apparently it is something that doesn't pass the smell test -- yet -- for the smart set.
Good.
It is interesting that this morning's Nate Silver piece, "Does Sanders Have A Ceiling? Maybe. Can He Win Anyway? Yes.," appears the same time as the results of the Marist poll. Many corporate Democrats who dismiss Bernie do so with the statement that Bernie has a hard ceiling of 30%. Well, the Marist poll, though the sample size is not huge, offers proof that that might not be the case.
Silver has gone from being a Sanders skeptic to being bullish on Bernie. Though the FiveThirtyEight predictive model has reduced Sanders' chance of winning the nomination from 49% to 38%, to the point that Bernie is now basically in a dead heat with a brokered convention, Silver appears to be tacking in the direction of Bernie momentum.
It might be better to talk about hard ceilings for Bloomberg. Remember, he has to win 30% of the Super Tuesday delegates to be in a position to guarantee a brokered convention. It is hard to see how he gets there. Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Biden are likely to remain in the race through Super Tuesday. That clutters the ballot for Bloomberg. Plus, the more people hear about Bloomberg's record and his beliefs -- the guy is against the minimum wage! -- the harder it is going to be for him to break out of the low 20s. He needs more public intellectuals singing his praises and not just corrupt endorsements from pols.
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