Bernie Sanders Must Win Wisconsin Tonight—Full Stop
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The media loves a horse race, and the primary season is perfect horse race material. Almost every week since late February, there has been a primary or a series of primaries that provide fuel for the narrative machine. The fact that each one has mattered far less than our national sensationalists would have you believe is irrelevant—all that counts is whether they can sell it as something meaningful. If tomorrow proves them wrong, that’s tomorrow’s problem, and it won’t even be a problem because tomorrow’s problem is yesterday’s news.
All of which is a complicated way to say that you have inevitably heard what I’m about to say before. When Bernie Sanders lost Iowa by a razor-thin margin, it was either a fatal blow to his campaign or a stunning sign of life from the darkest of socialist dark horses. When he routed Clinton in Michigan, the frontrunner was in serious trouble and her campaign was dangling by a thread. Until she struck back in Nevada and South Carolina, and won the Super Tuesday southern states, which buried Bernie for good. Except that he took some surprising victories in Oklahoma and Colorado and Minnesota. Except that she proved she wasn’t just a regional candidate, and would roll to the nomination, by winning Massachusetts. Then it was a massive reversal in Michigan, where he changed the whole tenor of the race, until she quieted him with five wins on Mar. 15, which ended the campaign for good until he won to win six of seven primaries out west.
You get the point—if you believe the corporate media, the candidates have lived and died with each caucus, each primary, and by now they have died a thousand deaths.
But there is a moment, when you get beyond the narrative, when things truly are, politically speaking, life-and-death. There is no doubting that Hillary Clinton has a nice lead in pledged delegates, and there is no doubting that Bernie Sanders gains on her, nationally and locally, with each day—and that he currently owns the momentum. (Although that word, “momentum,” is deceiving, since what it really means is that he’s enjoying a favorable run of states at the moment, while she enjoyed one earlier.)
But we are 32 states and several territories deep into this race, and time is running out. As any sports fan can tell you, dwindling time favors the team in the lead, and while momentum and confidence are nice, there’s a point at which a rising trajectory simply runs out of room to rise.