The Democratic primary race changed fundamentally — indeed, radically — after March 1st, and the national media’s failure to register this and work it into their polling, projections, and punditry is one of the most wide-ranging, public, and ultimately influential journalistic failures of the last decade. In short, it’s the reason supporters of Bernie Sanders have been tearing their hair out reading national media coverage that reports, and glibly, that the Democratic primary race is effectively over.
So let’s expose that radical sea-change with some hard-data analysis, and thereby, for the first time, cir scribe the effects of the media’s failure to catch it.
In the first month of the current, five-and-a-half month Democratic primary season, Hillary Clinton scored 60 percent of the available delegates — 59.8 percent, to be exact.
Since then, Clinton has edged Sanders in the delegate hunt by a mere 2.2 percent — 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent.
For the sake of brevity, let’s say that it’s been a 51 percent to 49 percent race since March 1st.
If the rather conservative projections for the upcoming Wisconsin and Wyoming votes turn out to be correct, that post-March 1st Clinton lead will narrow to 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent — a one percent differential — heading into the big primary in New York on April 19th. If Sanders over-performs in these two pre-New York votes to any degree — keeping in mind that in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington he out-performed projections by between 40 and 50 points — he will pull ahead in the post-March 1st delegate count.
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