The latest mailing asking for $2.70 donations to the Bernie Sanders campaign touts polls taken before his double-digit loss in New York state, even though it spent millions more than Hillary Clinton.
“The media likes to portray this as a fair fight on even footing,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver writes in an email bearing the subject header “Erased.”
It continues, “They seem to forget that when we started our campaign on April 30, we barely registered in the polls.”
Noting that the campaign “didn’t have a political organization” or “millionaires waiting in the wings,” Weaver adds, “And then millions of people came together in a political revolution.”
But so far, Clinton has an overwhelming lead in the Democratic popular vote, and many media outlets are projecting that the former secretary of state will reach the 2,382 figure needed to win, even before California votes on June 7. Clinton has a 2,694,273-vote lead in the popular vote — 10,404,655 to 7,710,382. She is ahead by 1,421 to 1,151 in delegates, and 502 to 38 in superdelegates, according to RealClearPolitics.
“The latest national poll average shows us just 1.4 percent behind Secretary Clinton,” the campaign notes. “We’ve erased a 55-point advantage she once held over our campaign. That is really quite something.”
Including an edited screenshot taken from RealClearPolitics, Weaver writes, “The graph you see above of our national polling average is something nobody ever thought possible.”
However, the mailing doesn’t note that the graph only reflects polling up to April 14, and ignores that Sanders lost New York state by 16 points on April 19. And it cuts off the polling from November 2015, when Clinton only had a 2O-point lead.
The Center for Public Integrity calculated that the Sanders campaign spent over $3 million more than the Clinton campaign on television and radio ads, in the losing effort: $6,801,040 to $3,780,401.
Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn wrote on Thursday that Weaver’s plan to flip “superdelegates” seemed “fanciful.”
Referring to RealClearPolitics polling averages that indicate Sanders might win the national election with higher numbers that Clinton, Corn argued that there is “one missing factor in these polls, and it might be huge.”
“Sanders has yet to face a true negative ad campaign aimed at destroying his public image,” Corn wrote. “Were he to be the Democratic nominee, he would be confronted with hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads designed to rip him apart.”
Corn predicted that “everyone knows what that pummeling would focus on: He’s a self-proclaimed socialist.” He added that polls showing Sanders doing better against leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “are meaningless,” since Clinton is “already damaged goods”, but has “withstood decades of attacks, some real and fact-based, some phony and underhanded.”
