by Ruth
Conniff
It was a big
upset for Bernie Sanders. Polls showed him down by twenty points against
Hillary Clinton in Michigan. His win, delivered by Michigan voters on Tuesday
night was a blow to conventional wisdom.
“I want to thank the people of
Michigan who repudiated the polls which had us down 20 to 25 points and
repudiated the pundits who said Bernie Sanders wasn’t going anywhere,” Sanders declared
in his victory speech.
At a contentious debate in Flint, on the
eve of the Michigan vote, Clinton appeared to score points against Sanders by
denouncing what she characterized as his vote against President Obama’s auto
industry bailout. Sanders’s response seemed a little muddled and vague,
attacking the bailout for Wall Street, but not specifically responding to the
auto industry charge. (In fact, Sanders supported the auto bailout as stand-alone
legislation, and later voted against the giant Troubled Asset Relief bank
bailout which contained auto bailout funds.)
In the end, Michigan voters
did not buy Clinton’s attack.
Instead, they rejected
Clinton, who supported NAFTA when Bill Clinton signed it, and who has only
recently become a critic of big trade deals that have helped destroy
manufacturing jobs in this country.
The win in Michigan means
Sanders will split the state’s delegates with Clinton. But it also means that
his message on trade policy and the failure of austerity and trickle-down
economics resonated with rust belt voters, including African American voters,
who handed him a victory in hard-hit Flint.
“Most I’ve ever seen CNN
discuss trade,” Lee Fang of the Intercept commented on Twitter after Sanders
and Donald Trump won in Michigan, thanks, in part, to their aggressive
criticism of NAFTA-like trade deals. “They do virtually no reporting on trade
policy, but will discuss in the context of a political race,” he added.
The dynamics of the 2016
presidential race are forcing a lot of issues that establishment candidates in
both parties would rather ignore. Insisting on attention to trade deals that
cost American jobs, high-dollar campaign fundraising, Wall Street regulation,
and other issues where the two major parties have long agreed to agree, voters
continue to make things uncomfortable this year.
For now, Sanders is back
in the game. Clinton is still far ahead in numbers of delegates, but those
include super delegates who could conceivably change their minds. More than
half the states have yet to vote—and in none of them does the winner take all
the delegates.
Michigan changes the momentum
of the race. There are big states yet to come where the Sanders campaign
expects to do well, amassing more delegates in California, New York, and a
couple more key Midwestern states, Illinois and Ohio.
And Michigan changes something
else: Sanders seemed to finally connect his message on jobs, trade, and a fair
economy with the specific concerns of African American working people—something
he badly needed to do, and had fumbled
in the South, and at the Democratic debate in Milwaukee—where unfair trade
policy has devastated the black middle class.
The Democratic primary will go
on into the summer. And the “political revolution” Sanders declared will not
easily fade away.
© 2015 The Progressive
Ruth Conniff is editor of The Progressive magazine. Follow her on
Twitter: @rconniff
