Tough questions

Bernie's team confronts tough questions

Coming off big wins, the Sanders campaign struggled to explain how it can overcome Clinton's lead.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Coming off its best stretch of the campaign, having won six of seven contests over the past week, Bernie Sanders’ campaign found itself on defense on Monday, forced to explain why the senator remains far behind even when top aides are saying that his path to the Democratic nomination is still viable.

A 45-minute conference call with reporters hosted by senior Sanders aides sent multiple confusing messages, starting with chief strategist Tad Devine’ s insistence that Sanders would be beating Hillary Clinton, except that his campaign chose not to compete in some of the big states that she won.

“We have a very good chance of beating her in every state where we compete with her,” said Devine, blaming Clinton's wins in Texas, Alabama, Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and Arkansas on Sanders’ lack of investment there. “Ninety-seven percent of her delegate lead today comes from those eight states where we did not compete."

In fact, Sanders invested in television ads and spent three days in Florida shortly before it voted, including one three-stop swing just five days before the primary. He visited Texas for two huge rallies just three days before that primary. And, two weeks before the Georgia primary, he predicted a win if there was a high voter turnout. His staff was also playing up his chances in Virginia until shortly before Super Tuesday.

Meanwhile, campaign manager Jeff Weaver told reporters that Sanders has a number of superdelegates on his side that will help him claim the nomination. But Weaver wouldn’t name these party power brokers, or even reveal how many there were.

It was an afternoon that captured the political moment: with replenished campaign coffers, including $4 million in donations over the past two days alone, Sanders’ campaign has a fresh burst of optimism heading into the April 5 Wisconsin primary. But it still must contend with the difficult delegate math that lies ahead of him.

“Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” insisted Weaver to kick off the afternoon call. He, Devine and pollster Ben Tulchin then leapfrogged from Sanders’ winning streak — victories in Idaho, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii and Washington that have been central to his strategic plan ever since he lost Nevada — into an explanation of how he planned compete in big upcoming states like New York and California to dig out of his hole of roughly 250 pledged delegates.

Nonetheless, Sanders has to win 57 percent of the remaining pledged delegates — which will come primarily from primaries, not caucuses — to match the former secretary of state, explained Clinton’s chief strategist Joel Benenson in his own call responding to the Sanders campaign's. That’s even before superdelegates are taken into account, Benenson said — and Sanders has only twice broken the 57 percent mark in primary contests so far.

After the Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island primaries on April 26, Benenson added, he expects Sanders’ path forward to be impossible.

Sanders’ top aides have acknowledged for weeks that his path to the nomination has been narrow and winding, and while his wide-margin wins in the caucus states helped him cut into Clinton’s delegate lead, they didn’t fundamentally change the terrain. But, staffers insisted, the candidate does well in states where he can spend time and money, and the $4 million injection will help power his upcoming tour through Wisconsin, where he is already outspending Clinton on the airwaves.

While Clinton holds a slim lead in Wisconsin according to recent public polling, Sanders backers see an opportunity for a surprisingly large victory there, in a state where Devine said “Sanders’ message resonates very strongly,” and where independents can vote.

Sanders has been targeting Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who is deeply unpopular with Democrats, both in speeches and in a new fundraising email on Monday. While Clinton's team is looking to replicate its win in neighboring Ohio, relying on big turnout from minorities in Milwaukee, Sanders allies are hoping independents and middle-class white voters turn out for him, like in Michigan.

But while the eyes of the political world turned to Wisconsin, his campaign team also started ramping up in California and New York, the two states he most needs to win by large margins to upend Clinton: The campaign opened its first New York office, a space in Brooklyn, on Saturday at a party attended by Devine. Sanders' effort for the April 19 New York primary is being overseen by some of the top staffers from his Iowa and New Hampshire operations. Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign dispatched another top aide who worked in New Hampshire and some of the early March states to open the operation in California, which votes on June 6.

The moves were long-term investments in a campaign against a front-runner who’s already started pivoting to the general election. Clinton appeared in Wisconsin on Monday to bash Senate Republicans and Donald Trump, satisfied knowing that her wins in Florida, Georgia and Texas netted more delegates in each state than Sanders reaped in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii combined.

Yet to Weaver, the turn to New York and California was far from premature, or too little, too late.

The native Brooklynite Sanders, he insisted, is “in many ways, the voice of New York."