
A shocker. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has Bernie up 54 to 39 over Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, according to the same poll, Hillary Clinton no longer has a double digit lead over Donald Trump like she did just a month ago — her lead over Trump is just 3 points.
On the other hand, while less than a quarter of likely Republican voters backed Trump a month ago, he’s since gained 14 points. Only 66% percent of Sanders supporters say they’d vote for Clinton in November, which her supporters say will rise if Sanders drops out. After all, that’s what happened on the Republican side. But 17% of Sanders supporters have already vowed to vote for Trump if Clinton is the nominee — a greater margin than Clinton had of Republican voters when Cruz and Kasich remained in the race.
Hillary Clinton wins with all the demographics that Trump loses with painfully. In a general election, she would win African American voters 88% to Trump’s 9%. Still, with other demographics — such as women and young people — Sanders would defeat Trump by a greater margin.
Just last week, Bernie Sanders told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell he was the stronger candidate to defeat Donald Trump. “The case we’ll make [with the superdelegates] is that I am the stronger candidate. It’s not just the polling. Our campaign is the campaign bringing in working class people,” Sanders said.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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