WASHINGTON POST
There is near consensus that Bernie Sanders lost last night’s debate because of his tone.
The Vermont senator preached to the choir and did not do enough to win over fresh converts, which he needs to change the trajectory of the Democratic nominating contest. He often seemed caustic, angry and bitter. His cantankerousness was off-putting.
Dripping sarcasm and ironic snark do not a governing coalition make…
“I doubt it was any sort of strategy,” Chris Cillizza writes, “but rather a reflection that he has been running against Clinton for a long time and is sick of listening to her talking points. … It might not be as smooth a path as she and her team imagined but she will win unless Sanders can start changing hearts and minds.”
ABC News political director Rick Klein thinks maybe Bernie has internalized what his supporters are saying about Clinton so much that he’s lost sight of the larger goal.
-- Each candidate oozed disdain for the other. The latest debate was the most rancorous yet. It was quintessentially New York: Lots of shouting. An unruly audience. And a race to the left.
The nastiness grows from Clinton’s resentment and frustration that she has not been able to put the race away and Sanders’s late-in-the-game belief that he really could win the nomination.
It’s questionable that many minds were changed,” Dan Balz writes. “The tone and tenor suggested the degree to which both sides are now dug in for a contest that, despite Clinton’s advantages in pledged delegates, will go all the way to the end of the primary season.
Clinton has held, and possibly expanded, her double-digit lead in New York after two weeks of pretty intensive campaigning. An NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist College poll shows her with a 17-point lead over Sanders in the Empire State ahead of Tuesday’s primary. Their poll last week put her up 14 points.
-- But Sanders’s sharpened attacks are taking a meaningful toll on her public image nationally. A Gallup poll published yesterday showed that only 66 percent of Democrats view Clinton favorably. Three in 10 Democrats say they dislike Hillary. When Clinton got into the race a year ago, her net favorability was 63 percent. Now it’s 36 percent.
Sanders has really moved the Democratic discourse leftward, which could make Hillary’s life harder if she’s the nominee and faces a credible GOP rival. Clinton got booed when she said she wants a $12 national minimum wage last night. Why? Because it is not the $15-an-hour that Sanders supports. Going from $7.25 to $12 would be a 67 percent increase, Dave Fahrenthold notes. But that’s not good enough for the ideologically pure, holier-than-thou liberals who packed the Duggal Greenhouse in Brooklyn. “I want to get something done,” Clinton protested.
This is why last night might have been the final debate.Despite her string of recent losses, Clinton continues to maintain a large lead in both pledged delegates and votes, which will only grow in the coming weeks, and her team has declined to commit to any future meetings with Sanders. The ugliness of the two-hour showdown on CNN – and the harshness of the attacks – will disincline Clinton advisers to agree to any more before the convention in Philadelphia.