Oh...so the Stranger decided to wait until Super Tuesday to have the staff publicly present a debate between the two candidates? Too bad you didn't decide to do this a few months ago...you'd have persevered what was left of your street cred.

Gosh, that's got to be why the Republicans are prodding Bernie to attack Hillary. Surely they couldn't have any other reason, right?

Any polling for Bernie in the general that doesn't include Bloomberg is a waste of pixels.

Wouldn't Theodore Roosevelt be the most experienced candidate ever, followed by Grover Cleveland for hi second term, not including incumbents running for reelection?

I can't see another woman who has the support and financial backing to run for, and win, POTUS in the near future. I hope Hillary takes us all the way to the WH. Of course, i'll vote for either one in the end. Until then, I remain hopeful.

Yeah, Bloomberg! What is wrong with, uh, fucking everybody, that they're not taking the Bloomberg factor seriously? Also zombie Ayn Rand and zombie Reagan? And maybe Pikachu?

One important difference is that the Republican smear machine has devoted enormous resources to smearing Hillary: Benghazi, private emails, etc. And they have been doing this for years (decades if you start counting in 1992), so we know that Hillary can endure. By contrast, Bernie Sander could be described as being in a "honeymoon" phase with the general public. Republican candidates aren't attacking him at all.

But if Bernie wins the nomination Conservatives would begin swift-boating him as soon as possible. How much that would damage his poll numbers is anybody's guess, but my guess is that they would fall significantly as the tried and true "Government taking over your lives" alone would sour people quickly.

@6: Pikachu's an electric type, so he's going to have a very weak ground game.

Opposition to Clinton couldn't possibly be related to her (disastrous) neocon/neoliberal policies, or her (horrible) record, or her open corruption (she's on Wall Street's payroll to the tune of million$, for the FSM's sake!!!).

I'd love to see a woman president, but Clinton has never met a bank or big business or war that she didn't like. She might be a skilled campaigner, but she's a terrible Democrat. She doesn't even think single payer health care is worth fighting for! Once she's in office, she'll tack right (as the author predicts) and we'll get four (or eight) more years of the same neoliberal nightmare we've been living in for the last 40 years.

I am in no way supporting or excusing the Clintons' neocon adventures and I'm voting for Bernie in the primary but "opened a factory in Haiti" and "supported a coup de tat in Honduras" are nowhere near knockout punches in a U.S. presidential race. I would venture to guess that a majority of Americans cannot point to Haiti or Honduras on a map. Haiti maybe not even on a labelled one.

All these strong supporters better get out there and vote in the primaries, or it will be Hillary Clinton as the nominee. That's the way Democracy works.

Also, cross-posting cause I can't say it enough: Fight all you want now guys but please, please, please remember that the make-up of SCOTUS for possibly the next 3 to 4 DECADES hangs in the balance.

@7 - Maybe so, but the Republicans also don't want Trump, maybe worse than they don't want Sanders, so if Trump ends up with the nomination, as seems likely, then maybe a whole pile of Republicans will hold their noses and help Sanders win, he's likely to be more amenable to compromise than the Dumpster.
WHO KNOWS? Anything is becoming possible in this most unusual of election years.

@14

Ventura vs. Bloomberg?

Bern may not have Hill's baggage, but he also didn't run the State dept. I feel the Bern as much as the next guy, but reality is we're going to run Hillary. I don't like her policies, either domestic or foreign, as much as Bernie's, but I trust her to fight the republicans like hell.

This nonsense again. We've got data on this kind of polling since 1948, and it pretty unequivocally tells us head to head polls are garbage--have predictive value whatsoever--200+ days out. (At around 200 days, they become a very poor but not entirely useless tool. A few months later they're not bad.)

Even if we think the history doesn't matter--that *this time* polling this far from the election actually tells us important things, for reasons no one has bothered to identify--we're very much not looking at like things. Trump and Clinton are 100% name recognition; they're already-baked cakes. No effort to sell them or tear them down is going to change all that much about the public perception of them. That's absolutely not true for Sanders; he was never been put through the Republican attack machine. If you don't think that'll bring his positives down and his negatives up, well, I wish I lived in your alternative reality.

There's only two reasons someone would present this faulty data as real evidence--they're clueless about how to read and use polls, or they're a dishonest hack. I'm willing to give Ansel the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, but the rest of the post contains a lot of tedious nonsense that makes me wonder. ("Supported the Honduran coup" really just means "didn't condemn it as vociferously and quickly as I would have liked" for example.) Stick to the police beat, Ansel.

Hillary Clinton is a white woman who has experienced her share and perhaps then some of sex discrimination in her lifetime. Clinton's parents were comfortably middle class, and she went to an expensive, elite Seven Sisters College and an Ivy League law school. Hillary and Bill's net worth is at least $125,000,000 and their daughter works for a hedge fund. Having a woman president just for the sake of a woman winning office is ludicrous if that woman is a corporate booster. That having been said, the aspect of a Hillary Clinton presidency I find the most troubling is her track record as a hawk who strongly believes in and in the past has vigorously advocated for a "muscular" military. I want the next president to hold back and not get the US sucked in any deeper in the Middle East and North Africa. Recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost $trillions at a time when our own country has become a rambling wreck of poverty, joblessness, heroin addiction and the most drastic inequality inequality seen since the the first Gilded Age. Millions of people have already died and millions of war refugees are streaming into Europe in the wake of our military adventures in the Middle East, not just on Bush's watch, but on Obama's watch too. If all this doesn't provide Hillary with clues, nothing will. Information about her advocacy for regime change and its disastrous outcomes, which are still playing out, are posted her:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/pol…

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/pol…

Did they ask anyone they polled if they knew a single one of Bernie Sanders' policy proposals? Just a guess but I would say that his policy proposals might have some impact on his electiblity in the general election. Proposals like introducing single payer health insurance paid for by a middle class income tax increase.

Agree with david jw @17. Nobody with a clue takes these polls as a meaningful measure of electoral potential.

Clamber back up on the turnip truck and ride a few miles more before you try to peddle this bill of goods.

Catalina, I listened to a recent Stranger podcast in which one of the guests, a longtime local Dem Party leader on the East Side of Lake WA, said that the WA GOP doesn't use the caucus system to select their candidate for the POTUS race. Instead, they have a straight up primary. The Dem Party, in contrast asserts that caucuses "increase participation and voter engagement," which is puzzling because the number of primary voters invariably exceeds caucus attendees. The establishment Dems are freaking out about Bernie because they don't want "her" nomination to be stolen again the way Barak Obama stole it in 2008. They may be Democrats with a big D, but not so much practitioners of democracy with a small d.

People vote for men for the sake of voting for a man all the time, why the fuck is it any different when it comes to voting for a goddamn woman?

Mud baby dear, Washington state is one of fifty states, and the primary is fairly late in the game. Voter turnout for democrats has generally been low across the nation this primary season. Outside of political circles, neither candidate seems to excite anyone all that much.

Who would you vote for in the General if it were Clinton versus Trump or Cruz? Trump actually seems somewhat isolationist now, but I'm sure he will have some hawkish advisors. Cruz is of the "make the sand glow" school of defense.

You're so cute, Ansel.

Funny how I see all this talk about how tired liberals and Democrats are over having to basically vote for right-leaning moderates all the time, and yet here we are, seeing Hillary Clinton win the primaries over Sanders.

Sanders who actually believes in liberalism and has fought for it for 30 years. Liberals got exactly what they hoped for and said "no thanks."

Hillary Clinton has been on the national scene since late 1991, whereas most of American hadn't heard of Bernie Sanders until well after he had declared his candidacy for President. Even since that point, Republicans have expended few resources on attacking Sanders. Prior to the election in November 1992, conservative groups had already attacked HRC on her Rose Law Firm billing records, Whitewater, and her commodities investments, among other supposed scandals. People should be very cautious in thinking that Sanders' number won't change in the event that Sanders became the presumptive nominee (which at this point he will not). And remember the truth behind any conservative attack campaign against Sanders won't matter. John Kerry's military career in Vietnam, for which he received numerous medals, was "swift boated" during the 2004 campaign by people who sought to reelect a candidate who had spent the war doing cocaine back in the U.S.

@27:

The entire mainstream political spectrum in this country has been pulled pretty far to the right since the Reagan era, to the point that the modern Democratic Party for all intents-and-purposes occupies a position closer to so-called "Rockefeller Republicans" of the 1960's and '70's: liberal on social issues, but rather conservative on fiscal and national defense issues. What we seem to be seeing this year is a definite pulling at the edges of the spectrum with Trump yanking the GOP about as far to the right as they can go without devolving into full-blown Italian-style Fascism, and with Sanders pulling in the opposite direction towards far more liberal Democratic-Socialism. The real question, and I think it's one that may actually take a few more election cycles to play out, is: can the Center hold under the strain? We're already seeing what may amount to open rebellion from the GOP mainstream on the Right, and the mutual antipathy from some in both the Sanders and Clinton camps certainly bodes for similar stressors on the Left/Center.

If Clinton wins in November and brings a Democratically-controlled Senate and more balanced House along on her coattails, we may see some slight easing of this. But given the very clear generational divergences starting to play out: a larger population of younger, more ethnically diverse liberals on one side, versus an increasingly aging and shrinking mostly White Right; it seems like the pendulum is beginning to swing back towards some form of left-centrist position that I think most of us here (with a few notable exceptions) would have little difficulty supporting. If, on the other hand, Trump ekes out a victory, I think we're going to see pretty much the same obstructionism between the Executive and Legislative branch that has essentially paralyzed political activity at the federal level for the past seven and a-half years, which in my mind at least, will only exacerbate tensions between the Left and Right.

@26: 😚