Sanders Could Get Big Debate Bounce

The Atlantic says “don’t be sur­prised if it’s Bernie Sanders who be­ne­fits just as much as Clin­ton from his per­form­ance at the Demo­crat­ic de­bate—and pos­sible even more. For an in­sur­gent like the Ver­mont sen­at­or, these ini­tial con­tests are the first real chance to in­tro­duce him­self to the coun­try, and judging from the Demo­crat­ic de­bate re­cord of 15.3 mil­lion people who tuned in to CNN, there was a lot of in­terest in see­ing Sanders take on Clin­ton.”

“While pun­dits de­clared Clin­ton the win­ner, tele­vi­sion fo­cus groups and ini­tial on­line polls went de­cis­ively for Sanders. Those are ad­mit­tedly a wholly non-sci­entif­ic pair of met­rics, but the res­ults got the at­ten­tion of former ad­visers to Pres­id­ent Obama, who said they saw the same dy­nam­ic play out dur­ing the de­bates eight years ago.”