Sanders Won the Focus Groups and Online Polls. So Why Do the Media Say Clinton Won the Debate?

By Adam Johnson, AlterNet

    Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton at Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas. (Erik Kabik Photography / MediaPunch / IPX)

This piece first appeared at AlterNet.

Who “won” a debate is inherently subjective. The idea of “winning” a debate necessarily entails a goal to be achieved. What this goal is, therefore, says as much about the person judging its achievement than the goal itself. Pundits are ostensibly supposed to judge whether or not a candidate said what “the voters” want to hear. But what ends up happening, invariably, is they end up judging whether or not the candidate said what they think voters wanted to hear. This, after all, is why pundits exist, to act a clergy class charged with interpreting people’s own inscrutable opinions for them. The chasm between what the pundits saw and what the public was quite big last night.

Bernie Sanders by all objective measures won the debate. Hands down. I don’t say this as a personal analysis of the debate – the very idea of “winning” a debate is silly to me. I say this because based on the only objective metrics we have, online polls and focus groups, he did win. And it’s not even close.

Sanders won the CNN focus group, the Fusion focus group, and the Fox News focus group – in the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters. He won the Slate online poll, the CNN/Time online poll, 9News Colorado, The Street online poll, Fox5 poll, the conservative Drudge online poll and the liberal Daily Kos online poll. There wasn’t, to this writer’s knowledge, a poll he didn’t win by at least an 18 point margin. But you wouldn’t know this from reading the establishment press. The New York Times, The New Yorker, CNN, Politico, Slate, New York Magazine, and Vox all of which unanimously say Hillary Clinton cleaned house. What gives?

Firstly, it’s important to point out that online polls, and to a lesser extent focus groups, are obviously not scientific. But it’s also important to point out that the echo chamber musings of establishment liberal pundits is far, far less scientific. It wasn’t that the online polls and focus groups had Sanders winning, it’s that they had him winning by a lot. And it wasn’t just that the pundit classes has Clinton winning, it’s that they had her winning by a lot. This gap speaks to a larger gap that we’ve seen since the beginning of Sanders campaign. The mainstream media writes off Bernie and is constantly shocked when his polls numbers go up. What explains this phenomenon? Freddie DeBoer, writing about the gap between what the pundits saw and what the public saw, had this to say:

This morning, I’ve been pointing out on Twitter that the unanimity of pro-Hillary Clinton journalism coming from the mouthpieces of establishment Democratic politics — Slate, Vox, New York Magazine, etc. — is entirely predictable and has no meaningful relationship to her actual performance at the debate last night. That’s because, one, the Democrats are a centrist party that is interested in maintaining the stranglehold of the DNC establishment on their presidential politics, and these publications toe that line. And second, because Clinton has long been assumed to be the heavy favorite to win the presidency, these publications are in a heated battle to produce the most sympathetic coverage, in order to gain access. That is a tried-and-true method of career advancement in political journalism. Ezra Klein was a well-regarded blogger and journalist. He became the most influential journalist in DC (and someone, I can tell you with great confidence, that young political journalists are terrified of crossing) through his rabid defense of Obamacare, and subsequent access to the President. That people would try and play the same role with Clinton is as natural and unsurprising as I can imagine.

So many establishment journalists were in a hurry to declare Clinton not just the winner of the debate, but the election. One fairly creepy exchange between Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker and Alec MacGillis summed it up nicely. Lizza tweeted, “Hillary Clinton won because all of her opponents are terrible.” MacGillis responded, “Exactly. It’s time for this to be admitted and to stop pretending there is a race.”

“Pretend” there’s a race? Isn’t that sort of the whole point of democracy? To have as much debate and vetting as possible before nominating a potential leader of the free world? Matt Yglesias at Vox also dismissed this entire primary process out of hand, titling a section in his review of the debate, “Clinton is not facing first-rate competition.”

It’s unclear what the rush is. The first primary is months away and they’re ready to call it based entirely on they and their pundit buddies’ ad hoc analysis of one debate. This tweet by Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe would perfectly sum up mainstream media’s cluelessness:

A “protest candidate”? If Cohen hasn’t noticed the electorate is full of piss and vinegar and rancor which is precisely why an otherwise obscure, self-described socialist has rose in the polls the way he has.

But the question still remains: why the rush to write off Sanders? Why the constant gap between how the public perceives Sanders and how the mainstream media does? Why, most of all, would anyone listen to the very same pundit class that was wrong in ’08 and continues to be wrong in 2015?

Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.