Call for 'Revolution' Still Reverberating as Sanders, Clinton Head Neck and Neck Into Indiana

Bernie Sanders supporters at a rally on April 12, 2016. (Photo: Patrick Damiano/flickr/cc)

Call for 'Revolution' Still Reverberating as Sanders, Clinton Head Neck and Neck Into Indiana

"This is the beginning of the revolt against the establishment, not the end," political analyst says

Days ahead of Indiana's May 3 primary, a new poll shows Democratic presidential rivals Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton neck and neck while observers foresee the Vermont senator's impact being felt long after the nomination is secured.

According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll, Clinton leads among likely Indiana primary goers 50 percent to Sanders' 46 percent. But that lead is within the poll's margin of error of 4.6 percentage points for Democrats.

The poll also shows Sanders with a greater edge over Clinton in a hypothetical general-election match-up against Donald Trump. If voters in Indiana were making that choice now, the Republican front-runner came away with a seven-point lead over Clinton, but just a single point lead over Sanders.

Also on Sunday, the Sanders campaign announced that it had brought in $25.8 million in April, with the average donation being just under $26. And while the amount is far less than the $44 million haul in March, or $43.5 million in February, the campaign still touted it as surpassing the average monthly total of $17 million.

"He is the candidate who is in the best position to bring a new generation of voters into the democratic process and restore the faith of working-class voters that we can have a government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent," Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver said in a statement.

Speaking to CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday morning, Sanders said his path to the nomination is "difficult but not impossible."

Clinton, for her part, toldCNN's State of the Union Sunday, "I'm very far ahead in both the popular vote and the delegate count, so I think the path leads to the nomination," adding, "I certainly look forward to working with Senator Sanders in the lead-up to the convention, in the lead-up to [writing] the platform."

Many in the media have already declared it over for Sanders since his loss to Clinton in New York, though Sanders has since stressed to his supporters, "We're going all the way to California," referring to that state's presidential primary on June 7.

Gary Legum writes at Salon Sunday:

Sanders and his campaign seem to have tacitly admitted they cannot catch up to Clinton, and are now in it to amass as many delegates as possible before the July convention in Philadelphia. The hope is that these delegates can force the Democrats to accept a more progressive party platform and some changes to its primary electoral process, among other things. Essentially, the next few weeks for the Sanders campaign are all about laying groundwork for the future of the progressive wing within the Democratic Party. But as far as the presidential nomination is concerned, it's all over but the shouting.

Still, argues Cenk Uygur, host of "The Young Turks," Sanders getting the nomination is improbable but not impossible. Uygur adds in his piece at CNBC, "the revolution is coming."

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"This is the beginning of the revolt against the establishment, not the end," he writes.

Canada's Globe and Mail echoed that message this weekend with the headline "The U.S. could feel the Bern for decades as Sanders plans to reform democracy."

"[Sanders'] impact on the Democratic Party - and the country's broader political alignment - is only just beginning. It may not be much consolation for his most fervent fans, but Mr. Sanders could turn out to be one of the most consequential losers ever in American politics," the Globe and Mail's Joanna Slater writes.

"For Mr. Sanders's supporters, it's clear that the road does not end at the Democratic convention in July or even with the presidential election in November," Slater continues.

Indeed, a poll released last week from Harvard's Institute of Politics showed that Sanders remains the most popular presidential candidate for so-called millennials.

Polling director John Della Volpe told the Washington Post on Monday. "He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left," adding, "Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation--the largest generation in the history of America--thinks about politics."

Noted intellectual Noam Chomsky similarly stated last week that Sanders "has mobilized a large number of young people, these young people who are saying, 'Look, we're not going to consent anymore.' And if that turns into a continuing, organized, mobilized--mobilized force, that could change the country--maybe not for this election, but in the longer term."

The impact is being felt among more seasoned voters as well.

Forty-four-year old Carla Bellamy, a professor at a public university in New York, told the Globe and Mail, "I don't think we can have an election any more where people don't ask hard questions about super PACs and money and who you're really working for."

"That's really important progress," she said.

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