Clinton and Sanders add pep and competition
At the last presidential debate on Sunday before the primaries begin in February, the race for the White House finally heated up in the Democratic camp as well. All this while, it has been an intense contest in the Republican side, which had no clear front-runners, and wherein real estate mogul Donald Trump sprung a surprise by emerging as a serious candidate for the nomination and possibly the White House. The Democratic camp, on the other hand, has been relatively quieter and without many surprises that is, until now. Though former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remains the front-runner, it is now becoming clear that she’ll be facing a tough fight from Mr Bernie Sanders, a junior Senator from a small State, Vermont. Though Mr Sanders has been in politics for a long time, he hasn't been a major figure at the national level, unlike Ms Clinton, who represented America on the world stage after serving as a high-profile Senator from New York (and this is not even to mention her two terms as First lady). Yet, Mr Sanders has been successful in putting together a strong campaign, raising larger amounts of funds comparable to the Clinton war chest, and in cornering a significant chunk of the left, progressive votes. So much so that he is now ahead of Ms Clinton in New Hampshire and fast catching up in Iowa. A survey by Monmouth University in New Hampshire last week put Mr Sanders ahead of Ms Clinton by 14 points, while a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics survey showed that Ms Clinton had a lead of just two points in Iowa. These two States, which go to polls on February 1 (Iowa) and February 9 (New Hampshire) are crucial for the Democrats as they will set the tone for the rest of the campaign.
Nationally, Ms Clinton still has a strong lead over Mr Sanders according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, she is 25 percentage points ahead. However, she cannot be complacent. Not only can she not let Mr Sanders whisk away the left-progressive votebank, she will also have to keep a grip on the sizeable Black and latino voters. The latter voted en masse for President Barack Obama in 2008, but Ms Clinton is still trying to win them over. Towards this end, she has now embraced President Obama's legacy wholeheartedly. This was especially evident during Sunday's debate in Charleston, South Carolina — home to a large Black population. Here, not only did Ms Clinton strongly defend Mr Obama's flagship healthcare legislation and criticise Mr Sanders’s alternative plan, she also highlighted gun violence (another Obama pet-issue) and tore into her opponent’s arguably weak record on the issue. With Emanuel AME Church, whose Black worshippers were slain by a White supremacist last year, located just a block away from the debate venue, Ms Clinton underlined that Mr Sanders had opposed tighter guns laws at least twice — in 1993 and again in 2005. It’s now up to the voters to buy the respective arguments.