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The Sanders Effect: Why more and more Democrats are feeling the ‘Bern’

According to the poll, Clinton leads former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush Bush 44 percent to 40 percent, her biggest advantage over any GOP candidate, and real estate magnate Donald Trump 43-40.

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A WMUR/Granite State Poll released last week showed Sanders in a statistical tie against Clinton.

Sanders said that his momentum is “not just in polls”, but also in his burgeoning crowd sizes. Their goal was to push for the most progressive nominee possible, whether it meant pressuring Clinton to move to the left or supporting an alternative like Massachusetts Sen. According to RealClearPolitics rolling average, Clinton is ahead of Sanders among Democratic voters by 36 points.

Hillary Clinton has vowed since day one that her campaign will take nothing for granted and stay focused on the Democratic primary. “This is out of all the candidates from Republican to Democratic”.

Vice President Joe Biden got 9 percent support in the poll.

Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who has been drawing huge crowds around the country, is running strongest in New Hampshire, where he started the race better known because of his long representation of Vermont.

Rapper and mogul Brandon McCartney, known to his 1.16 million Twitter followers as Lil B the Based God, has switched his allegiance from Clinton to Sanders.

Sanders is easily distinguished from “the more conventional establishment politician who is consistently hedging, and also begging for funding from major sources”, said Jack Citrin, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

But the bottom line, even among those voters who expressed preference for the Vermont senator, is they believe she will win.

Bernie Sanders, so far, is the only candidate with a comprehensive “racial justice” plan, which includes addressing physical violence against African Americans, whether perpetrated by the state or by extremists. It’s a place to keep up with what is actually going on with his campaign. “You can not seriously talk about the right to rise and support laws that deny the right to vote”. And the campaign is working to cast Bernie as the candidate who will help address the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it’s a good message for Hillary and for the Democratic Party. Just in the first two weeks of August, a historically sleepy month on the political calendar, Sanders has had more than 100,000 people attend his events, like the one Monday night in Los Angeles that drew 27,000 people.

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While he is unlikely to go negative against Clinton or other Democrats, his brash populism will infuse the nomination fight, adding energy as well as unpredictability to a race that some had thought would be a coronation.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand