Political analyst Lloyd Green suspects the Associated Press thought it was doing Hillary Clinton a favor by declaring the Democratic primary over, in the middle of the night on Monday before the last round of voting took place, but he told SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon of Breitbart News Daily that it looks like a rather unwelcome favor.
“She was publicly grumbling about it last night, on the one hand smiling, but on the other hand, there was concern within the campaign that this might depress turnout today,” Green observed on Tuesday morning. “I think they would have liked the story to come out at about nine o’clock tonight, at the same time as they had numbers coming in from New Jersey, but that’s not what happened.”
He agreed with Bannon that the early AP call looked like a “planned hit” designed to demoralize Bernie Sanders supporters ahead of the final primaries, invoking the Church Lady character from Saturday Night Live and her sarcastic tag line, “How conveeeeeeenient!”
Green said:
Had it come out at nine o’clock tonight, they would have said, “Well, this is the natural conclusion for a dateline today.” But it came out a day in advance. It gets her headlines on the one hand, but it also diminishes what looks like a win in New Jersey today, and possibly a win in California, as well.
He judged California to be a clear “must win” state for Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, if he is to retain “any credibility upon going to the super-delegates.”
“At the end of tonight, Hillary Clinton will have won a majority of the bound delegates,” Green explained. “That’s a fact. It’s not going away. She only has to win about 200-something out of them, and even if she gets a fifty-fifty split, she’ll be there.”
“She also has a majority of the super-delegates,” he continued, noting that she has won about 55 percent of the popular vote in the Democrat primary. He predicted Sanders would have to “win California with convincing numbers” to have any chance at persuading the super-delegates to back him instead.
Bannon noted that in the twilight of his insurgent campaign, Sanders finally began hitting Clinton on her corruption, to such a degree that “in the last 48 hours, you would think he wrote Clinton Cash.”
“Why did he wait so long to attack her in the one area where particularly young Democrats are furious at her, which is her corruption about money?” Bannon asked.
“I think he made a mistake, pure and simple,” Green replied, adding:
Now, why did he make that mistake? I think initially, he thought a simple populist message of saying, “Free tuition!” would be enough. I don’t think he appreciated how much disgust there was out there for her corruption, toward the emails, toward–what do you call them?–Clinton, Inc. I don’t think he even got it.
“And then when he turned around to move on it, it became too late. It was kind of surprising,” he said, noting that Sanders has tough, experienced political operatives in his campaign who should have pointed out Clinton’s vulnerability to him.
Green predicted that some of the Democrat voters, sickened by Clinton’s corruption, will refuse to vote for her in the general election, as they have been threatening, while others will hold their noses and pull the lever.
“What that means is a lower turnout on the Democratic side,” he said. “I think some young voters will end up saying, ‘We wanted to have someone whose hands were not dirty, who’s not up to his or her eyeballs in muck.’ You can’t say that about Hillary Clinton.”
“You go into this last weekend, and what did you have, as the usual type of Clinton story? Roger Clinton gets busted in California for DUI,” Green pointed out. “Same old, same old.”
Although Sanders would see his slim hope of swaying the super-delegates disappear completely with a loss in California, Green said he will at least be assured of the consolation prize of a speech at the Democratic convention.
“If he loses, he won’t go away. There’s an outlet for him, a platform. But how he loses is going to bear watching,” said Green.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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