This post first appeared on Alter­Net.

There wasn’t, to this writer's knowledge, a poll [Bernie Sanders] didn’t win by at least an 18-point margin. But you wouldn’t know this from reading the establishment press.

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 as 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 as a cler­gy class charged with inter­pret­ing people’s own inscrutable opin­ions for them. The chasm between what the pun­dits saw and what the pub­lic saw was even big­ger than usu­al 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 rel­a­tive­ly objec­tive met­ric 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, 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 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 class has Clin­ton win­ning, it’s that they had her win­ning by a lot. This gap speaks to a larg­er gap we’ve seen since the begin­ning of the Sanders cam­paign. The main­stream media writes off Bernie and is con­stant­ly shocked when his polls num­bers go up. What explains this phe­nom­e­non? Fred­die DeBoer 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.

Many estab­lish­ment jour­nal­ists were in a hur­ry to declare Clin­ton not just the win­ner of the debate, but of the par­ty nom­i­na­tion. One fair­ly creepy exchange between Ryan Liz­za of the New York­er and Alec MacGillis summed it up nicely:

“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:

It’s unclear what the rush is. The first pri­ma­ry is months away, yet they’re ready to call it based entire­ly on an ad hoc analy­sis of one debate. This tweet by Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe per­fect­ly sums 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 risen 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?