NEW YORK — Bernie Sanders had just arrived at the rally, and missed the incendiary remark entirely. Many on the senator’s campaign had never even heard of Dr. Paul Song, the speaker who had just commandeered news coverage of a massive Washington Square rally in New York by referring to “corporate Democratic whores.”

Nevertheless, by the next morning, the campaign was forced into full scramble mode. Cable coverage of the 27,000-person rally was eclipsed by reporting on the furor surrounding the comment, requiring a Sanders response. After first resisting an apology, the campaign settled on disavowing the remark with a tweet.


Another day, another lost news cycle.

In New York, Sanders finally hit the wall, his winning streak halted by a daily pummeling that forced him on the defensive and stopped his momentum cold. The tabloids dealt him punishing hit after punishing hit. The Democratic establishment, most of it in Hillary Clinton’s camp, piled on harder than the Sanders campaign expected. Caught up in one distraction after another — a quarrel over debate details, a back and forth with Clinton over her qualifications, a trip to the Vatican in the run-up to the election — Sanders never gained his footing or even came close to pulling off the upset victory he once predicted with frequency.

Just two weeks before, on the night of his victory in Wisconsin, everything seemed to be going Sanders’ way. He was flush with cash thanks to his energized small donors and he was riding a wave of momentum after posting six wins in the seven previous contests. His aides had just agreed to the finishing touches of a debate in New York — something Sanders himself wanted after the campaigns had initially agreed to hold it in Pennsylvania. His top staff viewed the increasingly sharp timbre and pitch of the race as confirmation that Clinton herself was frustrated with the direction of things.

But even then, trouble was brewing. As Wisconsin voters went to the polls, a transcript of a halting Sanders’ interview with the New York Daily News editorial board earlier that week was beginning to generate online chatter, raising questions about Sanders’ solutions on his wheelhouse topics like breaking up the biggest banks. The Clinton campaign quickly seized on the transcript, sending it to millions of its backers as part of a fundraising email making the case that Sanders hadn’t thought through how to accomplish his biggest goals.

The next day, fresh off his victory, Sanders received another hit: His advisers read in disbelief a Washington Post headline that they took to mean Clinton had questioned Sanders’ qualifications for the presidency during a "Morning Joe" interview. It was one step too far, they thought — and Sanders himself agreed.

“She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote, unquote, not qualified to be president,” said a fired-up Sanders that Wednesday night, headlining a rally in Philadelphia and delivering up his harshest take yet on the former secretary of state and senator as the political spotlight started shifting fully to New York.

“Well let me, let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton: I don’t believe that she is qualified if she is, if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds. I don’t think you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street through your super PAC. I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don’t think you are qualified if you’ve supported virtually every disastrous trade agreement, which has cost us millions of decent-paying jobs. I don’t think you are qualified if you supported the Panama free trade agreement, something I very strongly opposed and which, as all of you know, has allowed corporations and wealthy people all over the world to avoid paying their taxes to their countries."

Stunned Clinton staffers, according to several of them, saw it as a declaration of war. Clinton’s army of elected surrogates in New York went on the attack against Sanders, painting the suggestion as absurd and offensive, and the kind of thing one hears from a crass politician, not a political revolutionary — a message that Clinton allies said the campaign heard from Democrats as it was door-knocking across the state. Sanders was repeatedly asked to defend his claim before he eventually backed off.

Meanwhile, Sanders’ Daily News interview continued to reverberate. The senator’s campaign was surprised by the harsh reaction to it, which aides felt was out of proportion. Sanders’ wife, Jane, sought to downplay it by calling it an “inquisition” on CNN.

But Clinton’s team saw it as a chance to underscore its own candidate’s message — that Sanders couldn’t follow through on his promises — and it touted sections of the interview focused on Wall Street and gun control on television and in campaign missives.

“He lost a lot of credibility, and, in many respects, he was unmasked as somebody who many people thought he might be,” said Jay Jacobs, a Clinton fundraiser and Democratic National Committee member from Nassau County who helped oversee some campaign operations in the state, explaining why publicizing the transcript was an obvious move for Team Clinton. “Somebody who was tapping into the anger in the electorate on the left with broad-stroke ideas that sound good, much like Santa Claus delivering gifts at Christmas time, but without the details."

Sanders’ team stayed focused on holding on his signature megarallies all over the state, scheduling a series of them in the boroughs — where roughly half of the state’s Democratic primary vote was likely to come from — for the closing days of the race. The candidate stepped up his smaller events highlighting specific issues like public housing, too, but the campaign was working overtime to hype his massive crowds at events in the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn before the closing concert-slash-rally in Queens.

He visited churches and released a series of videos of celebrity endorsers — he ended up spending over $3 million more than her on television advertisements, complete with a closing message that invoked New York’s own Franklin Delano Roosevelt — only to be matched by what people close to his team said was an unexpected flood of campaign activity from high-profile Clinton backers in local government.

But with his position in the polls at a standstill — and in a state where the closed-primary rules disadvantaged Sanders — his top advisers conspicuously started talking less about winning New York and more about his longer-term ambitions to woo superdelegates before the July convention.

On April 1, Sanders’ message had been definitive: “We are going to win New York." By primary eve, Sanders was downplaying the effects of a loss.

“This is her home state, we forced her to defend it,” said Sanders’ chief strategist Tad Devine on the eve of the primary, pointedly not repeating his own previous predictions of victory. “She has spent millions of dollars on television advertising, [and campaigned all over], as has President Clinton. They’ve thrown some high hard ones at us, the surrogates in particular."

No decision symbolized the uneven and scattershot nature of his New York campaign as much as the one he made to schedule a two-day trip to the Vatican in the final days before the primary.

The decision to leave the campaign trail late Thursday and head to a Vatican City conference was his own — even some of his top aides were unaware it was in the works until he told them. Some local allies were caught entirely unaware. Few developments from Sanders’ trip reached a New York audience on Friday, and the big moment didn’t come until the wee hours of Saturday night East Coast time, when most voters were asleep. By the time they were awake, Pope Francis had weighed in, simply calling the meeting a “common courtesy."

Sanders worked hard to minimize the disruption. Thirty-eight hours after he took off for Rome, he was due back in New York for a Saturday night event. But as he was landing at John F. Kennedy Airport, news came down that his roundtable event that evening — scheduled to include Al Sharpton and Cornel West — would not feature Sharpton, depriving Sanders of a chance to appear with a prominent African-American leader, one he sorely needed to court.

It was just another unfortunate turn of events in a series of them. But it didn’t stop Sanders from looking out into his crowd of 28,000 in Brooklyn the next night and telling the New Yorkers: “With your help on Tuesday, we’re going to win right here in New York state.”

On Tuesday, he was proved wrong.

“It was a long shot coming into it,” said SienaCollege pollster Steve Greenberg. “If you’re trying to set expectations such that you can perform up to those expectations, or possibly exceed those expectations, I think it was not the wisest thing for the Sanders campaign to try and tell the public that they were going to win New York."

