You know you’ve witnessed an epic upset when the victor is as glassy-eyed and gobsmacked as the vanquished.

A groggy and disheveled Bernie Sanders approached the podium in Miami on Tuesday night, three slightly askew campaign signs haphazardly tacked to the wall behind him, talking to a room that had been abandoned by his supporters hours earlier. He had the happily dazed expression of a death-row inmate who had just been told he wasn’t going to be executed, and — who knows? — he might even have a shot at getting the warden’s job.


Michigan was meshuggana. Anyone who polled the Democratic race there should chuck it in and pursue a new career in interpretive dance — on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton never had a 17-point lead (the average of several closing-day surveys), and, moreover, the exit polls showed the race wasn’t swayed by a wave of last-minute defectors. And that means every other Clinton lead in the region could be a chimera — or not. Nobody knows.

Clinton still commands a big overall lead in delegates, but her failure to finish off a 74-year-old socialist from Vermont who a year ago had the national name recognition of, well, a 74-year-old socialist from Vermont, augurs ill for a string of upcoming contests in the Rust Belt.

It’s going to take a while for both campaigns to figure out exactly what the hell happened (contrary to the CNN talking heads who confidently blamed Clinton’s loss on her attacking Sanders’ gimmicky position on the auto bailout). But the Michigan result’s impact is immediate and obvious: Sanders is not only alive, but dangerous, and Clinton needs to retool her campaign (yet again) to compensate for the front-runner’s weaknesses and failure to seal the deal.

Here are five takeaways.

1. Clinton leaned too hard on a black voter strategy. Panicky Clinton surrogates spent much of Tuesday afternoon — when they were starting to realize that Sanders was seriously outperforming them in the state’s predominantly white areas — barraging reporters with tactical attacks, including Sanders’ use of 1960s lingo to describe a black neighborhood as a “ghetto.” It was a telling move: Clinton’s Nevada and South Carolina redemption came by the good graces and loyalty of black voters — so why not double-down on that strategy in Michigan?

For starters, Sanders isn’t the second coming of Orval Faubus, and he’s a more limber politician than she is. After oddly dodging his personal experiences with racial issues in the South (he’s a forever, pro-affirmative action liberal who was arrested in protests as a University of Chicago student and marched with Dr. King on Washington), he embraced his own history and, most importantly, didn’t concede votes in black neighborhoods as he did in the South.

Finally, his appeal to young voters busted through the color line — Clinton won blacks 60 percent-40 percent (not 80-20, as she did in her Tuesday win in Mississippi) — and Sanders fought her to a draw among under-40 African-Americans, and turnout in Wayne County (home to Detroit) was maddeningly meh, perhaps because everybody figured she’d win in a walk. And she barely held on to win Genesee County, home to Flint, the emotional focal point of her Michigan effort — and, in many ways, her entire campaign.

This is very, very bad news for Clinton — who had been running on the promise of becoming a kind of third black president (after her husband and President Barack Obama). She continues to struggle mightily with white voters in general (the exit polls had Sanders winning whites overall by a Romney 2012 level of 57 percent), and she remains acne-unpopular with anyone under the age of 30: She received 19 percent of the demographic’s vote. Ultimately, a pivot to pale will help Clinton in a general election against Donald Trump, who body-surfed his wave of white rage to a big Michigan win on Tuesday. But she needs to figure out how to erode Sanders’ lead among non-minority voters, and fast.

2. She’s probably going to win anyway. Momentum is important — so is money — and Michigan refills Sanders’ tank with both. But as Clinton’s campaign is reminding us by the minute, she actually gained delegates on Tuesday despite the shock-horror headlines. Sanders netted a modest nine pledged delegates in Michigan for his 1.5-percentage-point win, but she destroyed him in Mississippi, where she out-delegated Sanders by a whopping 32 to 5.

Mississippi got a fraction of the media attention, but it was a much more statistically significant event. It means she added about 16 delegates to her commanding 745-to-540 lead over Sanders in pledged delegates — an advantage that balloons to a margin of around 650 when you count superdelegates, party establishment stalwarts who are showing no signs of jumping from Clinton to Sanders.

A couple more Michigans could rewrite the script and wound the front-runner badly — or not. Moral victories (leading to $5 million online fundraising days) are swell, but Sanders could win a majority of the biggest states for the rest of the primary season and still lose, badly, if his margins of victory aren’t big enough to erase her overall delegate lead.





David Plouffe, an unpaid Clinton adviser who quarterbacked Obama’s two presidential wins, put her odds of winning the primary at 98 percent before Super Tuesday. Why? “[I]t is not about winning certain states or momentum, or winning the press cycle. It's about delegate acquisition,” he said.

3. Democrats don’t want the primary to end. Paradoxically, Clinton’s loss in Michigan in 2016 mirrors her big New Hampshire win in 2008. Obama, speaking to me during an “Off Message” podcast earlier this year, chalked up his defeat to buyer’s remorse: Voters, who had just handed him a campaign-changing victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, were in a hold-on-a-second, skeptical mood.

The difference is that Obama was viewed back then as the vanguard of his party’s ascendant progressive wing, and Clinton — who has adopted most of the left’s core positions — is seen as positioning herself as a prog. That may not be fair (especially on health care reform, where she was a pioneer), but it reflects the restive mood of the party’s base; there’s a sense among younger voters ignorant of Clinton’s long-haul history that she’s a me-too on issues of economic inequality and social justice compared to Sanders, an early adopter who languished in the wilderness because he was so, so brave and pure.

This is tightrope politics. It is precisely that polite skepticism that hurts the Vermont senator with black voters — who see him as attacking their racially pioneering president — but it gives his campaign a propulsion and a purpose Clinton’s seems to lack. When I sat down with Tad Devine, Sanders’ top strategist, over the weekend, he embraced what the Clintons consider to be political apostasy — the idea that (white) progressives are disappointed with Obama (on trade, refusing to take on the big banks, etc.) and that they aren’t in the mood for a third Obama term. “Bernie has differences with the president and they are substantive,” he said. “And frankly, for Bernie to succeed, there has to be both a recognition of what has been accomplished in the Obama era, which is to take the country back from the brink of depression, but also a recognition of the reality of our economy today, that wages and income are falling behind.

“So it’s always going to be difficult, because there has to be at least implicit criticism. … I mean, the truth is — and I think this is a fair statement — that Hillary Clinton would like to continue on the road that President Obama has laid out.”

4. Free trade is Clinton’s albatross. Just as the cable networks were calling the shocker for Sanders, an email popped into my inbox from one architect of Obama’s 2008 triumph, who was traveling overseas. “Americans really hate free trade,” he wrote. “Don’t know how else to explain it. Same thing running through republican race.”

Clinton has been howling about China’s evil trade policies for years, and she belatedly bucked the White House on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact late last year — but she has the burden of schlepping the albatross of NAFTA with her throughout the Midwest. This is where voters’ lack of trust and her core belief in the value of open markets for American manufacturers collide. When Clinton questions free trade, nobody really believes her; Sanders’ thunderous anti-free trade talk taps a vein of deep grievance, his cash advantage allowed him to saturate markets with word of his opposition to TPP and NAFTA — and his debate-stage answer on the topic was pithier and more convincing than Clinton’s.

Brooklyn’s silver bullet counterargument was to roll out a half-true, politician’s attack on the 2009 auto bailout (Sanders voted against it because it contained provisions bailing out the automakers’ insolvent, Wall Street-controlled finance arms). In any event, voters didn’t buy that the wife of President NAFTA had more credibility on free trade than a guy who walks, talks and barks like a UAW organizer.

5. Sanders has a big edge in open primaries. Clinton and Democratic establishment types are always talking about how Bernie Sanders, who switched his affiliation from independent to Democrat last year, isn’t even one of them. Turns out that’s a huge advantage in a state, like Michigan, that allow independents and Republicans to crossover vote on election day. Sanders won roughly three-quarters of independent voters (who tend to be overwhelmingly white and working-class) on Tuesday.

Clinton has scored victories in open-primary states, but with the exception of her impressive Super Tuesday win in Massachusetts, they all came in the upper and Deep South. And now comes a string of Michigan-like states with large, monochromatic, independent voter bases — Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana. Clinton has an edge in Illinois — with its highly engaged African-American population and connections to Obama — but her big leads in the polls in other three could turn out to be a Michigan mirage.

