Bernie Sanders’ surprise but narrow win over Hillary Clinton in Michigan raised the intensity level between the Democratic presidential contenders before their eighth head-to-head debate on Wednesday night in Florida.
Clinton remains the leader by far in delegates needed for the party’s nomination. But Michigan gives Sanders a big industrial state victory.
Clinton and Sanders face a winner-take-all Florida primary on March 15. But the candidates will be speaking to a much wider audience of voters in the delegate-rich states of Missouri, Illinois, Ohio and North Carolina, which also host Democratic contests that day.
Florida, which doesn’t reliably vote for one party or another, has 99 Democratic delegates at stake Tuesday. It has chosen a Democrat, President Barack Obama, in the most recent two presidential elections, and a Republican, George W Bush, twice before that — including in the election drama of 2000, when the Supreme Court decided the race in Bush’s favour.
Sanders’ win in Michigan came largely as a result of his drive to cast trade deals as “disastrous” for working-class Americans. Expect more such talk ahead of the contests in other Midwest industrial states Ohio and Illinois on Tuesday.
Sanders has come under criticism for saying in the last debate that “when you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” He made it sound as if only non-whites live in poverty.
Sanders, who has tried to make progress with black voters, later said he only meant that many white people aren’t aware of the pressures and police oppression facing black Americans.
