Clinton-Sanders

We affirm our trend forecast, made one year ago, that Hillary Clinton will win the 2016 presidential race. We now forecast her Democratic challenger, Bernie Sanders, will be chosen as her vice presidential running mate.

In our Spring 2015 Trends Journal, two months prior to Donald Trump announcing his candidacy, we wrote:

“If the election were held today… we forecast Clinton as the winner. On issues of gay rights, women’s rights and abortion, Cruz, Paul, Rubio, Carson, Fiorina and Huckabee will find weak support among a sizable portion of women voters.”

In the 2008 presidential election, 70.4 million women cast ballots vs. 60.7 million men. In the 2012 race, Barack Obama won the two-party vote among female voters by 12 points, 56 percent to 44 percent.”

Indeed, in the absence of a major scandal, and as the current field of candidates stands, a Clinton victory was sealed last week when Donald Trump, already suffering “women problems” in the polls, sunk 73 percent into negative territory when he said if a woman had an abortion and they were illegal, she should be subject to “some form of punishment.”

Bernie Does Obama

With Clinton having solidly secured the women vote and holding an insurmountable delegate lead, Sanders has succeeded in attracting die-hard Democratic liberals, the financially desperate and deeply indebted millennial voters back into the party fold.

Plucking lines directly from candidate Obama’s “Change You Can Believe In” chant that rang across the nation in his 2008 campaign, Sanders simply replaced the “change” Obama never delivered on an equally boastful promise to deliver “A FUTURE TO BELIEVEIN.”

Indeed, considering Sanders’ stump-speech rhetoric that has generated strong populism popularity, he will, as Clinton’s running mate, both increase the Democratic voter turnout in November and counter Clinton’s 52 percent negative-personality rating and her pro-war policies.

Bernie does his job

Both Clinton and Sanders have strategically avoided maliciously attacking each other. And conspicuously absent in their debates and on the campaign trail are in-depth foreign-policy measures each would take if elected.

And, while Sanders monotonously rants he voted against the Iraq War, and while his supporters portray him as a man of peace, they avoid his war-hawk positions in supporting and funding a steady stream of US war policies and initiatives. Beginning with Bill Clinton’s Iraq bombing campaign and sanctions policies, his 1999 Yugoslav war and George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, to Obama’s drone-strike policy, regime change in Libya and Syria, and the $1 billion aid package for the US-backed government coup of Ukraine… Sanders voted for and/or supported these and numerous other pro-war initiatives.

Sanders also has been a strong proponent of the $1.4 trillion F-35 fighter jet cost-overrun fiasco for which he champions a squadron stationed at the Burlington Vermont Airport because “it will create jobs.”

But such facts, when presented to his liberal/millennial core base, are either dismissed or vehemently denied.

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