Bernie Won All the Focus Groups & Online Polls, So Why Is the Media Saying Hillary Won the Debate?

What the public wants out of a candidate and what the beltway press wants appear to be two entirely different things.

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.

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