Isn’t it great when the media asks tough questions? The team at “Today" had some fantastic ones ready for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton Friday morning. Why, they asked, is she doing so poorly among Millennial voters and those who care about honesty?
Matt Lauer had the task of providing the former secretary of state with statistics that display her campaign’s inability to attract the above demographics, and then some. If she has the potential to be the first female president, Lauer asked, why is Bernie Sanders even a competition among women voters?
“Bernie Sanders got 82 percent of the votes from people under the age of 30," Lauer explained. "Eighty-nine percent of people said they thought Bernie Sanders was basically honest; 58 percent said that about you. And this struck me – you are running to become perhaps an historic candidate, perhaps the first woman elected president, and right now if you look at Wisconsin, you basically split the women’s vote with Senator Sanders. When you lay in bed at night, how do you get your arms around that.”
Clinton excused these numbers as being too narrow.
“I just think about it from a much broader perspective,” she said, noting that she lost Wisconsin to President Obama by an even bigger margin in 2008.
“I am absolutely confident that if I’m so fortunate as to secure the Democratic nomination, we will unify the Democratic party - all parts of it.”
The thing is, it’s not just Wisconsin. Exit polls from previous contests show her losing to Sanders by huge margins among voters who consider honesty the most important quality a candidate can own. In the Nevada primary, 84 percent of voters who value honesty chose Sanders. In New Hampshire it was even worse. A Fox News exit poll following that primary showed that only 5 percent of Democrats who looked for trustworthiness chose Clinton.
I challenge Clinton to put that in a positive perspective.
In the same sit-down interview, Clinton also dismissed the FBI investigation into her email correspondence as secretary of state as “fantasy.”