On Wednesday night in the midst of the post-New Hampshire primary coverage, ABC’s World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News failed to note the role that Hillary Clinton’s near-unanimous disapproval among Granite State Democratic primary voters concerning her honesty and trustworthiness played in her massive loss to socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Instead, the pair (plus NBC Nightly News) largely pointed to Clinton’s losses among young voters and women and spun for her that voters in the future primary contests are more likely to break favorably for her than Sanders.
CBS congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes reported on the Clinton campaign and pinpointed the former secretary of state’s chief weakness as being “softening support among women and almost no support among millennials.”
As for a secondary problem for her, Cordes explained at the end of her two-minute-and-four-second piece that Clinton’s lavish fundraisers have turned off many liberal supporters that have instead flocked to Sanders: “Pressure from Sanders has made the optics of those ritzy, big-dollar fundraisers problematic for her, while he's on track, Scott, to raise $6 million online just in the 24 hours post-victory.”
Over on ABC, Clinton correspondent Cecilia Vega received a sit-down with Sanders and followed CBS’s Scott Pelley in confronting Sanders about beating Clinton going forward:
VEGA: He faces an uphill climb in those states, where a large portion of the Democratic vote is black and Latino. It explains his visit to Harlem today, trying to match Hillary Clinton's strong support in those communities. [TO SANDERS] Do you really think you can beat her on that? There are polls that show you behind by 40 percent when it comes to non-white voters.
SANDERS: I'm not denying that we have got a lot of work in front of us, but we have already closed the gap within the African-American and Latino communities.
After alluding to Clinton’s horrid results on women and young people, Vega turned soft on Sanders by touting his appearance on ABC’s The View that included “a little game of campaign word association.”
NBC Nightly News provided much the same narrative, but Clinton correspondent/MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell took the time to highlight the troubling Clinton numbers in another category:
Top Clinton supporters tell NBC News they are alarmed by voters' reasons for abandoning Clinton, losing to Sanders on honesty and trustworthiness by a whopping 86 points and the potential first female president losing women by 11 points, and young women by 59 points. Expect to hear more Clinton attack lines against Sanders' policy on health care and taxes.
Despite that, Mitchell touted how the “Clintons hope Nevada and South Carolina, more diverse and where she now leads, are a firewall” plus how she “will get as many delegates as Sanders from elected officials, and tomorrow, she will be endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus” even though she lost to Sanders by 22 points.
