https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/sanders-gains-black-voters-are-big-deal-heading-race-s-n1140261

But now, that seems to be changing — and it may be the surest sign yet that the train is leaving the station for any of Sanders’ rivals to blunt his momentum heading into Nevada, South Carolina and the diverse Super Tuesday states.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal oversample of black voters finds that Sanders now essentially enjoys the same level of support as Biden among black Democratic primary voters, with each getting the backing of about a third, while no other Democratic candidate comes anywhere close to that.

In fact, the only other candidate demonstrating even a small sign of traction nationally among black primary voters appears to be former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and we’ll note that the poll was in the field before his pummeling over the stop-and-frisk policy on the debate stage Wednesday night.

What’s more, all registered black voters express about the same level of comfort about Sanders as they do about Biden.

A combined 65 percent are either enthusiastic (20 percent) or comfortable (45 percent) with Sanders, while a combined 30 percent express some discomfort. For Biden, it’s a combined 69 percent either enthusiastic (16 percent) or comfortable (53 percent), with 28 percent feeling more negative.

Much of Sanders’ strength here has to do with the same generational differences that we’ve seen among the electorate at large. The lion’s share of Sanders’ support among black primary voters comes from his standing with those under 50, while Biden gets by far the largest share of older African Americans.

By the way, the new numbers from the NBC/WSJ poll dovetail with some other data we saw yesterday: a new Winthrop University poll of South Carolina primary voters that found Sanders cutting Biden’s lead in the state to just five points.

https://theweek.com/articles/896455/how-much-medicareforall-save-americans-lot

No country has a limitless supply of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Decent, humane countries allocate their health resources according to need — very sick or injured people get first priority, while those with non-emergency conditions or recommended tests might have to wait awhile. In the United States today, rich people can get all the care they want, even if it’s pointless or elective, because they can use their money to cut to the front of the line, while poor and working-class people routinely have to wait for months or simply go without.

So while a Sanders bill would probably not cause an explosion of health care use, it might cause some wealthier people to wait longer than they usually do. Insofar as that becomes a problem, we should increase the supply of providers, especially doctors. The U.S. currently has only 2.3 doctors per 1,000 residents — about a quarter fewer than Norway, a third fewer than France, and less than half as many as Cuba. We could surely use a couple hundred thousand more physicians — and if their pay was more in line with international norms, it wouldn’t even cost much.

But that’s a question for the future. At bottom, the research is clear: Medicare-for-all would save the United States money, probably quite a lot, and save tens of thousands of lives. Once a baseline of universal coverage is established, we can start fixing up the rest of the health care system. With some time and effort, Americans could have their health care cake and eat it too.

Highest positives for Bernie in this poll

https://apnews.com/e9d83a65fda49a3a1dec01f2fcc03ccf

Seventy-four percent of Democratic voters say they have a favorable opinion of Sanders, while 67% say that of former Vice President Joe Biden, 64% for Warren, and 58% for former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. About half of Democrats express favorable opinions of billionaire Mike Bloomberg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, while nearly 4 in 10 say they have a positive opinion of billionaire Tom Steyer.

Many Democratic voters say they don’t know enough to have an opinion of many of the candidates, including Steyer (52%), Klobuchar (39%), Buttigieg (28%), Bloomberg (25%) and Warren (16%).

But about 2 in 10 Democrats express negative opinions of Biden, Bloomberg, Warren and Sanders.

https://apnews.com/5acc3c51c0313e235bb7e1de867f33ec

California is the largest prize in the calculations of any Democratic presidential candidate, and Bernie Sanders has been working the state for months, worrying his rivals.

Sanders has been organizing intensively among Latinos and young voters, producing campaign materials in seven languages, going, as one aide said, “where most candidates don’t go.” Mike Bloomberg has tried to counter Sanders with saturation advertising, including buying time at television stations in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon that also reach California. Pete Buttigieg held three public events in the past week to capitalize on his early state momentum. Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren remain competitive.

The attention reflects a growing concern among Sanders’ rivals that if he performs well enough in the state, with its 415 delegates at stake on Super Tuesday, March 3, that he could build a delegate lead that is difficult to catch.

Sanders’ campaign has long counted California as important, deploying more than 80 staff here last year and sending Sanders regularly. He’ll hold two rallies Friday in heavily Latino areas, on top of an event earlier this week in the San Francisco Bay Area, a Democratic stronghold rich with delegates.

He’s running television ads in every market. Campaign staffers were out just days after ballots dropped on Feb. 3, knocking on doors offering to collect them, a legal practice in California, and his events have booths set up to collect them. And he is trying to show that organizing can be more potent that TV ads.

Rafael Návar, Sanders’ state director, said the campaign believes he will win delegates in every congressional district.

“We’ve prioritized where most presidential campaigns don’t go,” he said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/483944-rivals-worry-sanders-building-insurmountable-super-tuesday-lead

The Sanders campaign sees the worries about his general election prospects as hysterical speculation, pointing to national polls that routinely show Sanders running as strong as any of the candidates in a head-to-head match-up with Trump.

Meanwhile, Sanders is motoring along and aiming to bolster his front-runner status with a victory in Nevada on Saturday.

A victory here could showcase Sanders’s diverse coalition, which increasingly includes a large share of Latino voters.

The Vermont senator is projecting confidence and will not spend caucus day in the state. Following a rally in California on Friday, Sanders will head to Texas for rallies in San Antonio and El Paso.

https://newrepublic.com/article/156639/bernie-sanders-no-donald-trump

That there is no valid parallel to be made between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is, in this sense, precisely the reason why that comparison has been made, in increasingly overt and desperate ways, in recent weeks. The comparison isn’t about the few things that Sanders and Trump have in common, which amount to tri-state accents abrasive enough to cut glass and the fact that both have been saying the same things over and over again for decades. Even on that last point, though, the difference between the two is both obvious and telling. Sanders has been assailing the cultural and political violence that follows economic inequality and unfettered capitalism for his entire adult life; Trump has been roughly as consistent pushing the line that various swimsuit models “were very interested” upon meeting Trump in the VIP area at the China Club during Ronald Reagan’s second term. Each holds well-attended rallies; Sanders’s are pitched at people otherwise outside politics, where Trump’s are merely styled that way. Both aspire to be elected president of the United States later this year. But the two are not the same, or similar.

This is mostly why, when Democratic consultants and campaign operatives hint at the similarities between Trump and Sanders or the rotation pundits on MSNBC do the same, or when Joe Biden describes the behavior of Sanders’s supporters (if not the candidate himself) as “Trump-like,” or when ostensibly conflicted Never Trumpers like The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin keep turning up parallels between the Democratic front-runner and the Republican president, it all feels kind of grasping and desperate and off. These are not exceptionally discerning minds, of course, but even if they remain stuck on describing the shape of what the candidates do instead of addressing what they propose, they surely can see the difference between the bloated marzipan golem who currently lords over a lawless archipelago of concentration camps for immigrants and the most reliably left-wing figure in Congress over the last three decades.

The question, then, is why they would bother to make this obviously facile and unconvincing comparison in the first place. That answer has two parts. One is that none of these people are really much good at their very important jobs. The other is that they are scared, because Sanders’s ongoing run toward the Democratic nomination suggests that a critical mass of voters has noticed as much, and is ignoring them. If there’s any real parallel to be drawn between Trump and Sanders, it’s how their respective rises have revealed the flubby redundancy of their respective parties’ establishments.