No, he is not. As others here have noted, he is polling at numbers comparable to people who aren't running. His winning the nomination with the way his campaign is currently running is all but impossible: short of a giant scandal or massive unforeseen event, his winning would be absurdly unlikely. Like Ron Paul, he has a small, very vocal group of supporters who have a very strong Internet presence, and push him very aggressively on social media.
Whether this form of campaigning can actually translate into meaningful gains in polling is, I think, dubious. I'm particularly curious as to whether such aggressive social media campaigning could end up being harmful, causing audience fatigue or even backlash; the latter, I think, may have been a significant problem for Ron Paul, with his supporters coming off as so fanatical and aggressive that even people who would have agreed with Paul's stances were driven away. The same may happen with Sanders. On snapzu, for example, despite having all politics tribes removed from my subscriptions, I still am subjected to two of these Sanders posts, and on reddit, r/politics has been taken over the extent that a majority is either Sanders puffery or Clinton-bashing. The comment here by radixius of "I tell everyone... for some reason the don't buy it" makes me wonder whether this sort of fatigue and backlash is at play in their campaigning.
No, he is not. As others here have noted, he is polling at numbers comparable to people who aren't running. His winning the nomination with the way his campaign is currently running is all but impossible: short of a giant scandal or massive unforeseen event, his winning would be absurdly unlikely. Like Ron Paul, he has a small, very vocal group of supporters who have a very strong Internet presence, and push him very aggressively on social media.
Whether this form of campaigning can actually translate into meaningful gains in polling is, I think, dubious. I'm particularly curious as to whether such aggressive social media campaigning could end up being harmful, causing audience fatigue or even backlash; the latter, I think, may have been a significant problem for Ron Paul, with his supporters coming off as so fanatical and aggressive that even people who would have agreed with Paul's stances were driven away. The same may happen with Sanders. On snapzu, for example, despite having all politics tribes removed from my subscriptions, I still am subjected to two of these Sanders posts, and on reddit, r/politics has been taken over the extent that a majority is either Sanders puffery or Clinton-bashing. The comment here by radixius of "I tell everyone... for some reason the don't buy it" makes me wonder whether this sort of fatigue and backlash is at play in their campaigning.