There is definitely a difference in enthusiasm between Hillary supporters and Bernie supporters. This is to be expected, Bernie is running promising to fight for what we want, while Hillary is running promising to deliver what we can get.
Sanders wins all the polls of
self selected groups chiming in on who won the debate. By a huge margin. All the online polls, all the focus groups (of course, I don't think we should forget that the FOX focus group is carefully put together to give the answer that Rupert Murdoch wants, and they obviously are most afraid of Hillary). But as noted
here, Hilary actually came out on top of the randomly selected polls. That is, if you ask a random democrat who won, 62% say Hillary; while if you put up a sign asking democrats to
come to you to tell you who they think won then three quarters
of the people who put in the effort say Bernie.
The people who think Hillary won just aren't all that agitated about it. They don't have to be, because she was already winning. And they aren't going to be, because Hillary is promising another 8 years of careful maneuvering and steady incremental progressive change that will be in large part poll driven as she picks battles she thinks she can win as we steadily win the culture war. Yawn.
But TL;DR: Sanders "won" because he put in a good performance and got his message out and it was a message people wanted to hear. Hillary "won" because she was winning before and she is still winning now. In the sense of "who is more likely to be president" the victory clearly goes to Clinton. She didn't piss away any of her lead and helped bury a bunch of stupid media speculation about whether her campaign was floundering. She accomplished all she needed to do and then some. Sanders did more on that stage than he probably thought was possible a year or two ago, but to actually become President he needed to have put Clinton on the back foot. And he didn't.
Sanders is looking better for VP though.
-Username17
Seems we've come full circle.
