Is Bernie Sanders reprising Hillary Clinton's role from 2008?

WASHINGTON, March 9 (UPI) -- After Tuesday's surprising result in Michigan's presidential primary, there are two narratives in the Democratic race.

The first is that the upset was an unmitigated disaster for Hillary Clinton. The New York Times called her campaign "shaken" despite her position as the front-runner in control of the race.

Then there is the math, which shows why she really is the dominant front-runner despite dropping a state where polls showed she was favored to win in a landslide, but instead lost in a squeaker to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The juiciest story was that Sanders pulled off the biggest upset of either party's races so far. He was forecast to lose by somewhere between 15 to 20 percentage points. Instead, he managed just over 50 percent of the vote, to Clinton's 48 percent, good for a win that grabbed national headlines.

For all the good press, the Michigan win only yielded a net gain of nine delegates for Sanders there.

That's why the far bigger news for people interested in who will become the party's nominee happened in deeply conservative Mississippi, where Clinton housed Sanders in that state's primary. Her 70-point blowout in Dixie made her the delegate winner of the night -- she won 29 of the 33 delegates at stake there -- despite the embarrassing loss in Michigan.

There are ramifications for both campaigns, but for Sanders the effect is immediate. Victories in the past for Sanders have led to huge spikes in online fundraising -- he raised $2.6 million in a single day after winning the New Hampshire primary -- restocking his campaign coffers and ensuring he will have resources to compete until the Democratic convention in July, as he's stated he intends to do.

In many ways, Sanders is playing the role first taken by his opponent in Clinton's historic 2008 primary campaign against then-Sen. Barack Obama. In that race, she proved impossible to knock out despite trailing in the pledged delegates throughout all caucuses and primaries.

There were many analysts who examined Obama's successful 2008 campaign who pointed to Clinton as one of the biggest reasons why he proved so strong in the general election -- and who now say she is poised to run a campaign similar to Obama's.

In 2008, her enduring challenge and ability to score victories when she needed them to keep her campaign alive forced Obama to grind out the nomination fight to the bitter end. To do this, his campaign built robust field operations in all 50 states, effectively forcing him to create a campaign infrastructure -- volunteers, small donors, local endorsements and all-important voter identification data -- not usually begun until well into the general election.

There was ample proof it helped. While defeating Sen. John McCain soundly in the general election, Obama pulled in victories in traditionally Republican-leaning states like Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina -- states that might have been overlooked by a campaign that hadn't already run hard there in a primary. Clinton is already showing signs of laying that groundwork now.

A candidate with a solid lead in pledged delegates -- and an overwhelming lead in superdelegates -- can sustain a loss like the one Clinton suffered in Michigan. Of course, making it a habit would be bad news and could signal a real problem for her among the Democratic-leaning independents and college-educated white liberals who have flocked to Sanders for now, but who Clinton will need to win back if she does go on to win the nomination.

But the math doesn't lie. As of right now, Clinton is the clear front-runner and, as she has been all along, the heavy favorite to win the Democratic nomination.

Of course, there are the obvious downsides for Clinton in failing to sew up the nomination as early as possible. Waging primary fights is expensive business and will tax her campaign resources. The longer Sanders remains a viable candidate, the longer she will have to speak to his core liberal issues and the more difficult it will be to pivot to the more moderate rhetoric candidates tend to adopt in a general election.

Perhaps the biggest risk for Clinton is the longer she opposes Sanders, the longer she remains on the wrong side of the dominant campaign theme in 2016. Every time she stands on a stage opposite Sanders, Clinton embodies the quintessential establishment candidate in an election year when voters across the political spectrum frustrated with that establishment are flocking to outsider candidates.

So, to use a boxing metaphor, what benefit is there for her to continue to hold up Sanders in the fight?

For starters, a viable Sanders campaign also keeps Clinton's name in the news. It prevents the press, which would immediately flock to the GOP's campaign rumpus, from all but ignoring Clinton for months until the Democratic convention. It also allows her to put her message before more voters than she would if her nomination was already a foregone conclusion.

Not to mention, any presidential candidate benefits from a dress rehearsal in the general election battleground states of Ohio and Florida, which hold primaries on Tuesday.

And as long as Sanders has the money to keep Clinton's campaign honest, it will force her to continue running hard and doing the kind of work Obama did in 2008, when he took an early lead in pledged delegates and rode it all the way to the Democratic nomination -- and then the White House.