According to a new IBD/TIPP poll, Hillary Clinton’s national lead over Bernie Sanders has vanished, to the point where she now finds herself in a statistical tie with the only candidate in either party more geriatric and economically illiterate than she is. Clinton now only leads Sanders 43%-39%, well within the poll’s margin of error.

This is even worse than polls showing Sanders closing on her in a hypothetical three way race with Biden. The pool of voters Biden was thought to pull from was the same “establishment Democrat” pool that Hillary is playing for, so Hillary had a plausible excuse for lagging somewhat behind. When Biden announced that he wouldn’t run, Hillary established dominance over the race which was supposed to be permanent. It turns out, not so much.

The state of Iowa just became a must-win for Hillary Clinton. If Bernie Sanders wins Iowa, even by a couple percentage points, the bump he will get from that victory will almost without a doubt carry him to a second win in NH. And if Bernie wins IA and NH, then what’s left of her national lead will completely evaporate. I hope Hillary has been working on polishing a really overwrought Midwestern accent – one that is much more convincing than the borderline racist dialect she adopts when speaking to black audiences or the definitely condescending southern accent she affects when in South Carolina.

Two inexorable truths are conspiring right now to drag Hillary’s campaign into terminal territory. The first is that people don’t like her. Even people who think she should win because of her gender (and let’s be frank, there is no other reason to think Hillary should win) really can’t avoid the fact that she’s an intensely unlikeable person who is openly dishonest, not to mention a swindler of charities.

The second is that the email story, which Clinton thought was put to bed after the first Democrat debate, but which continues to rear its ugly head. The most recent damaging revelation, released over the weekend, showed her clearly instructing a subordinate to remove header information and send classified information over a nonsecure connection. Even Democrat voters have SOME threshold when it comes to national security.

Just the fact that Sanders is this close in spite of the fact that the DNC is openly covering for Hillary by hiding all their debates opposite major television events is an embarrassment for Hillary and clearly shows her weakness as a candidate.