On Tuesday night, 15.3 million people tuned in to CNN to watch the first Democratic Debate of the 2016 presidential race.

I, like many of my fellow millennials, thought Bernie Sanders was the clear winner. However, that’s not what the news seemed to portray when I woke up to read the headlines Wednesday morning.

Be it CNN, The New York Times, The New Yorker, or multitudes of other well-accredited publications, their verdict seemed clear: Hillary Clinton had sealed the deal with her debate performance.

I guess they weren’t watching the same debate as the rest of America was.

In CNN’s own poll, 81 percent of respondents said that Bernie Sanders was the winner. The results of this poll were also reflected by many others including Time Magazine, Drudge, Slate, NJ.com, The Street, and even the University of Minnesota’s own straw poll which all indicated a clear win by Sanders. Sure, these polls are informal, but those voting do mostly represent the general population of people watching the debate.

CNN has now removed the results of their poll and has put out multiple articles telling readers that Clinton was the clear winner. Interesting. Maybe that has to do with the fact that Time Warner has been one of Hillary’s top supporters? Or, less likely, their journalists and editors do firmly believe she was the winner?

Here’s why they’re wrong.

First, the email scandal question. Clinton dismissed the scandal as irrelevant to her campaign and made no attempt to treat it as a serious matter. This response was only justified by Bernie: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!” Sanders used this opportunity to gain middle ground between him and Clinton supporters, which has been an obvious challenge of his campaign so far. He also used his well-received answer to seamlessly shift into a conversation on the "real issues" like income inequality and Citizens United, issues that his campaign are most firmly grounded upon.

Second, social media. There is no denying that Bernie has an extremely spread out support platform, but much of it is coming from young people. This becomes clear when examining how much Bernie’s social media status rose during and after the debate. Bernie gained 35,163 new followers just during the debate and Clinton only saw an increase of 13,252. That’s a 5 percent increase for Sanders and a 0.3 percent increase for Clinton.

Sanders’ monetary campaign support also skyrocketed following the debate. Bernie raised $1.3 million in the first four hours after the debate began. True to his cause, too, the money came from numerous people—37,600 to be exact—which is in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s monetary support—mostly PACs.

Lastly, Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic Debate because he went into the night knowing he needed to prove himself, knowing he needed to shun people who immediately discredited him due to his classification as a Democratic Socialist, and, most of all, knowing that he needed to prove to people that he was an electable presidential candidate. The rhetoric of pundits has indicated that Hillary Clinton won because she didn’t mess up. Staying clear of mistakes does not correlate to a victory; rather, amplifying one’s message and pushing forward the quality of the arguments on the stage does, which is exactly what Bernie did.

Bernie Sanders showed America that he had never flip-flopped on the issues, had always fought for minorities and the middle class, and made smart but difficult decisions at crucial times. Bernie Sanders proved to be the genuine guy that his campaign is built on -- someone who is not a billionaire and someone who wants to end the injustice of the billionaire class on Wall Street.

All Sanders had to do was be who he’s always been, just in front of a larger audience than he has ever been before. He did just that, and as a result, he was received more favorably by Americans than any other candidate on that stage.