Don’t Panic

Sure, others would be better against Trump — but here are 7 reasons Bernie’s surge doesn’t doom our chances in the fall

Donald shouldn’t be so smug about pushing the Democrats to nominate Bernie

Since the polls closed in Nevada this past weekend, activists and donors have worried that (a) Bernie is now our de facto nominee, and (b) this makes a Trump re-elect inevitable.

Believe me, I get it. Most of the other Democrats still running would be a safer bet to get to 270 and get Trump out of office. It’s been infuriating to watch Trump and his allies manipulate the Democratic primary to draw their preferred opponent. Also, I have personally experienced the rage of Bernie’s more distasteful bros, so I would have to swallow hard to get behind Bernie.

Nonetheless, a cold-eyed review of the data indicates that (a) it is still possible for a safer candidate to win the primary, and (b) while he may not be our best bet, Bernie is a viable general-election candidate. Thus, regardless of the ultimate primary result, the case remains that we must invest in anti-Trump electoral efforts over the next 253 days: Trump is an existential threat, and he can be beaten.

Here are 7 reasons Bernie’s surge doesn’t doom our chances of ousting Trump:

(1) Available polling data bodes well

Bernie beats Trump in head-to-head polls. Most of the vote is already locked in by negative partisanship, and doesn’t depend on the Democratic candidate. National head-to-head matchups currently show that Bernie beats Trump.

These early polls may have more predictive value than in prior years. In the past, head-to-head matchups were not reliable until late summer. But such polls may be more reliable than in the past, as voters are paying much more attention now than at this point in prior cycles.

Bernie has good name recognition and net favorability. Name recognition is a reliable indicator of a candidate’s future strength, because if voters think they know a candidate, they tend to stick to their initial impression. That’s good for Bernie, because tens of millions of Americans know who he is and like him, including voters who are not paying much attention.

Bernie may actually a Democratic unity candidate. Bernie appeals to the fickle far left, while moderate and conservative Democrats tend to unite behind the nominee and vote. Perhaps surprisingly, polls show that Bernie is well-liked among all rank-and-file Democrats. Bernie also has the party’s biggest base of small-dollar donors, making him the second best candidate (after Mike) in terms of having hard dollars to compete with Trump. Together, all this suggests that Sanders might be able to lead a unified, energized, and well-funded Democratic Party in the fall.

(2) Betting markets give Bernie a solid chance in the general

To be sure, betting markets are imperfect and swing wildly. But they are a useful check on our assumptions, and have a strong empirical track record of integrating diverse data sources such as 538, private polling, and expert judgments.

These markets give Bernie a 40–45% shot at beating Trump. The markets say Mike, Joe, or Amy would have roughly even odds in the 2020 general election, while Bernie and Liz have slightly lower odds at 40–45%, and Pete and Tom are the least electable at 30–40%.

That’s still a good bet. Going from 50–50 to 45–55 or 40–60 is obviously not great. We have all spent a lot of time and effort working to reduce Trump’s re-election odds by a point or two, so a 10–20% drop is a gut punch. That said, most of us would agree that a 40–45% chance of stopping a second Trump Administration is still worth massive support.

(3) Bernie has a strong narrative and brand

Bernie tells a good story. David Brooks of The New York Times, a conservative and thus no Bernie fan, writes that Bernie has built perhaps the most compelling narrative framework in the field. Another #NeverTrump conservative, Jonathan Last of The Bulwark, describes this narrative as follows:

Bernie is never going to settle into making ‘Trump So Bad’ arguments. His relentless focus is on the future, not the past. He’s a change candidate who will carry the initiative on a daily basis by proposing his own version of ‘the system is rigged against you and if you vote for me, I’ll punish the people you hate.’

Brooks and Last agree with the socialists of Jacobin magazine that this meta-narrative may have even more widespread appeal than Trump’s. As Last continues,

The difference is that when Trump makes this argument, he’s talking about half the country. And when Bernie makes it he’s talking about corporate America and the very rich.

This narrative frame provides coherence and stickiness to Bernie’s long history of kitchen-table advocacy regarding drug prices, economic insecurity, and inequality. It also mitigates the concern that Bernie will be seen as too radical: voters’ ideologies appear to be scattering away from the traditional left-right divide toward a framework of populism vs. elitism.

The question, of course, is how Bernie’s brand will hold up in the face of the GOP attack machine. Perhaps the biggest fear about Bernie is that he has not been nationally vetted by GOP attack ads, and thus the GOP will clobber his favorability once he becomes the nominee. This happened in 1988 when Bush trailed Dukakis by 17 points in July, only to win 53.4% of the popular vote & 426 electoral votes in November. It happened again in 2004, when the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry eliminated his ~5 point polling lead over the younger Bush. We know the GOP is gleeful about the attack ads they are preparing for Bernie, and we have heard reports that ads are already under development that mine his extensive baggage, such as:

• Testimonials from workers in Pennsylvania critiquing his proposed fracking ban;
• Spanish-language testimonials in Florida from families who have fled Latin American socialist regimes that Bernie has publicly defended;
• Ads targeting voters of color focused on Bernie’s past positions (such as his efforts to challenge President Obama in a primary in 2012);
• Ads targeting women based upon on his weird comments from the 1970s and 1980s regarding sexuality;
• General-audience commercials describing how Bernie’s policy ideas might implicate taxes, private health plans, the economy, and the border.

2016, however, proved that attack ads and personal baggage do not doom a nominee. During the Republican primary of that cycle, many Democrats wanted to face Trump in the general election because they thought they could bury him with attack ads built upon his horrific personal history. We know now that didn’t work. By the time Trump became the nominee, his brand positioning was hard to alter: people took him “seriously but not literally,” shrugged off his personal baggage, and accepted the GOP’s false equivalence based on decades of attacks against Hillary. Jonathan Last argues that while Bernie is a risky nominee, he has a shot at surviving the coming barrage:

if voters didn’t care about Trump saying that George W. Bush committed treason or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or that when you’re a star you can do anything you want to women, then why do we think voters are going to care about Bernie loving the commies? … Bernie’s free-everything proposals are at least as impossible as the Mexico-funded wall. … Why do we assume that voters won’t be willing to take him seriously, and not literally, too?

Bernie’s brand is well positioned to inoculate him from the GOP’s attacks. As noted above, Bernie has high name recognition and strong net favorability, especially in the core areas where Trump attacks Democrats (corruption, elitism, and honesty). Trump and his allies may yet find that they boosted Bernie too much and for too long; they may be surprised at how hard it is to take down a brand once it is widely established among tens of millions of people. The parallel with 2016 is made even stronger by the fact that, just as Trump faced a weakened Hillary in 2016, Bernie in 2020 would be facing a historically unpopular and divisive incumbent.

(4) Bernie connects with working class white voters

Working class white voters are a critical demographic group in swing states such as WI, MI, PA, and IA. In 2016, this demographic skewed heavily for Trump, and made up roughly 2/3 of his voters in those states. They are also the focus of Trump’s 2020 turnout efforts, since hundreds of thousands of them did not vote in 2016. Democrats need to fight him for these voters.

Bernie has staked out positions that resonate with this part of the electorate. Bernie has a long history of attacking the Democratic Party for failing to engage working class white voters. He has publicly pushed back on criticisms of Trump voters for racism. Many white working class voters also share Bernie’s open hostility to the Democratic Party “establishment” and its alleged favoritism to internationalism and corporate interests. Helpfully for this purpose, Bernie has a tepid record on gun control, a key wedge issue the GOP uses to win these voters. Bernie’s appeal to these voters is confirmed by his performance in Vermont, where he outperforms Democratic presidential candidates by 10–15% due to his votes from this demographic group.

Additionally, Bernie’s economic lens may blunt Trump’s race-baiting. Trump’s rhetorical strategy, bolstered by talk radio and Fox News, is to inflame the politics of white grievance. Bernie responds, roughly, by saying “don’t listen to the racism: that’s just plutocratic elites using race to divide us and keep us all down.” This approach has been empirically tested: the group Demos used surveys and election results in 2017 and 2018 to test whether explicit class-based rebuttals reduce the efficacy of race-baiting among low-income white voters. Turns out, Bernie’s class-based approach works in reducing the salience of racist appeals.

(5) Bernie is popular with young voters

Young voters are the X factor for 2020. They represent about 31% of the eligible electorate, and they hate Republicans by ~35 points. Their presidential-year turnout rates tend to be 15 or more points lower than for other age groups — suggesting that if their turnout matched that of other age groups, Democrats would improve their margins by about 5 points. The prospects for turnout gains among young people seem better than ever, as youth activism on guns and climate issues led to youth turnout doubling in 2018 as compared with 2014.

To be sure, Bernie’s campaign overstates this opportunity when they claim he will personally trigger a mass mobilization:

• Youth turnout is low for many reasons unrelated to candidates.
• The 2018 midterms showed that moderate candidates also do well with younger voters — suggesting that a candidate like Mike (strong on climate and guns, able to fund expensive GOTV efforts) might do just as well or better than Bernie in turning out young voters.
• Also, the presidency is decided in the Electoral College, and presidential-year turnout is already quite high in battleground states such as WI, MI, MN, FL, and NC, reducing the room to grow in those battlegrounds.

Even so, it matters that young people love Bernie. They love his simple message, his debating style, and his decades-long consistency on his core issues. They really love his student loan policies. They don’t mind socialism.

For these reasons, our investments in youth turnout efforts — such as voter registration; college engagement; culture and celebration initiatives; and peer-to-peer digital relational — may have an extra tailwind if Bernie is the nominee, perhaps offsetting Bernie’s weaknesses with moderate and center-right voters.

(6) Bernie can win the electoral college without hurting down-ballot Democrats

The biggest reason a moderate nominee would be better than Bernie in a general election is the electoral college. Critical battleground states may be tough for Bernie due to his positions on fracking (PA), Latin American socialism (FL), and big government (IA, NC, and AZ). In addition to the electoral college challenge, down-ballot Democrats and Republicans expect Bernie to change the Democrats’ national brand — he is unpopular in the reddish districts critical to keeping the House, for instance — so Bernie as the nominee could harm the party’s prospects for flipping the Senate, keeping the House, or winning state-level races.

Make no mistake, all of these concerns are legitimate. Prominent #NeverTrump conservative Charlie Sykes points to parallels with 1972, when Democrats got blown out against an unpopular incumbent because they nominated an exciting but extremist nominee. Jonathan Chait compares Bernie to Jeremy Corbyn, who just helped the unpopular and Trumpy Boris Johnson win a massive landslide in Britain.

In practice, however, these fears may prove just as unfounded as similar predictions about Trump in 2016. Many of the pundits who today predict a Bernie train wreck were predicting in 2016 that Trump would not just lose the White House, but also cost the GOP the Senate, the House, and state-level races. So, that was wrong. Not only did Trump decisively win the electoral college, but the GOP actually gained two governorships, and kept both chambers of Congress by only losing 2 net Senate seats and 6 net House seats.

The strengths that Bernie brings nationally — his brand, his narrative frames, his appeal to non-college whites and young voters — also apply to his prospects in critical swing states. Over the past two weeks, I have interviewed key party leaders and independent Democratic operatives in all of Bernie’s toughest battleground states. While the consensus remains that Mike, Joe, Amy, and Liz would be safer, there’s a solid path for Bernie to win the electoral college.

This case starts here: Bernie is as good or better than any other Democrat at getting 258 electoral votes, 12 shy of what he needs to win the White House.

• Bernie starts with 232 electors by holding all of Clinton’s states. Trump’s strategy for flipping the closest Clinton states (NH, MN, & NV) relies upon race-baiting among those states’ substantial working-class white populations. As noted above, Bernie is uniquely well positioned to resist this tactic.
• Bernie is favored to flip MI, getting to 248. The Cook Partisan Voting Index (CPVI) rates MI as D+1. Trump won Michigan and its 16 electoral votes in 2016 by only 0.23%, in part due to low turnout among core Democratic constituencies. In 2018, Democrats won the race for Governor by 10 points; for Secretary of State by 9; for U.S. Senate seat by 6; the popular majority for the state’s House by 5; for Attorney General by 3; and the popular majority for the state’s Senate by 2. Michigan now leans blue in consensus electoral forecasts. In the latest head-to-heads released on 2/20/20 from Quinnipiac, Bernie beats Trump by 5, same as Mike and better than Joe (+4), Liz (+2), or Pete and Amy (+1); YouGov has Bernie up 7, better than Pete (+6), Joe (+4), or Liz and Amy (+3).
• Bernie is as well positioned as any Democrat to take WI, getting to 258. Strategists in both parties see Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes, as critical for Democratic chances to win back the White House. The head-to-head polls give Bernie the best shot of any Democrat at beating Trump in the state: polling released on 2/20/20 by YouGov shows Bernie beating Trump by 2 (same as Joe, Liz and Pete, and 1 point better than Amy); more R-leaning polling from Quinnipiac shows Bernie and Joe losing to Trump by 7, better than Pete and Mike (-8), Liz (-10), or Amy (-11). So, why might Bernie do especially well in Wisconsin? For one thing, 60% of the state population is white non-college, and Trump’s statewide net approval with that demographic group is +10, 3 points worse than his +13 net approval with that demographic group nationwide. For another, Wisconsin has solid youth voting potential with over 350,000 enrolled students in the state’s colleges and universities. Finally, Bernie has maintained his loyal following of supporters from the 2016 Wisconsin primary. With a well-funded operation and talented state party leadership,

Concerns about Bernie’s electability center on getting the next tranche of delegates. To win 270, Bernie has to flip 12 more electoral votes (or 22 if he fails to win Wisconsin), and all of the paths he faces to get those votes are tougher for him than for other potential nominees.

Nonetheless, he has a pool of 82 flippable electoral votes from which he can get to 270, and he has a realistic chance at all of them:

• 20 electoral votes in Pennsylvania (CPVI even): Bernie could lose Pennsylvania over his pledge to ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a controversial fossil-fuel industry that supports billions of dollars of economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state. That said, as in 2016 with some of Trump’s crazier proposals, it’s possible that voters will take him “seriously but not literally” on his pledge to ban fracking — in other words, they may not believe that Bernie will actually eliminate their jobs by executive order. Eric Levitz, a Sanders supporter, writes that Bernie could triangulate on the timeline for his fracking ban. Bernie has already signaled, in a 2019 interview with Colorado Public Radio, that the ban would not be implemented “overnight.” In practice, since most fracking takes place on private land, a ban could only be implemented by an act of Congress, where Bernie would not have anything close to the necessary votes. Additionally, Bernie’s pro-environmental stance, while not great for white working class voters, might help him attract support from environmentally-minded suburban swing voters. In the Quinnipiac head-to-head polls released 2/20/20, Bernie leads Trump in the state by 4, worse than Joe (+8), Amy (+7), and Mike (+6), but better than Pete (+4) or Liz (+3); in the YouGov polls from the same day, Bernie wins the state by 2, a point or two better than any other Democrat in the field.
• 29 electoral votes in Florida (CVPI R+2): Florida is tough for Democrats. The GOP controls the governor’s mansion, both chambers of the state legislature, both U.S. Senate seats, and a majority of the delegation to the U.S. House. Bernie could make the state worse for Democrats over his public support for Latin American socialism, because the state has millions of voters whose families fled the Cuban, Venezuelan, Bolivian, and Nicaraguan regimes that Bernie has praised. That said, Bernie has a slight lead over Trump in head-to-head polling in the state, and his in-state supporters note that Bernie does not have to do much to overcome the GOP’s razor-thin popular-vote margins (Trump won in 2016 by ~1%; the Republican Governor won in 2018 by ~0.4%, and the Republican Senator from the state won in 2018 by ~0.1%). While Bernie starts the state in a hole with Cuban and similarly-minded voters, he does have a plausible play for the LatinX electorate by engaging younger and native-born citizens, while explaining that his prior defenses of Latin American socialist regimes did not extend to those nations’ authoritarian policies. Bernie may also benefit, as any other Democrat would, from Amendment 4, which restored the right to vote among formerly incarcerated citizens in the state, and which was recently bolstered by court ruling. If voting rights advocates continue to win their fights to implement the ruling in 2020, credible estimates suggests that Democrats stand to gain a net of 30–50 thousand marginal partisan votes — which would be enough for Democrats to win if they otherwise keep the state as close as it was in the 2018 statewide races.
• 15 electoral votes in North Carolina (CVPI R+3): Trump won this state by fewer than 200,000 votes, so it’s one of the Democrats’ top targets for 2020. The state is really tough for Bernie, however: it’s a conservative-leaning state where Republicans will thrash him for his plan to raise taxes to create a Medicare for All plan that will be available to undocumented immigrants. In recent history, North Carolina’s Democratic wins (for governor in 2016 and in the popular vote for state legislature in 2018) came only due to centrist candidates who distanced themselves from the party’s left flank. Also, Democrats can only win North Carolina with strong African American turnout, which the GOP will try to depress with attack ads regarding Bernie’s historical positions on race. For all of these reasons, North Carolina’s Democratic operatives prefer almost any candidate over Bernie. In private conversations, however, they argue that Bernie can win the state with the same strengths be brings in other locations: working class white voters, new young voters, and voters of color. Their case is somewhat bolstered by recent head-to-head polling in the state, which has Bernie beating Trump by 5 — a smaller margin than if Mike is the nominee, but not terrible as a starting position.
• 6 electoral votes in Iowa (CPVI R+3): Iowa is a reach for most Democrats. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by ~10% and ~150 thousand votes. In 2018, the GOP retained the governor’s mansion and also re-elected the openly white nationalist Congressman Steve King. Even so, there are indications that Bernie’s economic populism would give him a shot at flipping the heavily white and rural state. In 2012, Barack Obama won Iowa by 8 points by attacking Mitt Romney as an economic elitist. In 2018, Democrats flipped 2 of the state’s 4 congressional districts, and Democratic challenger Abby Finkenauer won the state’s northeastern congressional district with ads about gritty working class toughness. Trump’s net approval in Iowa is underwater by 6 points, in part due to unhappiness with his trade war and his 2017 tax bill. Bernie, for his part, retains an operation that helped him tie for first in the Democratic primaries in both 2016 and 2020.
• 11 electoral votes in Arizona (CPVI R+5): If turnout patterns are normal, Arizona should not be viable for Bernie. It is the most Republican-leaning swing state, with an electorate dominated by older and more conservative white voters, often from military families. Democrats trying to win in Arizona tend to look like super-moderate Senator Kyrsten Sinema. GOP commercials about Red Bernie would put him in an immediate hole, made deeper by attack ads about Bernie siding with Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis. The reason for hope, however, is that Arizona is the only swing state with low turnout, driven by exceptionally low turnout among LatinX voters throughout the state and especially in Maricopa County (Phoenix) and Pima County (Tuscon). These voters are not the same LatinX voters as in Florida: their heritage is overwhelmingly Mexican American, they do not have personal reasons to hate socialism, and they do have personal reasons to hate Trump due to his pardon of Joe Arpaio. These factors, plus excitement for Bernie among LatinX voters in neighboring Nevada, has local organizers in Arizona arguing that Bernie could bring to the polls as many as 200,000 net new LatinX voters, who might vote 75–25 against Trump. In a state Trump won by ~90 thousand votes in 2016, that might be enough to put Bernie over the top.
• 1 electoral vote in Maine’s second congressional district (CPVI R+2): It doesn’t get much attention, but two states (ME and NE) allocate their electoral votes in part by congressional district. ME-02 is a rural district that went for Obama in 2012 by 9 points, for Trump in 2016 by 10 points, and for a Democrat for Congress in the 2018 midterms by the thinnest of margins. The district is prime Bernie country: it is 72% rural, 95% white, and shares a border with Vermont where Bernie has been politically popular since the 1980s. If Bernie starts with 258, loses all the other swing states, and wins AZ on the strength of a turnout surge — all of which are plausible scenarios — ME-02 would put him into the White House with exactly 270 electoral votes.

But what about down-ballot? With down-ballot races, the reason for calm is that the Democratic Party is not Trump’s GOP. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are free to distance themselves from the top of the ticket, and in moderate districts they are already distancing themselves from Bernie. It remains to be seen whether this will work, but it is plausible that a Bernie nomination would be a gift to a candidate such as Mark Kelly, who is running for Senate in Arizona. Kelly, who is well-funded and has a strong personal brand, will position himself as a bulwark against either a Trump or a Sanders president. He thus stands to gain swing voters that Bernie cannot, while benefitting from a youth turnout surge that Bernie might deliver.

(7) The primary is not over — a stronger candidate may yet emerge

I didn’t start with this point, solely because the most urgent priority is for Trump’s opponents to unite around the eventual Democratic nominee. We can’t desert Bernie as the Labor establishment did to McGovern in 1972, and thus turn fears about electability into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But the reality is that Bernie currently has only 31 committed delegates. That’s 1,960 fewer than he needs to claim a majority of delegates on the first ballot. In other words, we haven’t really started the primary — the narratives are still nascent. Momentum can change fast: look at how Bernie’s odds of winning the primary changed from the day before Iowa to the day after. People may take a fresh look at Bernie now that he is the front-runner, and they may decide that Mike or Liz or Joe gives them a safer path to 270. The 538 model still gives >50% odds that Bernie fails to get an absolute majority, and ~30% odds that he fails to even get a plurality. The betting markets still say that candidates not named Bernie have a 40–50% chance of being the nominee: as of this writing, Mike is at about 1-in-5; Joe at about 1-in-8; and Pete is at about 1-in-15 (the markets don’t like Liz or Amy’s chances). South Carolina, in 4 days, is the first state to vote that is actually a good state for Joe. Mike isn’t even competing yet for delegates: his first ballot test is not until Super Tuesday, in 8 days.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

If you buy the above, then the following conclusions become clear:

(A) Bernie can win the general. Our strategies still make sense if Bernie is the nominee. We might adjust slightly as better data become available, but at a high level we still need to do the same things, in the same states, with the same strategies — and if we do those things, our odds of beating Trump remain credible.

(B) A moderate would be better, but Bernie is our most likely nominee. If you’re inclined to play in the primary, there is still time and value in supporting Mike or Joe because they improve our chances of winning by something like 10–20 points. But, since Bernie is our most likely nominee by far, it is imperative to support others in ways that don’t hurt Bernie’s viability in the general election (in other words, please do not run negative ads about Bernie in the battleground states).

Beating Trump is an existential imperative, and we can still do so even with Bernie as our nominee. So let’s use the next 253 days to keep fighting.

PS: If you’re worried about Bernie as President, read this by Paul Krugman and this by Matt Yglesias — in practice, Bernie will govern a moderate who will restore America after the disastrous corruption, nepotism, and authoritarianism of the Trump years.