Why Trump Fears Bernie
And the real reason a Sanders nomination should scare the president.
Recently, as part of the whole impeachment mishegoss, a private conversation between Donald Trump and several donors has leaked onto the internet.
The audio recording involves Trump bumbling through various topics, from the Ukraine to the European Union to marijuana. But it’s his discussion of the 2016 election that warrants special attention.
Turning to this subject, he admits he would have had a much tougher time running against Hilary Clinton had she chosen Bernie Sanders as her vice-president. “He was the only one I didn’t want her to pick,” he confided to his fellows, citing Sanders’s free-trade skepticism as the main reason.
No doubt some of this is true. As Stephen L. Morgan notes in a study he conducted with Jiwon Lee, the 6 million voters who jumped ship from Obama to Trump tended to view free trade as a greater threat to jobs and wages in comparison to diehard Republicans and Democrats.
Furthermore, a Sanders vice-presidency would’ve undermined Trump’s divide-and-conquer tactics. The Donald was quick to frame Clinton’s nomination as part of a rigged primary contest, hoping to alienate Sanders supporters from the Democrats. To their credit, most of them didn’t turn. But there were still enough voters who pivoted from Sanders to Trump (for whatever reason) in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to cost the Democrats the election. With Sanders as her VP, Clinton might’ve mitigated some of the damage.
Now, as the 2020 election approaches, Trump is attempting the same gambit again. But it will only work if Sanders loses the Democratic Primary. And with the Vermont senator surging in the polls, this outcome appears a lot less likely.
As Ryan Grim of the Intercept reports, it seems that Donald Trump is only just now grappling with the possibility of a Sanders nomination. January marked the only month where Trump mentioned a Democratic nominee — Sanders — in stump speeches more frequently than frontrunner Joe Biden. His campaign has recently sent out emails about Sanders leading a “socialist invasion”. And as of late, the president has made him a more frequent target of his tweets. Timed so closely to one another, these developments suggest that Sanders now occupies a sizeable lot in Trump’s head.
The president is a man of fixations. He repeats slogans until they become mantras. Tough on trade. Building a Wall. Making America Great Again. And with his narrow focus, he might not yet understand the real threat of a Sanders nomination. It isn’t just an opponent who wants to protect American jobs and opposed controversial trades deals like NAFTA and the TPP. It’s an honest populist who speaks to key sections of the electorate who might otherwise vote Republican.
If anything, that should terrify Trump.
None of the Democratic candidates have strong favourability scores with the general electorate. On the whole, they do better than Trump, but not by a wide margin. And Sanders is no exception here, with a mere 5-point lead over the president.
However, among these candidates, Sanders comes across as uniquely likable. The latest survey from Quinnipiac University placed Sanders as the one voters considered the most honest. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS had him leading the pack in terms of empathy and issues that matter. And a recent FOX News poll bore similar results. Out of all the Democratic candidates, Sanders was the one who most respondents regarded as trustworthy. Trump, meanwhile, was considered much less so than any of them.
Moreover, Sanders’s personal appeal and strong messaging on healthcare, inequality and the environment has translated into a significant lead with voting blocs on which Trump relies.
In a paper released last year, Professor Justin Grimmer and Ph.D. candidate William Marble examined these blocs and how they contributed to Trump’s 2016 victory. They did so by taking voter turnout and composition into account as well as voter choice and made a revealing discovery. In comparison to Mitt Romney — the Republican challenger in 2012 — Trump increased his net vote total the most among politically independent and non-college-educated whites.
And Bernie Sanders just so happens to poll better with independents and non-college-educated whites than any of his rivals.
This is certainly nothing to scoff at. Trump, who received fewer votes from Republicans than Romney, was carried into the White House by these swing voters. As such, a Democratic candidate who can fracture these voting blocs would be essential to Trump’s defeat in 2020.
This is what makes Sanders such a formidable opponent. In almost every poll he’s slated to beat the president. And his status as a political outsider gives him sway with disenchanted voters as well as committed Democrats.
When Trump ran against Clinton in 2016 he made a show of rallying against the establishment. He bragged that he would shake things up and root out corruption. Now, he is the establishment. Should Sanders run against him, it will expose Trump for what he really is: a clueless aristocrat, a member of the ruling class, one of the hated “elites”.
The president has already opened up the same playbook he used four years ago. He smears the political frontrunner as corrupt in the hope that something sticks. He gleefully took advantage of the email scandal that saw Clinton’s favorability ratings plummet. And last July, he urged the Ukranian president to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, swearing he did so to unearth “corruption”. Though Trump’s insinuation that Biden leveraged his political power for Hunter’s benefit is quite flimsy, the idea that Biden might be corrupt has now spread through the media like wildfire. Some of the more credible stories have even focused on his habit of taking big corporate donations and later backing policies that benefit those same donors.
Nobody would accuse Trump of being a genius, but the man clearly knows what sells in politics. He understands what people hate about politicians. Hypocrisy. Corruption. Insincerity. He’ll tar any opponent who seems the slightest bit guilty of these sins. And the spin usually works.
But it’s less likely to find purchase with an anti-establishment politician like Sanders. The Democratic hopeful has made it a point to forgo corporate donations and long maintained an image of integrity. He supported gay rights years before it was fashionable to do so and made the politically risky choice to oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even when it kept him away from the levers of power, Sanders stuck by his beliefs.
The most effective insult that Trump can muster against someone like that is to call them “Crazy Bernie”. But what other ammunition does he have besides scaremongering about socialism? He can brag about a stable economy and low unemployment rates all he wants, but it’s a message that will seem hopelessly out of touch alongside low wage growth and a widening gap in income inequality.
Sanders, on the other hand, is backed by a labor-intensive campaign and speaks to the concerns of working people. He has the better claim as a representative of everyday men and women. The same whiff of dishonesty that hangs about Clinton and Biden and especially Trump does not weigh on Sanders. A contest between the president and him would be a contest between a self-serving real-estate tycoon and a lovable, grumpy grandpa who attends union rallies.
Ultimately, the Democratic primary will decide whether or not this match-up happens. But Trump is clearly concerned about his chances if Sanders wins.
He’s right to worry.
