#BernieOrBust: Can Bernie Trump Hillary?

#BernieOrBust. It is a big thing. Young and progressive voters — swinging 80/20 for Bernie, may not show up for Secretary Clinton. Bernie leads independents by double-digits in the polls. There are many Republicans and Independents in our country who would vote for Bernie but #NeverTrump and certainly not for their Democratic opponent either.

After New York and its surrounds voted in the last couple weeks, the seeming improbability that Sanders will break through the Democratic establishment is echoing with more sounds of #BernieOrBust.

And as a Nader-Obama-Stein-Sanders voter, I get it. I’m with Bill Twist when he implores that the two most important acts Americans can take to fight climate change are to pass a carbon tax and to first repeal Citizens United. Jill Stein, Green Party candidate has written a letter to Senator Sanders, asking him to join her or to otherwise run as an independent candidate. Stein/Sanders might be my dream ticket. Kshama Sawant, Socialist member of the Seattle City Council, in her #Movement4Bernie petition, writes to Bernie that the “grassroots campaign that we have all worked so hard to build is too important to let its fate be decided by a rigged primary which involves only a small minority of voters.” And there are dozens more petitions towards that same goal — to run Bernie as a third candidate.

The math is clear that in Philadelphia, we will see Bernie and his opponent compete in a contested convention. There are at least half a million students in California, and if they all get registered to vote for Bernie by mail before June 7th, and they make good their pledge, Bernie could win California 2:1 and turn his Democratic delegate count around. Even if he doesn’t reach the pledged delegate majority before June 14th (the last primary), we’re all hoping that the super-delegates will listen to the people and the polls that say that Bernie will be the strongest candidate against the Republicans in the fall (where Bernie wins by double-digits, and Hillary wins vs. Trump but loses to Kasich). Anything is possible.

And as much as I’d love to see Sanders have a successful campaign with the Democrats, let’s say Clinton and the super-delegates won’t budge on the party platform. Brother Bernie takes his supporters and walks away from the DNC. There’s a lot at stake, and suddenly, it’s #BernieOrBust. It’s a three-way. It’s on.

Can Bernie win 2016 as an independent?

The Electoral Math Does Not Favor Us

In order to consider the prospect of any successful independent candidacy, we must wrestle with the fact that our Electoral College does not take kindly to any attempt at insurgency, or even coalition politics. In any election where the lead vote-getter does not reach 270 electoral votes, the 12th Amendment prescribes for the President to be chosen by the sitting House of Representatives. (Welcome President, uh… Kasich? Ryan?)

Ranked-choice voting, used in a fraction of American municipalities, is not available in Presidential elections. It is illegal in all but eight states to use any form of electoral fusion, in which the Greens or any other Independent party could simply nominate the Democratic front-runner as their candidate, and increase the vote share of their party without spoiling the election. Indeed, electoral fusion, once widespread in the United States, was outlawed precisely for such powers. One Republican legislator from Minnesota wrote:

“We don’t propose to allow the Democrats to make allies of the Populists, Prohibitionists, or any other party, and get up combination tickets against us. We can whip them single-handed, but don’t intend to fight all creation.”

The creation of the modern Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party was to formalize the coalition that was made possible by electoral fusion. Abraham Lincoln was elected to office on a fusion ticket between that era’s Republicans and the War Democrats — our last election to see a four-way split. We may see a similar scenario in this election with three or even four factions approaching a general election, depending on the result of each major parties’ primaries this summer. But we have no way to express coalition preferences through an instant-primary or instant-runoff vote. (Indeed, we must change this along with campaign finance and corporate personhood reform.)

The deck is clearly stacked against third-party candidacies in America, yet it is clear that our Progressive movement has, to date, achieved considerable political power. Amongst those powers:

• Bernie Sanders, our Presidential candidate, has already demonstrated the power to win Electoral Votes (as I demonstrate in my study), in a capacity damaging to our Democratic counter’s Presidential prospects;
• Such power is significant enough, if sustained through a few election cycles, to threaten the jobs of certain Representatives who do not cast their super-delegate or tie-breaker vote with the will of their people;
• The power to run Progressive campaigns for Congress in all fifty states, 
  to win in many of those states, and to caucus with the Democrats in 2017 — indeed, this may be one of the best horizons of our electoral campaign;
• The power to convince members of Congress and state government to act upon our vision of campaign finance reform and progressive politics.

There are also many things we do not yet know about our movement, the most important of which relates to our power to create majorities in the Electoral College and Congress. What is currently unknown is whether our movement can win enough state contests to guarantee complete success against both the Republican and Democratic parties in the 2016 Presidential Election.

While we do have an abundance of two-way polling that indicates that Sanders is a very strong candidate — indeed, the strongest candidate — as well as an abundance of supporters who simply trust, on a gut level, that Bernie would be a successful independent candidate, we have virtually no polling, nationally, state, or otherwise, asking voters how they would vote in a three-way contest. My study is an attempt to provide such a model based on the data we have — that is, primary election results. Yet it will take much more data to be able to guarantee that our Progressive Party will win the Presidency.

To be clear, I am rooting for that Progressive movement to succeed, and I am not seeking to cast any candidate with the label of “spoiler.” Instead, I see the moment that a candidate becomes powerful enough to shift an election from its contra-coalition counter (in our case, the Democrats) to its primary opponent (the Republicans) as that candidate’s all-in moment. Mathematically, it is the point beyond which our insurgency cannot afford to fail. It separates the small win and the big loss. It’s when we commit to shift from holding actions towards building the world we want to create.

Any movement which hopes to win the Presidency must ideally leap both this hurdle and the plurality hurdle that wins Electoral Votes all at once. Nader reached his all-in moment in Florida, but failed to have a movement strong enough to win any electoral votes and make him President. The War Democrats were able to support Lincoln through electoral fusion. As I will show, Bernie’s candidacy is certainly strong enough to win Electoral Votes, but we lack the data to guarantee that he will make it first-past-the-post and give the Progressives the big win in our current winner-or-Republicans-take-all mathematical reality.

It is a near ethical imperative that the Progressives put Bernie on the ballot as a third party should he fail to clinch the Democratic nomination:
• to honor the world we want to create and give voice to Progressive values
• to provide leverage to Sanders’ campaign in winning the Democratic campaign
• in case the FBI’s indictment against his Democratic opponent is successful.

Yet, it also stands to be of life-and-death importance to many that, absent such acts of state, we must not interfere with the election of our Democratic counter — however reluctant our counter-coalition with their anointed candidate — unless we are willing to guarantee that our favored candidate will reach 270 electoral votes.

In his recent press conference, Bernie was very clear that the primary goal of the Left in the general election must be to defeat Donald Trump, “or any other right-wing Republican candidate.” Others on the Left may relish the grassroots movement-building potential of a Trump presidency, but I believe we can all agree on one thing: the policies enacted by a Trump presidency and sympathetic Congress will be disastrous for women, immigrants, people of color — and, frankly, most other Americans as well. To win as a third party, the #BernieOrBust Progressive Party will need specific amounts of organizational and volunteer effort, fundraising capacity to pay people, political will, and the data to show there is a path to victory. Do we have these things? Remember, the math has no room for error.

We Are Already At The All-In Moment

The electoral college math can by summarized as such. In each state, the candidate that wins a plurality of votes receives that state’s electoral votes. In all cases, a candidate who wins the majority of 270 electoral votes becomes President. In a three-way, pluralities are decided by the House of Representatives amongst the candidates in the race (and only those candidates). In terms of votes, good is less than bad is less than great.

Because our polls to date do not dare measure it, I have used primary election results to give us a statistical idea of the current ranked-choice sentiment of the vast majority of the electorate. Amongst Democrats, I assume that Bernie and Hillary are either our first and second choice (though I know that for some, Jill Stein is their second). I separate the Republicans into three factions — the moderates (Kasich, Bush), the conservatives (Cruz, Rubio), and the Trump fan club, and take a wild guess at how coherent these voters become in the three-way race. I then scale these results to reflect the 2012 electorate (assuming a lower-turnout election creates a harder path for Bernie, which is useful for over-organizing for our best turnout.)

The following is a summary of my model so far:

• Bernie already has sufficient support to easily win Electoral Votes in HI, VT, WA (and I project OR as well, assuming he performs similar to WA).
• If the election were held today, Bernie would need to find another 15% of the electorate in ME, NH, RI, AK to win Electoral Votes in those states.
• Bernie can win the 41 Electoral Votes in the eight states listed above without compromising Clinton’s inauguration provided that she is able to hold together the Democratic coalition in all reliably “blue states” as well as win the Obama coalition swing states of OH, FL, and VA or NV and IA.
• Bernie’s popularity in the West and amongst independents suggest that there are paths to Electoral Votes in some Western States. Bernie can fight hard to net Western states (excluding California, which would put Bernie all-in against our Democratic counter) to cut into our Republican opponents, but without any significant change in the partisan behavior of the electorate, it would require an election with 75% turnout and all new voters choosing Bernie Sanders. Electoral Votes: 105 I, 272 D, 161 R.
• Bernie’s campaign reaches its all-in moment when it threatens any of 
  the 272 Electoral Votes coveted by our Democratic counter-party in the Midwest, California and the Northeast Corridor. In addition to winning uncertain territory in CA and the Midwest, the campaign must win electoral votes in our Democratic opponents’ base territory in the Northeast Corridor. If our Progressive campaign has won the West, it needs only one of the eight states in the Northeast Corridor to reach 270.
• A Progressive campaign that wins a significant chunk of Western electoral votes may, for the aforementioned reasons, have the power to influence the House in the event that no party nets 270 electoral votes.

In a three-party race, this is one picture of what our electoral map looks like today. There are parameters that can be shifted that are more favorable to our Progressive campaign, but — who are we kidding? My framework is not generous with Bernie Sanders and his movement — and neither will establishment politics be generous with us. Given this aspect of physical reality, it would behoove the Progressive movement to think critically and innovatively about how best to establish itself as the new paradigm in our experiment with democracy.

I offer this story not to say that a Progressive victory cannot ever happen — on the contrary, I believe it is the thing we need and I am cheering for it and organizing for it. But if we are to win, it is important that we look and see just what it will take to win in each state, regional and national contest — especially in those contests where Bernie is currently favored to land in the middle. If we ignore the mathematical reality of the election and convince ourselves that everyone is just “feeling the Bern” and that we just should go for it, we cannot guarantee the results we seek.

Instead, we gamble with an electoral rift between the Progressives and the Democrats. If we attempt to steal the Democrats current playbook in the general election and not expand our Progressive campaign to Red states, we risk limiting ourselves by the same playbook the Democratic party is currently operating by. We risk not achieving the 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of statehouses required to amend the constitution. We make it harder and even more important to win Congressional redistricting in 2020.

So to Kshama Sawant, and anyone else asking for Bernie to run independently, I would ask: Rather than have our movement stopped at the “rigged” Democratic convention, shall we, instead, let the movement be decided in such a a rigged general election? One that would be decided by the current Republican House and Senate?

Would we skip the chance to have the most liberal Supreme Court since the 1960’s and give the honor of picking our next Supreme Court justice to a Republican House, Senate, and President?

Or, are we willing to guarantee a Democrat or better for 2016 and a new, progressive government by 2020? Progressive majorities in statehouses? More equal redistricting for the House? A brand new congress?

For if we were to lose the Presidential election this cycle, for both the Democrats and the Progressives, we would have to be willing to go beyond conventional electoral action. Hank Edson writes:

“We cannot, like Gore, concede when we discover the fix is in at the Supreme Court. We have to shut the Supreme Court down. We cannot allow a president to be sworn in when voter fraud and suppression issues have not been rectified and the integrity of the results of the election have not been established. We have to shut the swearing in down.”

We know progressive policy views are shared by the vast majority of Americans. We win elections when we run progressive candidates. But until someone makes a similarly detailed road map based on solid polling that proves there is no statistical floor for Hillary’s support, I wouldn’t bet on Sanders’ success in 2016, nor on a Progressive movement than can win a majority in 2020, using the partisan breakdowns that we are used to thinking about. Those ways of dividing the electorate may no longer apply, and we need to create new ways of knowing how voters think.

And that’s a challenge I give to you. Get new polling. Show us the data in your community that guarantees a win. And commit to organizing from the bottom-up — not just for 2016, but for 2020. For it is clear that the American project is stacked against the impatient whims of the people, but can fall to sustained movements built of determined people’s power.

Support progressive initiatives such as single-payer health insurance in Colorado, housing the homeless in Utah, and stopping Keystone XL in Nebraska. Create organizations like the Working Families Party in New York, and the Richmond Progressive Alliance in California. These are just a few examples of what our movement can do when we bring people together to win against all odds.

It may be possible for Bernie Sanders to win as an independent candidate, but it remains ethical to aim for that big victory only if we have adequate information, through polling and survey, to conduct a three-party election, and a willing and responsive progressive organization that can guarantee a Progressive win. Barring an act of state between now and November that makes the Democratic candidate untenable, we must remain conscious that in those theoretical mathematics that we are asking for when we cheer for #BernieOrBust, a great unraveling lies between the great turn towards victory and the holding actions we must take against forces of inhumanity.

I hope that we will gather this information — from our neighbors, friends, fellow churchgoers — and that in this movement, we will have the information we need to prove that 2016 is not just a blip in the radar, but the beginning of the world we all know to be possible.