Sanders’ campaign suffers from Bern out
Bernie Sanders’ tilt at the presidency isn’t over, but it’s in deep trouble
FROM the day he announced his nomination just over a year ago, Bernie Sanders has been the front runner for the Democratic nomination for 2020 presidential candidate.
Powered by justified anger at how he was blocked from the nomination in favour of Hilary Clinton in 2016, Sanders has spent the past four years building a formidable organisation and fundraising effort aimed at winning the 2020 election.
Sanders and his have supporters have sought to portray themselves as the underdogs, but the reality has been that from the moment Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election, the 2020 nomination has been his to lose.
By contrast, Joe Biden has been a reluctant candidate. Unique among the large 2020 field, Biden has been motivated to run by a sense of duty rather than ambition. After all, he spent eight years a heart beat away from the most powerful job in the world and was in the room for all the momentous decisions during that time. He’s got nothing left to prove. You get the sense that Biden was almost coerced into putting up his hand by a party that was at its wit’s end about how to defeat Trump.
And until about a fortnight ago, everything was going to plan. Sanders had come a close second in the Iowa caucuses, easily won in New Hampshire and triumphed in Nevada. He has millions of dollars in the bank, a strong ground organisation and an army of passionate supporters.
With Super Tuesday approaching, it was assumed that would be the final icing on the cake to assure Sanders of the Democratic nomination, forcing the rest of the field to unite behind him.
Of all the challengers, Biden looked like the one who was most on the ropes. Then came South Carolina, and Biden won so convincingly that two of his major rivals in the centre of the pack, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, dropped out within 24 hours of each in the lead up to Super Tuesday.
Yet even Biden couldn’t have expected the result that took place on Tuesday, with him winning 10 of the 14 states on offer, including the big prizes of Massachusetts and Texas. Even though Sanders won the delegate rich California, the momentum is now with the Biden camp and unless there is a dramatic turn around in the next fortnight, Sanders is in deep trouble.
The multiple problems the Sanders campaign is now dealing with are not new. In fact, they are exactly the issues that made some of us sceptical about his campaign in the first place.
The sad reality for the Sanders campaign is that his base has not grown, and perhaps even shrunk since 2016. On Tuesday, Sanders won in the states where it was expected he would win but lost in the states that mattered.
It would have been the upset to beat all upsets if he had not won in California and Colorado. But his failure in Massachusetts, which neighbours his native Vermont and is as deep red liberal as they come, and in Texas with its large Latinx population, show that his message of a revolution is not gaining the traction he might hope.
Sanders convincingly won among young voters, but they represented a relatively small proportion of the electorate. He lost African Americans and college educated whites. He lost in the midwest, where Minnesota was a litmus test, and in the south. And while turnout was higher than 2016, that is put down to the desire to remove Trump from the White House rather than the much-vaunted Sanders factor.
Not only has Sanders continued to be unconvincing on the electability argument, but he has failed to build the type of broad demographic coalition that drove Barack Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012.
The real concern is that if Sanders is not able to convincingly win the votes of liberal Democrats, how on earth can he expect to win swing voters in a general election?
Sanders has been badly damaged by the coalescing behind Biden of mainstream Democrats. But this was always going to happen. From day one, there have been serious doubts about his electability against an incumbent president with a rock solid base of 35–40% of the electorate.
Sanders’ call for a political revolution has always struggled to resonate beyond his own base, and as the focus on the election has tightened, concerns about his approach have grown.
Bernie Sanders needs to decide urgently if he is running against the Democratic Party or running against Trump. This has been the great tension in his campaign ever since 2016.
Sanders is running an insurgent campaign which is as much about taking over and changing the Democratic Party as it is about winning the White House.
His campaign seems to be is premised on the belief that the Democratic Party is little better than the GOP and only way to save it is to destroy it. This is unsurprising given that until relatively recently he has never been a Democrat, instead voting as an independent and proclaiming himself a Democratic Socialist.
It’s unclear how important it is to Sanders to enact revenge for 2016 but to many of his supporters, it seems their over-riding motivation. This may prove to be a fatal miscalculation.
To date, Sanders and his supporters seem to see the rest of the Democratic Party as their enemy, rather than their allies. If he is to win the Democratic nomination, he needs to build relationships within the party, but it is likely much too late for him to do that.
And even if Sanders suddenly switches tack and begins seeking endorsements from key senior Democrats, will that alienate his supporters who want a total root and branch revolution inside the Democrats? It’s a hell of a dilemma but unlikely to happen as Sanders has shown little inclination to build bridges with the Democratic machine over the past four years.
The intensely loyal army of Sanders supporters, so long his greatest asset, now have the potential to turn into a major liability. What will happen if, like 2016, Sanders again falls short of the nomination? Will the Bernie Bros army actively campaign against the Democratic candidate, as many of them seem to suggest they will do, or just stay at home on the first Tuesday in November? Either way, they would be handing the White House to Trump for another four years.
Biden, on the other hand, makes his lifelong membership and activism for the Democrats a virtue. This is smart politics if you want to win the endorsements of other influential Democrats.
Sanders and his supporters have every right to feel aggrieved by the events of 2016. Perhaps he would have beaten Trump that year. But it’s worth remembering that Hilary Clinton still won the popular vote, and would have won the electoral college as well but for some strategic mistakes, including a failure to campaign in battleground states like Wisconsin and Ohio.
The political environment in 2020 is much different from 2016. Four years ago, the White House was vacant after two terms of a highly successful and popular Democratic president, and Donald Trump was treated as a joke until it was too late. Sanders’ call for a revolution was much more palatable back then than it is now, after four years of a right wing demagogue living on Pennsyvlvania Avenue.
Predictably, since Super Tuesday, Sanders’ supporters have begun lashing out at the “Democratic establishment” for conspiring to block his nomination. This not only mischaracterises the genuine concerns of many senior Democrats about his electability, but it is deeply insulting to the millions of working class African Americans who voted for him. To deride them as part of the ‘Democratic establishment’ says more about the white privilege of the Bernie Bros than it does about the nature of Biden’s backers.
Frankly, it comes from the same arrogant mindset that ignored the grievances of Brexit supporting working class Britons and handed the election to the Tory party late last year.
The same goes for their childish attacks on Elizabeth Warren, a fellow progressive and lifelong Sanders ally, as a ‘fraud’. This is no way to encourage Warren supporters to back Sanders now their candidate is out of the race; it may have the opposite effect.
Every presidential election is to some extent a referendum on the occupant of the White House, 2020 more so. This year, people will not be voting for something so much as voting against someone.
All the evidence from Super Tuesday is that Democrats want a change of President but they’re not sure if they want a revolution.
Majorities of Democratic voters in every Super Tuesday state said they would prefer a nominee who can beat Trump over one with whom they agree on the issues. This translates as general sympathy with Sanders’ agenda being overshadowed by concerns about his electability.
Like Jeremy Corbyn, Sanders’ problem is not so much his policies, which consistently poll well, as his style, temperament and background. His policy platform — affordable health care for all, cheap tertiary education, action on climate change, a decent minimum wage — is pretty moderate, even boring, by the standards of most western democracies, including Australia.
It’s his rhetoric, abrasive style, and the uncompromising way he approaches his politics which is Sanders’ problem, not his policy platform. For Sanders and his supporters, it’s all or nothing: a complete political revolution is called for.
But after four years of Trump, and the real fears of what he would be like if he won another four years without ever needing to run for election again, is a revolution what is really needed? Or is what Americans are craving for is a return to stability and normality, a grown up in the White House? Someone who will restore respect in institutions and for America, not someone who is determined to wage a revolution from within?
There is clearly scepticism among many Democrats not only about the call for revolution, but also about how Sanders could ever implement any of his policy agenda, given his polarising nature and his poor track record of legislative wins over several terms in the Senate. For all of Biden’s faults, he has been able to chalk up numerous achievements during a period when Sanders languished in relative obscurity.
Sanders and his supporters are deluded if they believe they can achieve the kind of change they talk about in four years in the White House. They only have to look at the frustrations of the Obama years to see how difficult reform is, even when you have a charismatic and popular President and control of the House and the Senate. Sanders would have none of those advantages.
Real change takes years, if not decades, to achieve. For growing numbers of Democrats, the one and only change they absolutely must have in 2020 is a change of president. Everything else can wait.
Try telling a minimum wage African American that it is better for them to have another four years of Trump than to compromise on the type of Democrat in the Oval Office. See how far that gets you.
Whether Sanders understands this is unclear. His record suggests that rather than tone down his message to something that is more electorally palatable, he will double down on it and refuse to compromise.
Once again, this prompts the question: is he running against Trump, or running against the Democratic Party?
For growing numbers of Democrats, the one and only change they absolutely must have in 2020 is a change of president. Everything else can wait.
For many Democrats, the risks of supporting Sanders are two-fold. Not only do they fear he would be trounced by Trump in the presidential election, but he could cost them both control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The so-called ‘blue wave’ in 2018 was the result of moderate Democrats flipping seats in districts that Trump won in 2016. It wasn’t some radical takeover of American politics. High-profile winners like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar did not wrest seats from the control of Republicans; the districts they won were already safely Democrat.
If the Democrats are to have any chance of winning back the Senate in 2020, it won’t be through a call for a socialist revolution, but by mainstream Democrat candidates gaining a handful of seats narrowly held by moderate Republicans. And they must avoid a reversal of the 2018 mid-terms.
It is wrong to characterise the large amount of opposition to Sanders as the “establishment” either trying to knock out an insurgent, or scared of a progressive agenda.
Political hard heads in the Democrats will have watched with horror Corbyn’s doomed crusade to reintroduce 1940s-style state intervention in the UK, resulting in Labour’s worst election in at least half a century, and seen obvious parallels with the Sanders campaign. There was nothing fundamentally bad with Corbyn’s agenda either, but he was the wrong person to advocate it. They must and will do anything to avoid the same outcome.
For all the problems Sanders now faces to win the Democratic nomination, they are not insurmountable. Sanders may have enormous electability issues, but Biden is also a flawed candidate.
There is his age, his tendency to make gaffes, his voting record which includes backing the war in Iraq, and his history as a typical Washington beltway insider.
The fact that he is one of the two last men left standing is hardly a ringing endorsement for Biden. Indeed, many of those voting for him will be doing so while pinching their nose.
While Sanders is calling for a revolution, Biden appears to have no fresh ideas nor any vision for the future. His only selling points are his experience, his connection to Obama, and fear of another four years of Trump.
Biden’s pitch to voters is that despite his flaws he’s not Sanders. He admits he has few new plans and wants to avoid a contest of ideas. He is exactly what he presents as: an old school legislator who has been around forever and will steady the ship and restore decency in politics after the chaotic Trump years.
Sanders has been around forever also but his record of achievement is thinner and his presidency would likely be just as chaotic. Perhaps Biden’s very blandness is his greatest attribute.
But it is also true that whoever wins out of Biden and Sanders, the platform the Democrats present to voters will be the most left wing in at least half a century and far more progressive than anything Obama ever attempted. Sanders’ two great achievements are that he has dragged the Democratic party so far to the left that his agenda is now considered mainstream, and that he has inspired and bred the next generation of leaders, such as AOC. That is victory in itself.
The reality is that the Democrat who is best placed to beat Trump may already be on the sidelines. This brutal primary season has seen gifted and unique politicians cast aside one by one, including Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar. Imagine how exciting it could have been to see Harris or Warren debating Trump one-on-one.
Unfortunately, even when Biden was struggling, none of them was able to get far enough ahead of the pack to become the great hope around whom the party mainstream could consolidate, and as each of them ran out of money, the choice narrowed down to Biden. If it hadn’t been Biden, it would have been someone else.
Each of them represented a different face of America, and the great tragedy is that the choice in November will be between two straight, 70-something white men. There is a good chance we will look back on 2020 as the year the Democrats blew their chance to have a black woman, or a gay man, or even just a woman, as their president. We will never know, but it shows how much higher the bar is for a woman, a person of colour, a non-hetero, or anyone aged under 70.
All this makes the two terms of Barack Obama, a mixed race man with his roots in the African American community, even more remarkable. It takes a unique set of political skills to achieve what Obama did, building a national coalition made up of Americans from every demographic cohort. We are unlikely to see anyone who even comes close to him for a long time.
The Sanders campaign is now staring down the barrel of political reality.
As exciting as his agenda and his rhetoric about transformational politics is, nothing has changed in the 12 months since Sanders announced his candidacy to convince anyone but his base about his ability to beat Trump.
Even when he was riding high, twice as many Democrats opposed Sanders as supported him; the problem was they were split among a large group rather than attached to a single candidate as is now the case. So to an extent, Sanders’ strong showing in the early primaries was misleading.
Super Tuesday just reinforced concerns about his electability because if you can’t win in Democratic primaries in states like Minnesota or Virginia, and in the suburbs of Houston or Boston, you are going to struggle in a general election especially against an opponent who will have no qualms painting you as a dangerous communist. That is simply stating the facts of political reality.
Perhaps Sanders can turn things around and convince enough Democrats between now and the party convention in Milwaukee in July that he is the only person who can beat Trump.
If Sanders is to dig himself out of this hole, he is going to need to make a convincing case to Democrats that he is the only one who can replicate Obama’s election-winning coalition. But his entire history shows that this is very unlikely.
The advantage for Sanders is he is now in his preferred position as underdog, but he still has more money and a better organisation than Biden. He is a more articulate candidate and the narrowing down of the field will bring renewed scrutiny to Biden’s many flaws.
The worst thing that could happen, now it is down to just these two, would be for Sanders to wipe the floor with Biden at the next debate, because there is no-one else left for those convinced Sanders cannot beat Donald Trump to fall back on.
Trump must be licking his lips at the prospect of facing either of these two Democrats. He will have an arsenal of attack ads ready to be fired which portray Sanders as a dangerous communist. As for ‘Sloppy Joe’, Trump will mercilessly revive the Ukraine allegations.
I am far from confident that Biden can beat Trump, but I am absolutely certain that Sanders cannot, not because of any fault of his own but because of the nature of the political and media environment in 2020.
But it is also worth remembering that in 1972, an outsider to the Democratic establishment called George McGovern, whose platform included an immediate end to the Vietnam War, faced off against a Republican president in Richard Nixon who two years later would be impeached and forced to resign from office in disgrace.
The result of that 1972 election? Nixon won 49 out of 50 states, and McGovern even lost his own state, gaining only 17 electoral college votes.
Frankly, in 2020, the revolution can wait. The only thing that matters is kicking Donald Trump out of the White House.
