Last week, Jim Geraghty of National Review Online identified four overlooked weaknesses of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. These can be condensed down to:
1. He’d never be able to weather a second major health scare
2. He has no emotional range and struggles with empathy
3. His consistent worldview is a liability when he has to address things that don’t neatly fit within it
4. His support for the working man is selective (see, e.g. fracking industry)
In a subsequent NRO post, Ramesh Ponnuru added a fifth overlooked weakness, that Bernie is soft on crime because he wants to vastly reduce the number of people who are incarcerated.
I’m not very impressed with this list. Even if I grant that Sanders’ health is a potential land mine, that isn’t something too many people are overlooking. Having a heart attack on the campaign trail tends to drive the point home for the American people. As for items two through four, consider how President Trump stacks up. If these are weaknesses for Sanders, the problem is not unique to him. Finally, if he’s soft on crime, at least he hasn’t been pardoning a slew of famous crooks and scoundrels.
These are not the weaknesses that cause many Democratic officeholders to panic at the prospect of Sanders leading their ticket. Whether they believe Sanders will certainly lose to Trump or not, they think he will do poorly in many of the districts the Democrats used in 2018 to win back control of the House of Representatives. Likewise, they think he will be a liability in many of states holding critical Senate races, like Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona. They don’t think this risk is related to some personality quirk or lack of empathy for energy sector workers. It has to do with how they believe his economic and social policies will play in the suburbs.
I’ve been talking about this subject since a couple of days after the 2016 election and I feel like a broken record. But there is a weakness that is still overlooked that I need to emphasize.
Although Elizabeth Warren might create some of the same vulnerabilities, Sanders is fairly unique among the Democratic candidates in the approach he’s taking to winning an Electoral College majority. Hillary Clinton pursued a suburban strategy and won a sizable popular vote victory. She succeeded in driving up her suburban performance, just not by enough to offset her rural losses. The 2018 midterm strategy for the Dems did not reverse Clinton’s strategy but instead doubled down on it. And it worked largely because President Trump was diligently alienating suburbanites and making the task easy.
What this means is that a lot of newly elected Democrats are dependent on the party keeping to a similar strategy in 2020. A candidate who is happy to trade suburban votes for rural votes could conceivably do better than one who seeks to consolidate and grow the suburban advantage, but that won’t necessarily be good enough to get vulnerable officeholders reelected or for committee chairmen to keep their gavels.
So, the somewhat hidden vulnerability for Sanders is that the party doesn’t feel safe or comfortable with his strategy. When people talk about this, they usually refer to the word “socialism,” but that’s really shorthand for something else. What’s important is that many Democrats will spend the 2020 campaign trying to distance themselves from Sanders in a way they would find unnecessary with the other candidates.
The question isn’t so much whether or not their fears are justified. Since they have these fears, the question is whether or not this lack of unity and message discipline up and down the ticket is going to create an insurmountable weakness for Sanders’ general election campaign.
This is where the difference between Democrats and Republicans really shows up. The GOP establishment was hardly unified behind Trump but they bit their lips and eventually got in line after he was elected. They don’t like to get on the wrong side of their leaders or their base, and will sometimes march into electoral oblivion (see 2006 midterms) rather than seek to distance or distinguish themselves from an unpopular president. Democrats show comparatively little reluctance to fashion themselves as critics of their president. And, unlike Senator Susan Collins of Maine, they tend to follow through. This is why President Bill Clinton couldn’t even get a committee vote on his health care plan when his own party was in control of Congress.
For Sanders, a misshapen coalition that doesn’t jibe with the shape of the Dem’s House Majority will be an obstacle to winning the general election, but it’s not necessarily insurmountable. It will make it harder to win because a divided Democratic Party is weaker than a united one, but there is more than one path to Electoral College victory.
If Sanders were to actually win and become president, he’d discover that this weakness did not go away. While some doubters would get in line, many would not. It’d be different if he brought in dozens of new congressmembers from small town/rural America, but that is almost definitely not going to happen. The Democrats don’t have a lot strong and well-funded people running for those districts, and even if Sanders performs well enough there to carry the states he needs, he’ll probably still be a drag on the ticket in those areas, just as any other Democrat would be.
Of course, Sanders is strong enough that there will be a schism in the party if he is not the nominee, Someone like Elizabeth Warren might be able to minimize this schism but, regardless, the schism would be less likely to persist into an actual administration for the other candidates.
Few people believed that Trump could win traditionally blue Rust Belt states, but he silenced the doubters. Bernie Sanders might silence his doubters, too. I think his platform would do better than people predict in many areas where the Democrats are currently weak. But I also think he’d underperform in the suburbs, and it’s a tradeoff that is never going to win the consent of the party as it is currently constituted.
So, the overlooked weakness for Sanders is that he has no realistic prospect of uniting the party either during or after the election. That doesn’t mean he can’t win, and for people who want to remake the party, it’s not a problem that he’d disrupt it and cause it to change shape.
5
O nuts you have succeeded in worrying me about the House. Thanks a lot.
New York Times
Maybe they are waiting for a nominee rather than alienating supporters of a candidate who is still a contender by making an endorsement now.
Twice as many House Dems have endorsed Bloomberg (16) as have endorsed Sanders (8). Biden (42) and Warren (12) both outpace Sanders.
So what? Why did those 16 endorse Bloomberg? Because he bought them, in one fashion or another as Bloomberg admitted tonight.
Over and over Republicans show us the strength of falling in line. But Democrats first instinct is to run. Anyhow thank you for cutting simply to the heart of the matter.
But hear me out. First we know from political research that when you join a new tribe over time you begin to change to better belong to that tribe. In other words you take your cues from the political elite. In the GOP’s case this is Rushbo and Fox News and ultimately Trump. For Democrats it’s still primarily electeds. I’m not saying Nancy Pelosi needs to preach the gospel of public ownership of Apple, hell Bernie doesn’t do that nor do I think he wants that. Even I dont think thats the best thing except in regard to utilities. What I mean is stop looking so damned worried and do what Bernie himself does: focus on the ones with power fucking us over with their money. Your solutions may be different than Bernies but be mad about the same thing.
Second the suburban switch in 2018 brought to power candidates who wanted to solve problems. There are problems in the suburbs to solve and its not the guy making 150k in the suburbs that is causing them. The middle class are being taken advantage of to and seldom get help. How many saw their retirement funds crater in 2008? That took a decade to climb out of. Did Obamacare help them? Only in indirect ways and they had to pay for a major chunk of it. Or think about a more pedestrian issue: cable companies are shit because of monopolies and regulatory capture. Sure its not the most pressing concern but how many industries are like that in some way? How many small cuts do you get that make your life harder or more annoying to make someone else that much more money?
Im sloganing but my point is, while you are right that it might be difficult to unite the party NOW longterm there are ways to create a shared sense of solidarity and it probably needs to happen to effect actual change. You can say that defeating Trump is more important but would any other candidate do much better? So far its Bernie who has the broadest coalition and no one else excites the youth as much as he does so anyone else will start in a hole. DKos is screaming into the wind for Warren but she excites college white people only. You cant win with JUST the suburbs either. Biden will kill any enthusiasm except Trump hate. But Trump hate is a coinflip as HRC showed. Because as much as you or I might see Trump as a huge threat for the average suburban not a whole lot has changed. Hell even if you are latino the main change if you are suburban is people feel freer to trash talk you or beat you up. Thats definitely not nothing (as I have personally experienced!) but its not that different than before or at least not different than your parents generation. To get back on topic I think you can start to generate some of that solidarity in time for November. I dont deny its a gamble but I dont think its a worse gamble than going for Biden or Bloomers.
Everything Martin is saying very well might be true but what’s the alternative? I watched a Joe Biden rally recently on C-Span. It was one of the saddest spectacles I’ve ever seen. A couple of hundred people standing around looking like they’d rather be killing themselves than be standing at a Joe Biden rally. The notion that he is somehow going to beat Trump I find utterly laughable. There is almost no groundswell of excitement for a Joe Biden.
Elizabeth Warren is great ,but as the above poster stated she doesn’t seem able to appeal to black people or Latino people or break out of just a attracting white college-educated voters. She also consistently polls the absolute worst and most of the key swing States.
As for Bloomberg, my average bowel movement is more charismatic than Mike Bloomberg. The notion of running him is beyond my ability to even contemplate.
Sanders, for all his faults and shortcomings, is able to attract Latinos, is capable of attracting black people, certainly almost on the same level as Biden, combined with a level of support and passion which is off the charts. And you combine that with his ability to excite young people, especially with him pushing for marijuana legalization, and I really don’t see who has a better chance than Sanders.
OK, Bernie doesn’t have much in the way of coattails, but maybe coattails are less relevant to winning congressional races this year. The Republicans in Congress are seen by a majority (obviously it doesn’t work out this way in every district) as the most despicable in living memory, especially in the Senate, where Collins, McSally, Gardner, and Tillis are four out of the five most vulnerable Senators (the fifth being, unfortunately, Doug Jones); but also where every single Republican senator except Romney has got a target on their ass. As for the House, if the Democrat wins, and likely even if not, the House is probably not in play. Finally, Sanders has proven ability to (a) raise lots of honest money, and (b) rally the troops (on a national level) against Trump and all the little Trumpsters. If he is the candidate, then, I believe he will do that to help congressional candidates too. Surely he has every motivation.
59% of the population think THEIR member of congress deserves to be reelected. That is the highest it’s been in a while. The Dem generic ballot advantage in polls taken in the last 4 days is at +6 (Morning Consult) +8 (Marist) and +7 (YouGuv). +7 is the number Dems need to retake the House. To hold they need less.
Right now there is 0 empirical evidence the house is in play.
So the Senate. If Sanders can hammer through that his policies are radical only because of the pundit American’t class (and he is On Message there!) and the middle class are being taken advantage of too (they are) calming the suburbs a bit, with his blunting the advantage that Trump has over white working class voters, I think that sets up favorable conditions for senate candidates. Now you can certainly say he will have a tough time breaking through with the gop rhetoric. But we’ve been running centrist hawk types for a while and they keep getting killed in rural areas. Did HRC have appreciable coattails?
I see it as mostly a push, but one where Bernie has a higher potential upside than anyone.
1.5