To some degree, fate conspired against Bernie Sanders’ second run at the presidency, but it was always going to be difficult for him to win the nomination. From the very beginning of the contest, I played up his chances precisely because the field was so crowded that it put him in a commanding position. He was likely to hit the 15 percent minimum threshold for delegates in almost every congressional district in the country, and the only other candidate who was similarly positioned was Joe Biden. For this reason, I said they were likely to be the finalists, and they were.
Joshua Holland correctly identifies a fatal flaw in the Sanders strategy when he points to his reliance on winning a plurality (perhaps as small as 30 percent) of the delegates. His team actually thought the likeliest course to victory was to win a contested convention, and they planned accordingly. This plan could only work if the field remained large for the majority of the contest, with several candidates consistently earning delegates.
Biden’s plan was far more plausible. He’d do better as a second choice than Sanders and grow in comparative strength as the field winnowed. Part of that plan included maintaining good relations with the other candidates so that they would be more willing to step aside from him, more likely to endorse him, and their supporters were less likely to be alienated.
Sanders didn’t really consider a plan for winning the majority of the delegates, and he certainly never implemented such a plan. Holland mentions a variety of mistakes and missteps that Sanders made along the way, but they broadly fall into the same category. He was banking on being a plurality nominee, and he thought his preexisting 2016 vote was a floor on which he could build. Neither assumption was safe.
Much of his 2016 vote was basically a protest vote against Hillary Clinton. Only some of that transferred to a protest against Joe Biden, and what remained was divvied up among many alternatives. Thus, Sanders was operating at a floor in the high teens, which wasn’t even at the 30 percent level he thought he needed. Then, because he didn’t court the other candidates or their supporters, and he did not do much to win over even progressive endorsements in Congress, he discovered that he gained almost nothing when his challengers began dropping out.
Ultimately, none of those challengers endorsed him or instructed their followers to support him, and that was what killed his chances.
To be more precise, pretty much everything Sanders did was in some way a failure to prevent that outcome, so the refusal to broaden his appeal or work on personal relationships is the real culprit.
Holland’s point is that none of this is necessarily transferrable to some other left-wing progressive candidate, and that’s true. There’s no reason a progressive can’t be good at making friends in the Democratic caucus, nor any reason they can’t craft a strategy based on winning over other people’s followers when they drop out. No one forced Sanders to adopt an overly optimistic assessment of his own standing in the Democratic electorate, nor to pursue a strategy based on the presumption that the field would remain crowded.
Any candidate who insists on running a hard anti-corporate campaign that threatens powerful industries will face many of the same challenges no matter what approach they choose, but that is not what doomed Sanders. It was a flawed campaign based on a bad reading of the electorate. Its inflexibility was seen as a virtue by some, but was inexcusable as plan for victory.
With Democrats saying emphatically that electability was key for them in this cycle, the idea that you’d be convincing when you’re not even hoping to win a majority of Democrats was laughable. Everything had to be about demonstrating your ability to reach voters outside of your base, and at the very least you had to create the perception that this was possible. Sanders did not seriously try.
In the future, we will find a cycle more interested in taking chances, and we may find a progressive who is more savvy about what victory is going to take. Nothing about Sanders’ failed campaign should really discourage progressives from thinking it’s possible to have a winning candidate.
Even Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t endorse Bernie. And this was the candidate who was going to excite and unify large numbers of Republican-leaning independents. Didn’t work in Iowa or New Hampshire or Nevada. By end of day in the South Carolina primary his entire theory of the election was dead. It’ll be another few years before the Bernie supporters admit it, but he was done before Super Tuesday.
Yes, there wasn’t anything in it for her. Once it was clear Bernie would lose, what did an isolated guy who was never running again have to offer?
Not to mention, she felt compelled to upbraid him on national tv after a debate for suggesting she wasn’t honest.
He was done when winning 25 percent of the vote was no longer enough to win the elections.
Sanders did run a terrible campaign. It was his hiring of David Sirota and Briahna Joy Gray that hit home for me that he wasn’t prepared to do what it takes to win. In many ways he and the left were too in love with the correct way to win that it just highlighted their allergy to wielding power altogether. Easier to think of it this way, be in love with our beautiful losers, paint a stabbed in the back myth, and carry on doing what they and their ideological brethren 20-30 years ago have always been doing.
Nonetheless, his run(s) will still prove to be important in the long run, what they show the electorate is really made of, where it’s going, and that you can still get 30-35% of the vote running as a democratic socialist without even reaching out to broaden the appeal. I mean, he had to be contacted by AOC’s office to get the endorsement! He wasn’t even reaching out to her! You can look at the data and it’s clear that she is perhaps solely responsible for saving his campaign after the heart attack. She might not have the votes in the House, but young people know who she is and the young voter tracker shot up in support for Sanders following her endorsement (Prior to the endorsement it had been more split with a significant number going to Warren). Just like Joe Biden’s win in South Carolina was a “signal” to voters elsewhere that they should rally behind Biden, AOC’s endorsement was the same “signal” that the left should rally behind Bernie rather than Warren.
Further, Bernie’s coalition is still a powerful broker. He put up some crazy numbers in California and Texas with Latinos. This isn’t “going away”. The youth vote wasn’t just a vote against Hillary because of stuff from Millennial childhood’s of the 1990’s. They’re a genuinely left wing generation and they believe the politicians who talk about it. Only two were in the running for that vote, and it was the two left wing candidates Warren and Sanders. We’ll see how they age, but people still have kids by the time they’re 45, and it cannot be waved away as simply youthful naivety.
Very good. I also noticed the influence of AOC and I believe the youth vote will follow her and friends for years to come. Bernie had his finger on an important progressive vein, and one I believe will win the future. He was just not able to make it work for him. I liked him for a good while but came to think of him as a pest and scold. it was too bad.
Millennial union member here. Yes, it did come down to Warren and Sanders for most of us. Having been denied the privileges our Boomer or Silent Generation grandparents, hell, even our late Boomer or X parents, still had and told to suck it up really rankles. The ability for only one person in a household to work to support a family, good infrastructure, and not being crushed with student loan debt. Oh, and being told to pipe down about the environment. Those folks will be long dead and we’ll be dealing with the problem of too much carbon. Oh, the rich better watch out, too, because we be comin’ for the hoarded wealth they made on our backs.
Having candidates that spoke to those concerns with plans that could be plausibly enacted was a breath of fresh air. Seeing Bernie and Warren get as far as they did was great. Biden, make me enthusiastic by picking a solid progressive as veep.
I’m a boomer who does not diss millennials. But by the same token, you might want to bear in mind that we lived with compulsory military service – those names on the long black wall in DC were mostly draftees – and we never forgot that nuclear annihilation was just 30 minutes away. Then there was the fact that you could get beaten up for having long hair, and spend 10 years in prison for smoking a joint. Economically, life was easier, no question, but we also didn’t have cell phones, internet or even cable TV. Each generation gets its own plate of crap to eat.
Probably, the idea that Eric Swalwell had, that he’d run as the voice of a generation, could work as part of a fresh progressive campaign. All the viable candidates this time were too old, and it wasn’t the right fit to create political magic.
The only problem with this analysis is that much of Sanders’ appeal was the fact that he was consistent (another word for which might be rigid). He didn’t behave like a typical politician which is precisely what made so many of his followers fall for him. Surely it’s possible to excite the base and appeal to the middle. Obama showed it could be done. In 2008 he pulled together both strands though a division remained between those who were more excited by a female president rather than one of color. He managed to seem radical enough to excite that crowd (though he would disappoint them later) and moderate enough to leave others feeling safe.
I’d say that being “consistent” doesn’t necessarily mean being “rigid”. Obama’s a decent example, but he never saw himself as a left-wing politician. Throughout his career he aimed to be at the center of a center-left majority.
A better example, perhaps, is Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. Jackson ran as a left-wing candidate, but unlike Sanders he ran as an inclusive candidate. His coalition grew from the 1984 campaign to the 1988 campaign, enough so that he finished second to Dukakis that year. His 1988 convention speech, “A Patchwork Quilt”, is a master class in inclusive political rhetoric. I hope AOC and her entire generation of progressive politicians study it as an example of how to use language to build political power.
Political dexterity is key to accumulating power. Ideological flexibility is key to exercising power. Sanders is no good at either of those things, and it has been his most glaring flaw as a candidate for two cycles in a row.
I acknowledged the “purity” of it has an appeal. But so what?