Bernie's Choice: Ride or Die - The Bulwark - 0 views
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That starts with internalizing an unpalatable truth: from its outset Sanders’ campaign was fatally flawed.
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“Sanders has made no effort to reach out beyond his voters, his movement, his revolution. It just has not grown. It is an utterly stable vote that is grounded in the very liberal portion of the Democratic party, but he’s so disdainful of any outreach beyond that base. He seems content to just keep hitting that drum.”
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“Sanders’ political failings are his own, and black people are not here to channel the political yearnings of white progressives. We are not here to carry your water or clean up your mess. It’s not that black people don’t believe you… You quite literally need more people.”
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Including white people. So far in 2020, Sanders has lost college-educated whites, badly. More surprising, he has hemorrhaged the same working-class whites he carried in 2016—which suggests that their transient adherence was driven more by aversion to Hillary Clinton than enthusiasm for Sanders himself.
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Sanders insists that his campaign is winning on the issues, and losing only because primary voters fear that he’s not electable. But this misses the point: Voters fear he’s unelectable because of his positions on the issues.
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Sanders claimed that he could fuse young people with the previously disengaged—people who rarely, if ever, vote—into a decisive bloc of new voters who would respond to him alone. Wrong. In primary upon primary, Sanders’ phantom army never materialized.
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In an extensive study of non-voters by the Knight Foundation the authors conclude that “If they all voted in 2020, non-voters would add an almost equal share of votes to Democratic and Republican candidates.”
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In sum Sanders, his campaign, and too many of his followers embraced an electoral strategy premised on magical thinking.
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Actual votes here tell the story. To succeed, Democrats must begin with their base—the coalition which Sander is losing by a wide margin. But they also need to add the votes of the same people who buoyed Democratic candidates in 2018: moderates, independents, persuadable Republicans, suburbanites, and college-educated women.
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[M]any progressive activists misread public opinion. Their answer to almost every question of political strategy is to insist that Americans are a profoundly progressive people who haven’t yet been inspired to vote the way they think… They are conflating our own opinions with smart political advice. They are choosing to believe what they want to believe.
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Overall, Sanders never reached large chunks of the Obama coalition – an essential predicate to any chance of long-term success.
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To be sure, some of Sanders’ individual proposals are popular among Democrats. But Sanders should contemplate that the adverse verdict of primary voters implicates his overall agenda—and that, if anything, this judgement minimizes the misgivings among the electorate writ large.
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Certain of Sanders’ fellow progressives get that. Here’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on appealing to voters: “I come from the lens of an organizer, and if someone doesn’t do what you want, you don’t blame them—you ask why. And you don’t demand that answer of that person—you reflect. And that reflection is where you can grow.”
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It’s one thing to criticize Biden on the issues. But if one worries about Trump beating Biden at such terrible cost to the globe, then it would be best not to call Uncle Joe, as Robinson has, “a sleazy dishonest person, the kind who should not be rewarded with a position of extreme trust like the presidency.”
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that’s what comes of treating the Democratic party as the target of a hostile takeover—as Sanders himself so often does. Soon enough, for his acolytes the party itself becomes the enemy, along with everyone within it who disagrees with their leader
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From there, it is but one step further to sabotaging Biden as an act of revenge. After the Michigan primary, pro-Sanders commentator Krystal Ball said: “The responsibility is placed solely on the voters to suck it up and vote Joe. I’m not buying it. If the choice is Donald Trump or Joe Biden, you can mark me down as officially undecided.”
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The essential choice for Sanders in 2020 is between facilitating Trump’s second term, and helping Biden become a candidate more of his voters can accept.
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Take his centerpiece proposal: single-payer healthcare. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 60 percent of swing voters in the pivotal states of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin consider it “a bad idea.” Without winning at least two of those states—and in reality they probably need all three —Democrats will lose to Trump.
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Very soon Sanders and his supporters will have to stop fabricating fantastical excuses for losing to Biden, look in the mirror, and decide what to do about Donald Trump.
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Trump must be defeated,” Bernie Sanders insists, “and I will do everything in my power to make that happen.”