Sanders stuns rivals with big win in Nevada
Nevada landslide puts Left-winger on course to face Trump – who offers him his congratulations
Bernie Sanders’s Democrat rivals are engaged in a desperate fight to stop the Left-wing senator running away with the US presidential nomination after his landslide win in Nevada over the weekend left moderate candidates reeling. Mr Sanders has now won the popular vote in the first three states to cast ballots. With more than half the votes counted in Nevada, Mr Sanders was on 47 per cent, with Joe Biden, the former vice-president, in second place on 19 per cent.
BERNIE SANDERS’ Democratic rivals have begun a desperate fight to stop the Left-wing senator running away with the US presidential nomination.
Mr Sanders scored a landslide win in Nevada over the weekend, leaving moderate candidates reeling. He has now won the popular vote in the first three states to cast ballots.
With more than half the votes counted in Nevada, Mr Sanders was on 47 per cent, ahead of Joe Biden, the former vice president, on 19 per cent, Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, on 15 per cent, and senator Elizabeth Warren on 10 per cent.
The next state to vote in the primaries will be South Carolina on Feb 29, three days before more than a dozen states, including California and Texas, go to the polls on “Super Tuesday”. In the wake of the result in Nevada, Mr Buttigieg launched a blistering attack on Mr Sanders, saying he had a “toxic tone” and the party should not “rush to nominate” him.
Speaking in Las Vegas, Mr Buttigieg said: “Let’s take a sober look at what is at stake for our party. Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution. Senator Sanders sees capitalism as the root of all evil.”
Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, was not on the ballot in Nevada, but has already spent $464 million (£358 million) on his campaign, mostly advertising in states that vote on Super Tuesday.
Kevin Sheekey, his campaign manager, said the result reinforced “the reality that this fragmented field is putting [Mr Sanders] on pace to amass an insurmountable delegate lead”.
Mr Biden and Mr Buttigieg have so far spent nothing on TV and radio advertisements in the Super Tuesday states, while Mr Sanders has already spent $11 million.
Mr Biden portrayed the Nevada result as a “comeback” after a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire. “The press is ready to declare people dead quickly, but we’re alive. You put me in position,” he told supporters.
Polls in South Carolina showed Mr Biden with a slight lead. The state has a large black population, which Mr Biden has called his “firewall”. Mr Bloomberg is competitive in North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma and Arkansas, but Mr Sanders has a commanding double digit lead in California.
As results came in, Mr Sanders was in Texas, where he also leads in polling. He told a raucous crowd in San Antonio: “We have put together a multigenerational, multiracial coalition which is going to sweep this country.”
The Nevada result appeared to shatter moderates’ belief that Mr Sanders could not build a broad coalition.
Asked if he thought Mr Sanders would be his opponent, Donald Trump said: “Bernie is looking more and more like he’ll be the nominee unless they [the Democrats] cheat him out of it.”
On Twitter the president wrote “Congratulations Bernie” and added “Biden & the rest look weak”.
This Saturday in Las Vegas, the Democrats put their money on red. Senator Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucus with 46 per cent of the vote and is now the clear frontrunner for his party’s nomination. This is remarkable, not only because he’s a self-proclaimed socialist, or a 78-year-old who recently had a heart attack, but because he’s only been a Democrat on and off since 2015. His run of victories is as much a repudiation of the liberal establishment as a warning to Donald Trump.
It’s tempting to write him off as the American Jeremy Corbyn and, yes, there are similarities. Bernie’s signature policies are a massive expansion of free healthcare and a green new deal, and he’s a trenchant critic of US foreign policy. He actually spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. Trump’s attack tweets practically write themselves.
They might not work, however. An easy majority of US voters don’t like socialism, but the young are warming to it and a significant proportion say they don’t even know what it is. As in Britain, the general idea might be unpopular, but the specifics can sell. The hospitality union in Nevada criticised Bernie because his healthcare-for-all programme threatened their own private insurance plan, yet their members ignored the leadership’s advice and voted for him anyway.
How much is this to do with socialism and how much to do with Bernie? It’s a critical contrast with Labour’s experience: Corbyn was less popular than his ideas, whereas Bernie is well known and polls strongly even when voters are reminded of his socialism. The irony is that while Corbyn is privately charming (so I’m told), Sanders can be short-tempered and rude.
He is a loner. Some of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust. His father died when he was 20, his mother when he was 18. When he first moved to rural Vermont, Bernie lived in a former sugar shack with a dirt floor. He released a financial disclosure in 1976 that read: “Unfortunately, there is not too much to report.”
He always looks, as Larry David said, like he’s been running for a bus. His character was captured in a vignette by journalist Anand Giridharadas, who recalls that when they travelled together on a plane, Bernie hardly spoke to him “in any real way”, until they came to get into a car and there wasn’t enough room to fit everybody in. Bernie was overcome with a “transfixing, physical sense of righteousness. It wasn’t about logistics; it was about justice.” He did everything he could to find the journalist space – move some bags, sit on a case – and in his determination to put something right, he became clear to Giridharadas for the first time: Bernie isn’t the man you want to sit next to on a long boat ride, because he’s got no chat. But he is “the person who will notice when you fall overboard and begin to drown”.
A Bernie rally is like no other. He invites the audience to come up and speak, to talk about how they lost their house or their job. “It isn’t about me,” he insists, “it’s about them.” Unusually for a politician, this is probably true. If he gets the nomination, the 2020 race will be a battle between a business nationalist and an international socialist, but also between ego and anti-ego, between “This is my land” and “This is your land”.
And yet, Trump and Sanders have so much in common. Both men are New Yorkers, shout a lot, compete for the affection of the working class and are accused of being backed by the Kremlin. Bernie Sanders isn’t so much the American Jeremy Corbyn as he is the Left-wing Donald Trump, which begs the question – are the Democrats happy to be captured and converted in the same way that Trump took over the Republicans? If not, then why haven’t they put up a better fight?
I’ve seen this election compared to 1972, when the Democrats nominated George Mcgovern and Mcgovern
– an ultraliberal tagged, unfairly, as the candidate of acid, amnesty and abortion – went down to a huge defeat in the autumn election. But there are two differences from 1972.
First, the country has changed: it is more socially liberal now, and ethnic minority voters, who seem drawn to Bernie, are in the ascendant. Secondly, in 1972, the Democrats split properly over Mcgovern because the party contained serious moderates and conservatives who didn’t like what he stood for on principle. That doesn’t hold up today. Pete Buttigieg or Joe Biden might spend the rest of the primaries calling Bernie a Marxist, but everything Bernie is for is merely the logical extension of what Pete and Joe have signed up to as well: free stuff, abortion on demand, weak borders, etc.
The Democrats’ failure to say a definitive “no” to the far-left in the last decade has paved the way for a socialist nominee, just as the Republican tolerance of racism made a Trump nomination more likely in 2016.
Yes, Bernie can be stopped in the coming weeks – but his opposition is fractured and hollow. If Bernie does win, Pete and Joe will come to the convention and endorse him and pretend that they loved him all along, because when parties stand for nothing, they can be captured by anyone.
Under these circumstances, Mike Bloomberg must consider an independent candidacy. Another New Yorker, another outsider. That state has a lot to answer for.