Bernie Sanders doesn’t have the goods to beat Trump
Bernie Sanders is as principled a major presidential candidate as we have seen. He has had the courage of his convictions for several decades, hammering away ceaselessly at issues of economic justice in ways that have opened the eyes of millions of Americans to truths that have seemed too unpleasant to confront.
And if he is the Democratic presidential nominee, the likely consequence is four more years of Donald Trump, the most dangerous, most damaging president wehaveeverhad.
The hard fact is that in order to deny Trump a second term, whoever is the Democratic nominee must score the equivalent of a royal flush. She or he must hold every single state carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and flip each of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Each of them. Without losing a single state carried by Clinton in 2016. Not New Hampshire, where Trump lost by less than 3,000 votes. Not Nevada, which he lost by only 27,000 votes. Not Minnesota, which he lost by only 45,000 votes. Otherwise, we are looking at a second Trump inaugural.
Sanders argues that he, uniquely, is positioned to generate such broad enthusiasm among hitherto disenfranchised or disengaged voters that a tidal wave of support for the Democratic ticket will sweep Trump out to sea. “To win, we need energy, we need excitement, we need the largest voter turnout in American history,” Sanders has said. “I think we are the campaign to do that.”
Problem is, the data from Iowa and New Hampshire, a limited sampling to be sure but two states where Sanders spent massive amounts of time and resources in 2016 and again in 2020, throws some ice water on Sanders’ argument. In 2008, 239,000 voters participated in the Iowa caucuses; this year, only 176,000 did, a drop-off of about 20% despite the disaster of the past three years. Sanders received just 26% of that sharply reduced turnout.
In New Hampshire, a state in which Sanders is virtually a third senator, he had a highly energized army of supporters and the benefit of a powerful political apparatus. Though the primary turnout increased from 250,000 in 2016 to 300,000 in 2020, the number of Democratic primary voters casting votes for Sanders dropped by 50%, from 153,000 in 2016 to only 76,000 this year.
The Vermont senator barely eked out a win over Pete Buttigieg, the 37- year old ex-mayor of a small Indi-ana city with no ties to New Hampshire and no natural base there, by fewer than 4,000 votes. Sanders’ 26% of the New Hampshire vote — which at this rate will earn him the moniker One Quarter Bernie — compared with the aggregate of 52% of the votes cast for Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden, all of whom in varying degrees pitched themselves as the “anti-Bernie” in the race. The apparent queasiness about Sanders among Democrats does not augur well for Sanders, especially if the theory that Sanders will generate a turn-out blowout fizzles out.
Then there is the little matter of Sanders’ self-identification as a socialist. The Sanders camp waves that aside, arguing that this will pose no impediment to his election. They are in a dream land. Asked late last month about the cost to taxpayers of his proposal to make all health care and all college free, Sanders confessed to being clueless.
“You don’t know how much your plan costs?” journalist Norah O’Donnell asked Sanders. “You don’t know,” he replied. “Nobody knows. This is impossible to predict.”
This quote, and plenty more where that came from, is going to hurt Sanders badly, and there is no use pretending otherwise.
It may well be that this should not be the case. Perhaps in an America of the not-so-distant future, things will be otherwise. But we are not there. Where we are is in serious trouble, and Bernie Sanders as nominee is not going to get us out of it.