The Bernie juggernaut
The establishment doesn’t have the credibility to stop the surging Sanders movement
Ahalf-hour before a Bernie Sanders rally Saturday night in Iowa, a line snaked around the nearly 900-seat Ames City Auditorium, but no one else was being let in: The theater was full.
Inside, the Grammy-winning indie rock band Portugal. The Man was playing. Rows of people were assembled on risers behind the musicians, waving Bernie signs. Sanders fans, most of them young, crowded the aisles; The Iowa State Daily reported that 1,400 people had crammed into the auditorium, with another 400 in an overflow room. The air buzzed with the intoxicating collective energy unique to social movements on the rise.
Mr. Sanders isn’t just running the most economically left campaign; he’s running the most unapologetically left campaign, period. And it’s surging, with Mr. Sanders leading in recent polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
It’s no longer far-fetched to think that he could be the Democratic nominee.
There are no moral or intellectual comparisons between Mr. Sanders and Donald Trump, but there are structural similarities between the Sanders campaign and the one Mr. Trump ran in 2016. Mr. Trump thrilled conservatives with his unembarrassed embrace of farright figures disdained by mainstream Republicans. He inspired alienated men on the internet to mobilize behind him. Party elites wanted to stop him, but his solid core of support allowed him to romp through a fractured field.
The parallels with Mr. Sanders are obvious. He’s running a campaign steeped in the ethos of an anti-establishment left and benefiting from elite Democrats’ failure to coalesce around someone else. An outsider who long refused to join the party whose nomination he’s seeking, he appeals to people who distrust most political institutions, the mainstream media very much included.
Obviously, Mr. Trump won, so there’s something to be said for aping some of his strategies. But the
Sanders juggernaut still scares me. As Ezra Klein recently pointed out in The New York Times, the brute demographics of American politics make Democrats more electorally dependent on centrists than Republicans are.
Right now, several polls show Mr. Sanders beating Mr. Trump, and a few show him beating Mr. Trump in some swing states by more than anyone else. Still, I’m terrified that those numbers won’t survive endless attack ads about Mr. Sanders’ radical past.
The economic inequities that Mr. Sanders rails against are very real, but most Americans — including most Democrats — say the economy is good, and a fortune would be spent to convince them that Mr. Sanders would crash it. Socialism may be newly current among the young, but polls suggest that it’s still anathema to the old.
But Sanders supporters have plenty of reasons to discount these anxieties. Polls are on their side. Their movement feels exhilarating, the fulfillment of their most fervent political hopes in view. Centrist predictions about which candidates are viable have failed over and over again.
“We keep hearing this argument about electability, or nominating safe candidates, and we keep losing,” said Derek Eadon, a 36-year-old former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party who endorsed Mr. Sanders this month.
Mr. Eadon, who was previously with Julian Castro’s campaign, didn’t take Mr. Sanders seriously in 2016. Two things changed since then. A painful nerve disease forced Mr. Eadon to become intimate with the absurdist horror of America’s health care system. And he said he saw Mr. Sanders expanding the electorate. “His ability to keep bringing in new people, and people that have not been involved before, is just such a strength electorally,” said Mr. Eadon.
This is the paradox helping to fuel Mr. Sanders’ rise: The more he attracts people who are heedless of traditional electability concerns, the more electable he looks.
Last week, Dalhi Myers, a conservative-leaning African American elected official in South Carolina, switched her support from Joe Biden to Mr. Sanders. Despite her affection for Mr. Biden, Ms. Myers, a member of the Richland County Council, had grown concerned by what she saw as an absence of grassroots enthusiasm for him. “I look at the Sanders campaign and what they’re doing to motivate people on the ground, and it’s working,” she told me.
No one knows if all this excitement will translate into the votes Democrats need. And no one knows if Democrats can win without it.