Regular Democrats aren’t worried about Bernie
But many in the party elite remain deeply skeptical of the Vermont senator
Judging by media coverage and the comments of party luminaries, you might think Democrats are bitterly polarized over Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid. Last month, Hillary Clinton declared that “nobody likes” the Vermont senator. Earlier this month, James Carville, who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, said he was “scared to death” of the Sanders campaign, which he likened to “a cult.” Since the beginning of the year, news organization after news organization has speculated that Mr. Sanders’ success may set off a Democratic “civil war.”
But polls of Democratic voters show nothing of the sort. Among ordinary Democrats, Mr. Sanders is strikingly popular, even with voters who favor his rivals. He sparks less opposition — in some cases far less — than his major competitors. On paper, he appears well positioned to unify the party should he win its presidential nomination.
So why all the talk of civil war? Because Mr. Sanders is far more divisive among Democratic elites — who prize institutional loyalty and ideological moderation — than Democratic voters. The danger is that by projecting their own anxieties onto rank-and-file Democrats, party insiders are exaggerating the risk of a schism if Mr. Sanders wins the nomination and overlooking the greater risk that the party could fracture if they engineer his defeat.
Strange as it sounds, Mr. Sanders may be the least polarizing candidate in the presidential field, at least according to surveys of ordinary Democrats. A Monmouth University poll earlier this month found not only that Mr. Sanders’ favorability rating among Democrats nationally — 71% — was higher than his five top rivals’, but also that his unfavorability rating — 19% — was tied for second lowest. Mr. Sanders’ net favorability rating was 6% higher than Elizabeth Warren’s, 16% higher than Joe Biden’s, 18% higher than Pete Buttigieg’s, 23% higher than Amy Klobuchar’s, and a whopping 40% higher than that of Michael Bloomberg, whom more than a third of Democratic voters viewed unfavorably.
A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month found similarly favorable results for Mr. Sanders. Among Democrats nationally, only Ms. Warren enjoyed higher net favorability ratings; on that measure, Mr. Sanders outpaced Mr. Biden, Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Bloomberg. (The pollsters didn’t ask about Ms. Klobuchar.) And according to a recent USA Today/IPSOS survey, Mr. Sanders is the candidate who Democrats say best shares their values.
Although political handicappers sometimes presume that centrist Democrats are hostile to Mr. Sanders, the Quinnipiac poll suggests that Mr. Sanders enjoys widespread affection even outside his ideological lane. Among self-described moderate or conservative Democrats, Mr. Sanders boasts a net favorability rating of 43% — far higher than Mr. Biden or Mr. Bloomberg fares among the “very liberal” Democrats who compose Mr. Sanders’ ideological base. Ninety-eight percent of Warren supporters, 97% of Buttigieg supporters and 92% of Biden supporters say they would back Mr. Sanders against Donald Trump. Only among Bloomberg supporters does that number dip to 83%.
None of this means Mr. Sanders would necessarily beat Mr. Trump. But the evidence does suggest that, if Democratic elites let him, he’s capable of unifying his party’s rank and file behind his campaign. He’s far better positioned than Mr. Trump was at this point in 2016, when his net favorability rating among Republicans was almost 20% lower than Mr. Sanders’ is among Democrats today.
But many Democratic insiders remain deeply skeptical. Mr. Sanders’ support among party elites dramatically lags his support among Democratic voters. According to FiveThirtyEight’s Endorsement Tracker, which awards candidates points when party officials endorse them, Mr. Sanders ranks fourth in endorsement points, behind Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Warren and far behind Mr. Biden. While ordinary voters don’t exhibit much hostility toward Mr. Sanders, party leaders do. When Seth
Masket of the University of Denver interviewed Democratic activists in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and Washington, D.C., this month, he found that almost two-thirds said they feared a Sanders nomination. The only candidate who elicited a more negative response was Tulsi Gabbard, the representative from Hawaii who some Democrats fear will run a spoiler third-party campaign against the eventual nominee.
This animosity seeps into the mainstream media, where Democratic strategists often express their opinions and inform the opinions of journalists who cover the presidential race. According to an In These Times study of MSNBC’s prime-time coverage in August and September of last year, Mr. Sanders received less coverage than Mr. Biden and Ms. Warren, and the coverage he did receive was more negative.
Democratic insiders tend to be institutionalists. They are more likely than ordinary voters to care about the fact that Mr. Sanders hasn’t always been a registered Democrat, that he often criticizes party officials, and that he didn’t do more to help Ms. Clinton in 2016. Mr. Masket told me that many of the party bigwigs he interviewed resented Mr. Sanders for “being a spoiler for 2016” by supposedly undermining Ms. Clinton, and for “sticking his finger in the eye of the Democratic establishment.”
The other reason Democratic insiders disproportionately oppose Mr. Sanders is that party elites and the journalists with whom they interact tend to distrust radicals of any stripe. “A quarter-century covering national politics has convinced me that the more pervasive force shaping coverage of Washington and elections is what might be thought of as centrist bias, flowing from reporters and sources alike,” the former Politico editor John Harris recently observed. “This bias is marked by an instinctual suspicion of anything suggesting ideological zealotry, an admiration for difference-splitting.”
The centrist bias that Mr. Harris describes skews elite perceptions of public opinion. It keeps party and media insiders from recognizing that Mr. Bloomberg, a former Republican now running as a centrist, is a far more divisive figure among ordinary Democrats than the putatively radical Mr. Sanders.
The greatest danger to Democratic unity is that, once primary voting is done, Mr. Sanders receives only a plurality of delegates — an outcome that the forecasters at FiveThirtyEight view as a strong possibility — yet party elites try to steer the nomination to Mr. Bloomberg or another moderate. They could do so through the roughly 770 superdelegates, politicians and party officials who, although now barred from voting on the first ballot at the convention, could vote on the second ballot if no candidate receives an initial majority. According to the Monmouth poll, Mr. Bloomberg enjoys a net favorability rating among Democrats of only 14%. If he polarizes Democrats now, imagine how polarizing he’ll be if he wins the nomination because party insiders subvert the will of Democratic voters and pick him over Mr. Sanders.
Across the ideological spectrum, ordinary Democrats like Bernie Sanders. That doesn’t mean he’ll beat Donald Trump. But his nomination won’t tear the party apart. Denying him the nomination just might.
Sanders is capable of unifying his party’s rank and file, if Democratic elites let him.