Sanders is beating them all as the rest slug each other
Bernie Sanders is for real, his opposition is fractured, and President Trump is delighted to play the Democrats against one another.
The Vermont senator’s sweep of Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday is no proof he can win in November. But it does reveal a campaign that can back what for many voters is a trusted brand with the political machinery to close the sale.
While Sanders’ more moderate opponents wring their hands, they might consider that Sanders built this brand in part through a series of specific promises: single-payer health care, free college, a Green New Deal, universal childcare and much more.
Sanders may not have explained in detail how he’d pay for all this, let alone, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., pointed out, how he’d shepherd it through Congress. But Sanders understands the hunger for specific forms of relief within a significant part of the Democratic electorate, particularly the young who suffered most from the fallout of the Great Recession.
In Mike Bloomberg’s business world, it might be said that Sanders offers a lot of “deliverables” — putting aside whether they can be delivered. Warren’s early “I have a plan for that” appeal made her competitive in this segment of the political marketplace, but she lost much of that edge after wavering on Medicare-for-all. In Nevada, Warren ran a distant fourth, behind Sanders, former vice president Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Sanders’ deliverables mattered in Nevada — and his performance there confirmed that in a multicandidate field, he can keep winning simply by holding enough of the 2016 vote he assembled against Hillary Clinton.
His showing among Latino voters is a good example. Four years ago and again on Saturday, Sanders won about half the ballots cast by Latinos. This time, he outpaced Biden, his nearest competitor, by 3-to-1.
Because so many Latinos think of themselves as moderates or conservatives — roughly 40% of them labeled themselves this way in Nevada, according to the Edison Entrance Poll — their strong support for expansive government programs and economic progressivism is often ignored. Sanders never made that mistake. He thus carried even self-described moderate and conservative Latinos by better than 2-to-1.
A key test for Sanders will come on Super Tuesday in Texas, where Latinos rejected him in 2016 for Clinton. But here is the dilemma for the divided moderates: Roughly twothirds of Nevada caucus-goers said their priority was to find a candidate who could beat Trump, and Sanders received less than a quarter of their preferences. But the rest of that beat-Trump-aboveall crowd was relatively evenly scattered.
The splintering of the non-Sanders vote may get worse. Warren could not take full advantage of her strong debate performance last week because so many Nevada votes were cast early, so she’ll soldier on. And Bloomberg’s spending for Super Tuesday guarantees him a share of the middle-ground vote, despite his ineffectual response to Warren’s pummeling.
Sanders is in no mood to pull this fractured party together. Trump would love to tie the entire Democratic Party to “crazy socialism” — but he’d also relish attacking “the Democratic establishment” for denying Sanders. What petrifies Democrats is that not one of their candidates, on the left or in the middle, has found a way out of this box.