I am having trouble watching MSNBC lately. Not because I am tired of hearing about Trump’s latest outrages. I’m tired of hearing the hosts and pundits predictions of what will happen to the Democratic Party in November if Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination.
First, no one knows what will happen in November regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination. In 2016 many of these same pundits told us we needed a moderate to beat Trump. However, in 2016 it was clear to anyone paying attention that key segments of the voting population were fed up with the status quo from the moderates of both political parties and were willing to risk any kind of radical change to get rid of the politics and policies that clearly were not helping them. Remember Trump’s challenge to those voters: “What do you have to lose?”
The difference in 2016 was that the Republican elite lost control of their party’s nomination while the Democratic elite managed to get their moderate choice. Had the Republican elite won and they too had run a moderate instead of Trump we could probably have tossed a coin to predict the winner, the voter turnout in that election would have been low, and things would have stayed the same or gotten worse for middle and lower income families. As it was, Trump, promising to shake things up and drain the swamp won, then promptly filled it with snakes and alligators.
What the TV hosts, pundits, and Democratic Party elites are demonstrating with their Sanders doomsday comments is exactly what turns voters off. If the majority of Democratic voters are favoring, and may ultimately select Sanders, who are these elites and pundits to say that he can’t bring together a broad enough coalition to win? What they are really saying is: we don’t believe in democracy because we know better than the voters.
The irony is that these are the same Democratic voices that lament the low voter turnout among minorities and younger voters that Democrats need to win. We will see in South Carolina and on Super-Tuesday, but in Nevada the minority and younger voters are exactly the groups that turned out in larger numbers than ever to support Sanders. In fact they got him close to 50% in a crowded field of opponents. Now consider this: If they turned out for the primary to support Sanders they likely will vote in November to support him again, since people are more likely to skip a primary election than a general election.
These very voters that are broadening the base also are more attuned to the issues and policies and pay less attention to empty labels than their older, white, counterparts. Trump and the Republicans are going to try to pin the socialist label on all Democrats regardless of who gets the Democratic nomination in an attempt to divert attention away from the issues and policies. They have to because for virtually all the key issues more than 60% of the voting public (in some cases much more) agrees with the basic Democratic positions on those issues. Additionally, for many of those issues a majority in the Republican Party agree with the Democratic positions. If voters in your own party agree with the opposition’s solutions over yours the only recourse is to try to scare them by labeling the opposing solutions “socialist.”
Then there is Medicare-for-All, the position that the moderate Democrats claim is too radical for many voters. While there is only one data point so far, the Nevada results showed us that even when the union leadership actively lobbied for their Cadillac health care plan over Sander’s Medicare-for-All, the majority of the union members chose Sanders and his plan. This data point, at least, does not support the Democratic moderates’ position that Sander’s plan is too radical for the working class who already have employer-based health care.
Perhaps it is time for the elites in the Democratic Party and their pundits to move into the 21st Century and start recognizing that, like it or not, their power is moving away toward the generations coming up.
While I too think that a Sanders candidacy is a risk, I also think any one of the moderate candidates poses at least as big a risk for the reasons stated above.
We are at a point in the history of our country where many things are in flux and every choice is a risk. No one can predict the 2020 outcome with any certainty for any of the candidates, least of all the Democratic elites and pundits who got it wrong in 2016 and are trying to convince us to make the same bet again.