Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Be sure to read this! Bernie has never been subjected to the Republican Fear Machine. He would be a uniquely target-rich nominee, and the 2018 results cited in this article demonstrate that the ultra-progressive platform, which may or may not be good public policy, is not a winning agenda except in deep blue districts, such as ours.
Note that none of the newly elected "squad" congresswomen flipped their district. Progressive candidates didn't flip any districts. It was the moderates that flipped districts and states! Flip them first (including the presidency!) and then move it further left.
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Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
By Jonathan Chait
Jan 28, 2020
In the field of political forecasting, almost nothing is a matter of certainty, and almost everything is a matter of probability. If Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders — who currently leads the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, and appears to be consolidating support among the party’s progressive wing, while its moderates remain splintered — his prospects against Donald Trump in November would be far from hopeless. Polarization has given any major party nominee a high enough floor of support that the term “unelectable” has no real place in the discussion. What’s more, every candidate in the race brings a suite of their own liabilities Trump could exploit.
His vulnerabilities
are enormous
and untested.
That said, the totality of the evidence suggests Sanders is an extremely, perhaps uniquely, risky nominee. His vulnerabilities are enormous and untested. No party nomination, with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a Sanders-led ticket would bring. To nominate Sanders would be insane.
Sanders has gleefully discarded the party’s conventional wisdom that it has to pick and choose where to push public opinion leftward, adopting a comprehensive left-wing agenda, some of which is popular, and some of which is decidedly not. Positions in the latter category include replacing all private health insurance with a government plan, banning fracking, letting prisoners vote, decriminalizing the border, giving free health care to undocumented immigrants, and eliminating ICE. (I am only listing Sanders positions that are intensely unpopular. I am not including positions, like national rent control and phasing out all nuclear energy, that I consider ill-advised but which probably won’t harm him much with voters.)
Not every one of these unpopular stances is unique to Sanders. Some have won the endorsement of rival candidates, and many of them have been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, Sanders’s closest rival. In fact, Sanders seem to have overtaken Warren in part because she spent most of 2019 closing the ideological gap between the two candidates, which made Democratic Party elites justifiably skeptical about her electability, thereby kneecapping her viability as a trans-factional candidate. Sanders probably wasn’t trying to undermine Warren by luring her into adopting all his policies, but it has worked out quite well for him, and poorly for her.
But Warren at least tries to couch her positions in a framework of reforming and revitalizing capitalism that is intended to reassure ideologically skeptical voters. Sanders combines unpopular program specifics in the unpopular packaging of “socialism.” The socialist label has grown less unpopular, a trend that has attracted so much media attention that many people have gotten the impression “socialism” is actually popular, which is absolutely not the case.
Compounding those vulnerabilities is a long history of radical associations. Sanders campaigned for the Socialist Workers’ Party and praised communist regimes. Obviously, Republicans call every Democratic nominee a “socialist.” But it’s one thing to have the label thrown at you by the opposition, another for it to be embraced willingly, and yet another thing altogether to have a web of creepy associations that make it child’s play for the opposition to paint your program as radical and dangerous. Viewing these attacks in isolation, and asking whether voters will care about Bernie’s views on the Cold War, misses the way they will be used as a stand-in to discredit his entire worldview. Nobody “cared” how Michael Dukakis looked in a tank, and probably not many voters cared about Mitt Romney’s dismissive remarks about the 47 percent, but both reinforced larger attack narratives. Vintage video of Bernie palling around with Soviet communists will make for an almost insultingly easy way for Republicans to communicate the idea that his plans to expand government are radical.
Sanders has never faced an electorate where these vulnerabilities could be used against him. Nor, for that matter, has he had to defend some of his bizarre youthful musings (such as his theory that sexual repression causes breast cancer) or the suspicious finances surrounding his wife’s college. Democrats are rightfully concerned about attacks on Hunter Biden’s nepotistic role at Burisma, but Sanders is going to have to defend equally questionable deals, like the $500,000 his wife’s university paid for a woodworking program run by his stepdaughter.
***
It’s impossible to measure the weight all these liabilities would bear upon a Sanders candidacy. The quality of a candidate is not the only, or even the main, determinate of election outcomes, and having popular views is only one factor in the quality of a candidate. Still, political science has generally found that, all things being equal, the electorate tends to punish ideologically extreme candidates. You can peruse studies finding such a conclusion here, here, and here. Again, none of this says the more extreme candidate always loses, merely that extremism creates a handicap.
For obvious reasons, the Democratic Party’s left wing has always resisted this conclusion (as has the Republican Party’s right wing.) But Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat created an opportunity for the party’s left to promote an alternative theory for how the party could and should compete. It deemed Donald Trump’s win a sign that capitalism had created such distress that voters were now rejecting conventional politicians altogether and open to radical alternatives who might promise to smash the failing system. Indeed, by this reasoning, Democrats would do better, not worse, by nominating more left-wing candidates, who could distance themselves more credibly from the discredited Establishment.
Yet this theory has had two clear tests, and failed both of them spectacularly. Numerous activists and intellectuals in the Sanders orbit held up Jeremy Corbyn as proof of concept for his viability. Anticipating a Corbyn victory, they argued over and over that Corbyn was showing how socialism would attract and mobilize, not repel, voters. Corbyn is more extreme than Sanders, but Sanders enthusiasts themselves drew a connection between the two, and his massive defeat obviously casts serious doubt on the model he was supposed to vindicate.
A second example, closer to home, is even more relevant. In the months leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, the Democratic Party was the subject of bitter and widespread criticism from its left wing. The party’s strategy was to flip the House by recruiting moderate candidates who would avoid controversial left-wing positions and instead focus attention on Trump’s agenda, especially his effort to eliminate Obamacare. The left predicted the strategy would fail — only an inspiring progressive agenda could mobilize enough voters to win back the House.
“Their theory of the case is to recruit old white guys who are longtime Establishment insiders who will run on a boring agenda Democrats would have run on 20 years ago,” complained Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “The DCCC is doing it wrong,” insisted Democracy for America’s Neil Sroka. “In district after district, the national party is throwing its weight behind candidates who are out of step with the national mood,” proclaimed a long piece in the left-wing Intercept attacking the party’s House recruitment strategy, “The DCCC’s failure to understand the shifting progressive electorate is costing the party.” Zephyr Teachout was quoted saying, “Their strategy is stupid in the first place and bad for democracy, but then it’s really stupid because they have 26-year-olds sitting around who don’t know anything about the real world deciding which candidates should win.”
Ryan Cooper, a socialist columnist, cited the Intercept piece to ruminate just why the Democrats would advance such an obviously doomed strategy. “Their naked self-interest and bourgeoise ideology is camouflaged behind a technocratic facade of just doing ‘what it takes to win’ — but it’s a facade they generally believe wholeheartedly.” The Democratic plan was obviously doomed to fail, so perhaps their motivation was actually to enrich themselves and advance neoliberalism, while claiming it was a good strategy to win the House.Our Revolution went 0–22,
Justice Democrats went 0–16,
and Brand New Congress went 0–6
As we now know, it was a good strategy to win the House. Democrats flipped 40 seats. Tellingly, while progressives managed to nominate several candidates in red districts — Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Richard Ojeda in West Virginia, and many others — any one of whose victory they would have cited as proof that left-wing candidates can win Trump districts, not a single one of them prevailed in November. Our Revolution went 0–22, Justice Democrats went 0–16, and Brand New Congress went 0–6.* The failed technocratic 26-year-old bourgeoise shills who were doing it wrong somehow accounted for 100 percent of the party’s House gains.
Had Democrats failed to win back the House, their left-wing critics would have claimed vindication. Instead, the entire debate sank below the surface without a trace. Indeed, what happened instead was something peculiar. The leftists chose to focus on a handful of left-wing candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated center-left Democrats in deep-blue districts. The conservative media strategically elevated her in a bid to make AOC and her squad the party’s face. The mutual interest of the two sides made AOC the narrative center of the election. The fact that the party had just run a field experiment between two factions, and the moderate faction prevailed conclusively, was forgotten.
A Sanders campaign
seems almost designed
to play directly into
Trump’s message.
At this point there is hardly any serious evidence to believe that the best strategy to defeat Trump is to mobilize voters with a radical economic agenda. Public satisfaction with the economy is now at its highest point since the peak of the dot-com boom two decades ago. Trump has serious weaknesses of issues like health care, corruption, taxes, and the environment, and a majority of the public disapproves of Trump’s performance, but he does enjoy broad approval of his economic management. Therefore, his reelection strategy revolves around painting his opponents as radical and dangerous. You may not like me, he will argue, but my opponents are going to turn over the apple cart. A Sanders campaign seems almost designed to play directly into Trump’s message.
Whatever evidence might have supported a Sanders-esque populist strategy for Democrats after the 2016 election, it has since collapsed. But in the ideological hothouse of the Sanders world, no setbacks have been acknowledged, no rethinking has taken place, and the skeptics are dismissed as elitist neoliberal corporate shills, as ever. The project moves forward even as the key tests of its viability have all failed. Once enough energy has been invested in a cause, it has too much momentum to be abandoned. For the socialist left, which has no other standard-bearer to choose from, Bernie is too big to fail. The question is whether the Democratic Party, the only political force standing between Donald Trump and his authoritarian ambitions, will risk failing with him.
*The original figures referred to all 2018 races, but I’ve edited the number to limit it solely to House races, which is most directly relevant.
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
So how do you explain Sander's very high ranking in the upcoming Iowa primaries?? Iowa! Nobody is more surprised and baffled than I!
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Barry:
Be sure to read this! Bernie has never been subjected to the Republican Fear Machine. He would be a uniquely target-rich nominee, and the 2018 results cited in this article demonstrate that the ultra-progressive platform, which may or may not be good public policy, is not a winning agenda except in deep blue districts, such as ours.
Note that none of the newly elected "squad" congresswomen flipped their district. Progressive candidates didn't flip any districts. It was the moderates that flipped districts and states! Flip them first (including the presidency!) and then move it further left.
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...0_00-05-00.png
Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
By Jonathan Chait
Jan 28, 2020
.
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
It is indeed a puzzlement, Occi.
Another one is the fact that Trump actually said he liked Bernie Sanders (or didn't mind him or words to that effect). Sort of makes me wonder what Trump thinks he has on Sanders should it come to that, or perhaps it was Trump's attempted kiss-of-death to the Sanders campaign.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by occihoff:
So how do you explain Sander's very high ranking in the upcoming Iowa primaries?? Iowa! Nobody is more surprised and baffled than I!
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Another reason, as pointed out here (Washington Post), - hoping to pick off his followers if he falters. You won't pick them off if you alienate them by slamming Sanders..
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Damned if they do, doomed if they don’t: Why Sanders rivals don’t go negative
Democrats should worry about what happens when Republicans take the gloves off.
By Brendan Nyhan
Brendan Nyhan is a professor of government at Dartmouth College.
Jan. 30, 2020 at 6:27 a.m. PST
They’re damned if they do, doomed if they don’t, says political scientist
How do you warn your party that its potential nominee is vulnerable in a general election without sinking your own campaign? That question now confronts Democratic rivals of Bernie Sanders, who are realizing that the iconoclastic Vermont democratic socialist might really win the presidential nomination.
In recent days, Sanders has taken a narrow lead in early-state polls and betting markets. Though he attracts support from only a minority of Democratic voters, he could plausibly follow a Trump-like path to the nomination in which multiple other candidates doubt his viability and stay in the race to await his collapse, dividing the vote against him until it is too late.
One factor in
Sanders’s success
is how little scrutiny
he has faced from rivals One factor in Sanders’s success is how little scrutiny he has faced from rivals on the campaign trail and the debate stage. Media accounts that catalogue Sanders’s atypical history and decades-old comments are easy to find for anyone who cares to look. But no one knows how Sanders will fare when Democratic or Republican rivals attack him in a high-profile fashion, which, to this point, no one has seriously done.
Democrats face a classic collective-action problem. The party has a strong interest in publicly vetting Sanders before he becomes its nominee, but no candidate wants to be the one to go negative on him. Instead, as with Donald Trump’s Republican opponents in 2016, other Democratic candidates are seemingly hoping to pick off Sanders voters during the primary season, or at least attract their support in November, without doing the dirty work of criticizing his record. Attacks that appear to echo potential Republican talking points are especially likely to go unsaid. As a result, large numbers of voters may not learn about Sanders’s vulnerabilities and how they might be exploited in a general election until much later in the race.
Bernie Sanders may soon have to confront this anti-Semitic myth
The lack of scrutiny of Sanders dates back to 2016. Despite his long career in politics, Sanders was a little-known outsider before his presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton. His unexpectedly strong showing in that race made him a national figure with an unusually positive public image. Why? Few politicians ever criticized him. Sanders never seriously threatened Clinton’s hold on the nomination, so she mostly held her fire, preferring to try to keep his voters in the fold for November. Republicans largely withheld criticism as well, presumably appreciating his refusal to withdraw from the race and hoping to run against him rather than Clinton in the general election.
These attacks will come, however, if Sanders is the Democratic nominee. Any candidate will face attacks, of course, but for contenders like Sanders who have been insulated from previous criticism, the potential for damage is especially great.
For instance, Sen. John McCain, with his reputation as a bipartisan maverick, seemed highly electable during President George W. Bush’s second term — the rare Republican whom even Democrats viewed favorably. But the polling numbers he enjoyed overstated his appeal as a party nominee. Once he took the positions required to win the 2008 GOP nomination and came under fire from Democrats, his public image became essentially that of a generic Republican, which helped enable his defeat by Barack Obama.
Similarly, Clinton had unusually strong favorability numbers entering Obama’s second term as a result of her tenure as secretary of state, which removed her from the political fray. Once she began her presidential campaign, however, attacks from Republicans and critical media coverage of controversies like her email practices and her handling of the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, helped drive her unfavorable ratings back up to near-record levels.
Sanders starts from a weaker position; his candidate favorability ratings have come back to earth, declining in CNN polls, for example, from 59 percent favorable and 35 unfavorable in April 2017 to 43 percent favorable and 44 percent unfavorable in December 2019. They could decline still further given the weaknesses in his background, which are little known to wide swaths of voters. How many Americans know that Sanders is not just an avowed democratic socialist but a former supporter of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which wanted to abolish the federal defense budget and supported “solidarity” with revolutionary regimes like Iran’s and Cuba’s? Do people know that he spoke positively about Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution (“a very profound and very deep revolution”) and even praised the Soviet Union and criticized the United States during a honeymoon trip to the U.S.S.R.? Could Sanders successfully distance himself from these statements, or would the public perceive them as disqualifying? No one knows, but the downside risk for Democrats has no precedent among front-runners in contemporary American political history.
Moreover, though Democratic candidates don’t want to make this point in the primary race, attacks on Sanders’s praise of socialist and communist governments are likely to be especially damaging when paired with criticism of his policy proposals as big-government socialism. Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who once assiduously sought to prevent Sanders from getting to her left, has realized the risks of Sanders’s plan to move all health care to a single-payer system and has started to edge away from the idea. Only 20 percent of voters — and just 37 percent of Democrats — say they would be enthusiastic about voting for a socialist for president.
the penalty for
extremism is real.
Labels like “socialist” are abstract and poorly understood by most voters, of course; some of Sanders’s policies are indeed popular. But the penalty for extremism is real. When ideologically extreme candidates narrowly defeat moderates for a party nomination, the political scientists Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson find, they perform even more poorly in the general election, in part because they inspire the other party’s base more than their own. For instance, former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, a hard-right conservative, barely beat the Republican governor in the 2018 gubernatorial primary before losing the general election to a Democrat by five percentage points.
Trump might seem to be a counterexample, but Sanders will struggle to replicate his success. It’s true that Trump won the White House despite having unusually high unfavorable ratings and a personal background that many voters considered disqualifying. Like Trump, Sanders would surely benefit from the strong pull of party loyalty, which can help counter the doubts of some potential supporters. But Trump had a key advantage: Voters in 2016 saw him as unusually moderate, which helped him overcome those record unfavorable numbers. Though the public now sees Trump as more conservative than in the last election, it views Sanders as even more distant from the center.
Besides his socialist positions, Sanders also has a long paper trail of writings and statements about sex, gender and race that have received relatively little attention but are likely to provoke far more controversy if he wins the nomination. In one 1969 essay, for instance, Sanders wrote that the “manner in which you bring up your daughter with regard to sexual attitudes may very well determine whether or not she will develop breast cancer, among other things.” And does his diverse coalition of young supporters know he once compared workers in Vermont to slaves?
Americans tend to hate negative ads and campaigning, but they can be informative to voters. If other candidates continue to pull their punches, Democrats may not learn more about Sanders until the whole country finds out this fall.
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by occihoff:
So how do you explain Sander's very high ranking in the upcoming Iowa primaries?? Iowa! Nobody is more surprised and baffled than I!
Ah yes. Because Iowa *must* be rednecks. Deplorables. Fly over country... Have you *ever* been to Iowa? Been there in the past few years? Because there have always been a lot of good people in Iowa. And there's a surprising amount of amazing food/music/beer/culture going on in some places there- with a much lower cost of living and a much more friendly climate to business in CA.
If you will remember... in 2016 Sanders/Clinton polled neck and neck. If memory serves Clinton won by lest then a 1/4% point. Then lost to Trump by 10%+ . And her loss was in no small point reflected in a poll out this week- that 52% of Sanders supporters will not support the D nominee if it's not Sanders,
We also have some numbers both from the last election...and this cycle- on the number of Sanders supporters who will vote for Trump.
We here in CA seem to want to believe that Sanders supporters are all on board with our reality of Sanders. Having grown up on the east coast... and having spent 2 weeks back there over the holidays... it ain't so. Many of the Sanders (and to a lesser extent Warren) supporters in this country don't really agree with huge chunks of the platform. They just hate the federal government. And want to be left alone to live their lives. A lot *will* vote for sanders in the primary... just to say %^&( you to the democrats. But unless the economy takes a turn before the election... many of the young voters won't vote as usual. And many of the older voters will vote for Trump because their communities are doing better than they have in 20 years.
AND...I'd recommend everyone read up on what a caucus is. I lived in a caucus state most of my adult life...so never "voted" in the primaries. Basically... a caucus is a bunch of people getting together in a room for hours...a lot of yelling and screaming, then they divide off into groups...which are counted. It's a system that largely excludes introverts. Families with children. People with very busy lives. People who care about politics but aren't fanatical. People who care about politics but aren't willing to be that involved. Basically you get a bunch of *very* politically active people... often on the extremes, who are either older, childless, or wealthy enough to have others take care of their kids while they go caucus.
It's a pretty messed up and undemocratic system IMHO. And I'd watch WA this year- a general left but also libertarian state with a strong conservative population as well that has done away with the caucus system this year in favor of a traditional primary as we here know it.
EDIT TO ADD It's also worth noting that Ted Cruz beat Trump by over 3% in Iowa. in 2016.. Trump was ~1% above Rubio there.
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by occihoff:
So how do you explain Sander's very high ranking in the upcoming Iowa primaries?? Iowa! Nobody is more surprised and baffled than I!
First, while it looks like Sanders may well win Iowa with 30% of the vote, that also means that 70% of Democrats want someone else.
Secondly, Sanders has not had to withstand any sustained incoming friendly fire (although it does seem there was some DNC foul play in 2016, and there may be more coming in 2020), let alone the Republican onslaught. Being that he is the new front runner, it looks like Bernie is about to have his time in the barrel from the Democrats.
Surely the Berniecrats will scream UNFAIR, but it was also the Berniecrats that that take endless pot shot at Mayor Pete and Biden and the rest of the corporatist centrists. Let see how he does.
As the article points out, Bernie is a particularly rich target. To pick just one issue, Bernie wants to raise taxes to pay for Medicare for All (whether you want it or not :wink:) plus he wants to give free health care to illegal immigrants. Sure it is a humane policy, but it is in an unpopular one and ripe for the Republicans whipping up hysteria about.
"Bernie want to raise your taxes to provide free health care to illegal immigrants"
and
"we'll be swamped by hoards of illegal immigrants coming here for free health care" ,
[ my made-up Republican talking points :waccosun:].
Both of which are arguably true, politically devastating, and the second of which (hoards) is a genuinely a serious problem, IMO!
That's just picking one of his general election (not so much primary) serious weak spot. There are plenty more. There really are a persuadable middle/independant voters that we could/will lose, that won't be compensated enough by an increased youth voting rate. Again see the article for 2018 election success in flipping districts for moderates vs progresives.
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Barry:
....Sanders has not had to withstand any sustained incoming friendly fire (although it does seem there was some DNC foul play in 2016....
While there was, arguably, "DNC foul play" in 2016.... we should take this is context. We are after all talking about a career politician, who after over 25 years at that point was routinely ranked as one of the worst congress critters- he accomplished nothing in a quarter century and made basically no allies. During this time he shunned the DNC. But when he got old and had grandiose visions of obtaining the highest office in the land... then he suddenly wanted the DNC's power, networks, etc, etc.
Be real people- if someone has told you to f&*k off for 25 years...but then suddenly wants to be part of your circle for their own selfish purposes... This pretty much sealed it for me with Bernie- if he truly had any integrity... he'd run as the socialist democrat he is. Perot almost pulled it off as as a 3rd party candidate.
But of course- Bernies a career politician and a hypocrite. Besides this just look into his dark money, ahem, "non profit organization" he created then conveniently distanced himself from- which was a cunning creation of a super pac that doesn't even have to play by the few rules a real super pac does- "Our Revolution"
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
I plan to vote for Bernie, as do many of my friends. I always vote on the basis of what my gut, heart, and mind tell me. Saying that Bernie does not have "any integrity," as below, is ridiculous. Please consider voting for him and contributing to his campaign, as I have. He would be likely to have a women as Vice-President. If he dies in office, we would have our first woman President. Yea! Or she may get the publicity and run for President next time. GO BERNIE GO!
I'm 75-years old and do not appreciate those Americans who are anti-elder. In other places where I have lived, Hawaii, people look up to elders.
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by SonomaPatientsCoop:
...if he truly had any integrity... he'd run as the socialist democrat he is. Perot almost pulled it off as as a 3rd party candidate....
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
On what planet does Sanders not take "sustained incoming friendly fire"? Although perhaps the qualifier "friendly" makes this a statement with some association with reality. Has there ever been a main stream media report the least bit friendly to Sanders? Of course, mostly he is ignored.
Regarding health care for undocumented immigrants, 20 million / 400 million is about 5 per cent. And most people who are predisposed to support Medicare for all, I would posit, would be OK with adding that much to the bill to get everyone covered. And, in fact, socialized medicine should be a big cost saver over all, so the extra small cost to add illegals seems like a red herring to me -- symbolic to some but not important to people who like single payer. And, in general, and certainly when compared to Warren, Sanders has not made a fetish of identity/wokester politics. Biden certainly has done a lot of sucking up to separate identity groupings where Sanders tries to be fair to all as a matter of practice.
Here's an article suggesting Bernie will do well with independent voters:
Why Bernie Sanders Is Electable, Too
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Barry:
...Sanders has not had to withstand any sustained incoming friendly fire ...
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
My wife and I staunchly support Sanders for president. We donate $25 every month to the Sanders campaign through an automatic bank transaction.
Sanders is the only candidate who can defeat Trump. Biden presents the certainty that Trump will be re-elected. Pete Boot has been passed up by billionaire Bloomberg, who has bought his 8% points starting from zero just a couple or so months ago; that's bad, bad ju-ju and he will lose to Trump.
The only path to the White House is through a Sanders candidacy. No one else will be able to do it.
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
More mud for the water.
(from SLATE magazine)
Not So Fast on the New Poll That Says Bernie Can Beat Trump
“Socialist” is still a problem.
By WILLIAM SALETAN
FEB 01, 20208:39 PM
Would people who don’t like socialism vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders against President Donald Trump? That’s a big question for Iowa Democrats as they prepare to caucus on Monday night. Socialism is consistently unpopular in polls. Even many Democrats say they wouldn’t vote for a socialist. If that makes Sanders unelectable, Iowans would be foolish to propel him toward the nomination.
A new poll taken by Data for Progress, a left-leaning organization, casts doubt on this criticism of Sanders. DFP hasn’t posted the survey or its methodology, but it released some of the data to Matthew Yglesias, my former Slate colleague. In a writeup in Vox, Yglesias presents the numbers with care and circumspection, reading them as evidence that Sanders could overcome the socialist label. I read them differently. The DFP poll tells us more about Trump than about Sanders. And its fits the theory that Democrats are better off nominating a different candidate.
The survey, taken between Jan. 9 and Jan. 19, posed three versions of a standard ballot test. One question asked how you’d vote “if the candidates were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.” The second version added partisan cues, asking how you’d vote “if the candidates were Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Donald Trump.” The third version asked how you’d vote if the candidates were “Democrat Bernie Sanders, who wants to tax the billionaire class to help the working class,” and “Republican Donald Trump, who says Sanders is a socialist who supports a government takeover of healthcare and open borders.”
The three versions yielded similar results. In the first scenario, respondents chose Sanders over Trump, 47 percent to 41 percent. (Vox doesn’t say whether the respondents were adults or registered voters, but DFP has generally polled registered voters.) In the second scenario, they chose Sanders by narrower margin, 45 percent to 43 percent. It’s possible that partisan cues helped Trump or hurt Sanders. It’s also possible that the difference was just random variation.
On the third version of the question—the one that mentioned socialism—respondents still chose Sanders, 47 percent to 42 percent. That’s almost identical to the first version. From this, Yglesias infers that “affixing that label to Sanders doesn’t really shift polling at all.” In its headline, Vox declares, “Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist.”
That’s a comforting conclusion. But it doesn’t quite match the survey. The question didn’t ask whether people would vote for Sanders when you remind them that he’s a socialist. It asked whether they’d vote for Sanders if Trump called Sanders a socialist. In the latest Fox News poll, 58 percent of voters said Trump wasn’t honest or trustworthy. Only 38 percent said he was. So when you tell respondents that Trump has called somebody a socialist, most of them won’t assume that person is a socialist.
Yglesias has a theory to explain why the “socialist” version of DFP’s question produced no effect.
“Republicans have been characterizing Democratic Party support for higher taxes and a more generous welfare state as ‘socialism’ for a long time,” he notes. This “may have somewhat deadened the argument.” In a subheadline, Vox puts this point in colloquial terms: Republicans are “the political party that cried wolf.”
That’s a good theory. It implies that Trump would have trouble persuading voters that a self-styled progressive pragmatist, such as former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, or former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, is a socialist. It would be Trump’s word—which most people don’t trust—against the word of the accused candidate. But if Sanders were the nominee, the claim would be conceded. Sanders calls himself a socialist. When the wolf says he’s a wolf, you don’t need to trust the shepherd boy.
In this way, the DFP survey fits the larger case against Sanders. If voters discount Trump’s allegations of socialism, it’s possible—but unlikely, given the findings of other polls—that they don’t care about socialism. It’s also possible that they dislike socialism but prefer Sanders anyway. But the simplest explanation is that they don’t believe Trump. They’re not going to accept that the Democratic nominee is a socialist unless he says so himself.
Sanders doesn’t just embrace the label. He backs it up with a long history of Marxism. And he’s the only major candidate who insists on abolishing private health insurance and replacing it with a government monopoly. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who initially shared his position, has since deferred the idea of taking over the health insurance market.) If you want to test how Sanders would fare in a general election, you can’t just tell voters that Trump calls Sanders a socialist. You have to tell them what Sanders has said and done.
Yglesias believes that Sanders’ performance as a candidate in Vermont supports an optimistic reading of the DFP survey. “Sanders consistently does a bit better in elections for his Senate seat than you would expect from the state’s baseline party lean,” he observes. But winning in Vermont is very different from winning a presidential election. According to Pew data, Vermont is 35 percent liberal, 32 percent moderate, and only 30 percent conservative. The United States, as a whole, leans the other way: 36 percent conservative, 33 percent moderate, and only 24 percent liberal. Wisconsin is 41 percent conservative, 36 percent moderate, and only 19 percent liberal. A minor liability in Vermont can be fatal in Wisconsin.
The good news for Sanders is that DFP’s survey dispels the worst-case scenario. The poll could have found that if Trump were to call Sanders a socialist, most people would vote against Sanders. It didn’t. Trump’s accusation, by itself, isn’t decisive. The question for Democrats is whether to nominate a candidate who will concede that accusation—or one who will fight it.
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
In analyzing whether people believe Trump's calling Sanders a socialist has an effect on their voting, the poster seems to treat the questions as if the respondents had not watched any of the debates or had no other knowledge of Sanders including all the negative media. Because in the debates he was very clear about his plans for socialized medicine and his calling himself and the other candidates calling him a democratic socialist, and the media certainly hasn't been shy about it either. More likely that third poll question merely recalled to the respondents' minds what they already know about Sanders, and the result of the poll shows they prefer him even more when they're reminded what he stands for.
Re. those Democrats who wouldn't vote for "Medicare For All": polls show that the largest identifiable group o Democrats that doesn't support Sanders are older people. Almost all my friends, including myself, are well into Medicare age, and I have yet to talk to anyone who wants to give up her Medicare and go out and get some private health insurance. Perhaps we need to suggest to them that other people need it as much as they do. It may be the case that those younger folks have not paid as much into Medicare with their Social Security taxes as we older folks, but they a) will pay for with their taxes, and b) they want to do that, and c) we can see that they'll be better off if they do so.
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Posted in reply to the post by luke32:
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Not So Fast on the New Poll That Says Bernie Can Beat Trump...
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
This election has to be an anyone but Trump event.
Splitting up the votes for ideal hopes is going turn into a tragedy.
I can't imagine any candidate out there who would be worse for President than what we have now.
All parties unite into the "Anyone But Trump Party"
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Be real, SPC! If Bernie ran without the backing of the money and establishment of the Democratic Party, in our system he'd get nowhere fast. I appreciate his guts for standing up all alone for Democratic Socialism in a country in which "socialism" has been so demonized by the political Establishment. And in spite of this courageous political unconventionality he has been repeatedly re-elected by his voters. Also, note that even without the backing of the Democratic Party he gave Clinton a hell of a run for her money!
Oy, I hope you are not one of those die-hard "never Sanders" who will vote for Trump if Sanders gets the Democratic nomination!
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Posted in reply to the post by SonomaPatientsCoop:
... Bernie- if he truly had any integrity... he'd run as the socialist democrat he is. ...
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Kudos to you, Valley Oak! But I'm a bit shocked that you believe that Sanders is the only candidate who can defeat Trump. It would be most depressing if after all that has happened in the last 3+ years Trump is really that popular. I keep hearing that he has a solid base of support in the 40+% range, which is depressing enough.
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Posted in reply to the post by Valley Oak:
...The only path to the White House is through a Sanders candidacy. No one else will be able to do it...
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Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Sad to Say - And, much as I appreciate Bernie - this is the Reality
Re: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Michael Moore has been hosting a podcast site for several months now, putting out 2-3 podcasts per week. He insists it's not just a "Bernie site", but because he's been working on Sanders' campaign, until yesterday spending weeks in Iowa, it's been about Bernie a lot. Some of the podcasts are interviews and some are just him talking, varying in length from 15 minutes to an hour or so. I have found them informative, and, as a Bernie supporter who sometimes becomes discouraged, inspirational. I highly recommend them for those of us who tend to like Bernie but wonder if it makes sense to be supporting him. The latest is a 43 minute talk about the Iowa caucus problems and other challenges the Sanders campaign faces. The one before is an 83 minutes on the same subject and includes an interview with Naomi Klein.
Many of my acquaintances who seem like likely podcast users do not listen to them, and I think it's mostly because they don't know what they are or how to use them. If you're like them, here's a quick explanation. Podcasts are sound files, usually set up as "mp3" files, which can be streamed online on downloaded to your computer or phone for later listening, perhaps when you don't have an internet connection. On your phone, you would get an app. For iphones it's easy: the ipod app, which you already have. There are many for android phones; one I use is AntennaPod, which is free and has no advertising or tracking and is pretty easy to use (important because some have so many extra features you don't know where to begin). Typically, the steps to go through, which sound complicated but quickly become routine, are 1) search for a podcast site, in this case "Rumble with Michael Moore", 2) "subscribe" to the site, which means that the app will then list for you the podcasts available for that particular site, from which you can then 3) choose to stream or download the "episode" or show that you want to listen to now or later.
The advantages of using one of these podcast apps, rather than just downloading an mp3 file from somewhere and listening to it somehow, are that it's easy for you to organize and find the sound files, it's easy to play them (right in the app), and, if you don't want to listen all at one time you can come back later and pick up where you left off. You may think you already can find files to download and you already have a way to listen to them, but I've done it both ways, and getting a podcast app is much easier by far.
Anyway, "Rumble with Michael Moore" is the site I started talking about. Here are some links, ones you can visit from your desk or laptop, because on your phone you should just search for it in your podcast app:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas...e/id1490354763
https://www.podparadise.com/Podcast/1490354763 (can listen online or download mp3 file to computer--gives the file a funny name--you'll probably want to rename to something descriptive unless you plan to listen to it immediately)
Going to one of these sites will give you an idea of the subject matter treated. You could listen to some online, and then see if you want to subscribe on your phone for more convenient listening, or maybe you like to sit at your computer and listen to something.
Sorry to go on at such length about the technical side, but my hope is that more people can listen to good information.
