Why Bernie Sanders Should Lose and Why He Is Losing
Excellent article from VOX:
Sanders can’t lead the Democrats if his campaign treats them like the enemy
What Bernie needs to learn from Biden.
By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Mar 4, 2020, 1:13am EST
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have been running very different kinds of campaigns, built on very different ambitions. Biden’s been running to lead the Democratic Party more or less as it exists today. Sanders, by contrast, has sought to lead a political revolution that will upend not just the Democratic Party but American politics more broadly.
On Super Tuesday, Sanders’s political revolution didn’t turn out, but the Democratic Party did.
“A big problem for the Sanders theory of this race is that when turnout is high, he wins,” writes Dave Weigel, a political reporter at the Washington Post. “Turnout is way up, but the most reliable new voters are Biden-curious suburbanites.” As election analyst Dave Wasserman noted, the new voters Sanders promised to pull into the party didn’t emerge, and as a result, he’s lost ground from 2016.
Dave Wasserman
✔@Redistrict
Sanders's pledge to bring new voters into his movement seems fairly empty in the results we're seeing so far. His coalition has shrunk since 2016, not grown.
Sanders didn’t get wiped out on Tuesday night — far from it. He won Vermont, Utah, and Colorado (and likely California, though the final tallies won’t be reported for a while). But Biden surged unexpectedly to win Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Virginia — and as I write this, he’s narrowly favored to win Texas and Maine, too.
It’s not that Sanders is running a weak campaign. But he is, in a way, running the wrong campaign. He’s the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination — at least he was until tonight — but he’s still running as an insurgent. The political revolution was supposed to close the gap between these realities: If Sanders could turn out enough new voters, he could sweep away the Democratic establishment and build his own party in its place. But going all the way back to Iowa, that strategy failed. Sanders won as a Democrat, not a revolutionary, and he needed to pivot to a strategy that would unite the existing Democratic Party around him.
Continues here
Re: Why Bernie Sanders Should Lose and Why He Is Losing
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by luke32:
Excellent article from VOX:
Sanders can’t lead the Democrats if his campaign treats them like the enemy
What Bernie needs to learn from Biden.
By
Ezra Klein@ezraklein Mar 4, 2020, 1:13am EST
I'd say Bernie could have learned more from Warren - someone who was pretty closely ideologically aligned with him on most issues, but has actually had success as a Senator...and who actually bothered to create very detailed plans for most issues - both on the legislative aspect AND the financing of those proposals side.
Now of course, Warren lost big....I'd argue for 3 main reasons. Bernie had the cult...and 6 years or so of fundraising and building infrastructure, she's a woman, and...she's just not a very charismatic person.
Still, for anyone who believed in Sanders ideas... I'd argue Warren was the one who had a chance to bring them to fruition
Re: Why Bernie Sanders Should Lose and Why He Is Losing
it is a dilemma:
how to unite the party
while veering away from the bought/sold corruption of the Dems establishment that gives billionaires entry
though uniting against the platform which actually gives the 99% programs that the rest of the first world have -
and calling that radical.
jude
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by luke32:
Re: Why Bernie Sanders Should Lose and Why He Is Losing
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Jude Iam:
it is a dilemma:
how to unite the party
while veering away from the bought/sold corruption of the Dems establishment that gives billionaires entry
though uniting against the platform which actually gives the 99% programs that the rest of the first world have -
and calling that radical.
jude
Bernie is an Independent and not a Democrat. He never wanted to unite, he wants a revolution. Or that's what he says.
