Sanders Supporters: "Never Biden"
Disgusting.
A 'Never Biden' movement vows not to vote for Joe
The ex-veep has work to do to win over Bernie's base.
Four in five of Bernie Sanders' backers in Michigan said they'd be dissatisfied with Joe Biden as the Democratic standard bearer. |
By DAVID SIDERS and HOLLY OTTERBEIN
03/13/2020 04:30 AM EDT
On Tuesday night, Joe Biden's campaign was celebrating his latest primary night triumph.
By Wednesday morning, #NeverBiden, #WriteinBernie and #DemExit2020 hashtags began trending on Twitter.
There's no question it’s been a banner two weeks for Biden. But lurking in the background of his sudden ascension to all-but-presumptive nominee is evidence that at least some Bernie Sanders supporters might not migrate to him in November, weakening him in the general election.
The significance of the problem became apparent in the same string of primaries that put Biden on the cusp of the nomination.
In Michigan — a state critical to Democrats’ efforts to reclaim their general election footing in the Rust Belt — just 2 of 5 Sanders backers said they would vote Democratic in November, regardless of who became the nominee, according to exit polls. Four in five said they'd be dissatisfied with Biden as the Democratic standard-bearer.
Though it's unclear how widespread or adamant the #NeverBiden contingent is — will they really stay home when the alternative is another four years of President Donald Trump? — the misgivings at least put the Biden campaign on notice that it has significant work to do to bring along Sanders' base.
There is certainly anecdotal evidence that for many progressives, Biden represents everything they dislike about mainstream Democratic politics. On “The Young Turks,” which draws millions of viewers, Krystal Ball, the former MSNBC host, said she couldn’t vote for Trump.
“But you can leave it blank,” she said, referring to the November ballot.
Ball said she is an "undecided voter" because "if they always can say, 'Look, you've got to vote for us no matter what, you've got no other choice,' then they're always going to treat us like this."
Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean, said that in their overtures to Sanders’ supporters, Democrats have “time, Trump and hopefully Bernie himself on our side.”
However, he said, “It’s a huge challenge.”
The November election is almost eight months away, and unlike in 2016, Sanders’ supporters don't have the hard feelings of superdelegates — the party bigwigs who clinched the nomination for Hillary Clinton — to overcome. This year, Sanders’ momentum was blunted not by those insiders but by black voters in the South and, following his victory in South Carolina, by the broader electorate.
Polls show Biden is also viewed more favorably now than Hillary Clinton was in 2016.
“At the end of the day, it’s Biden or Trump,” said Boyd Brown, a former South Carolina lawmaker and former Democratic National Committee member. “They’ll turn out.”
Still, some Sanders supporters see the consolidation of moderate presidential candidates and other elected officials around Biden as the establishment asserting its power over the grassroots. Trump has happily stoked the divide, declaring that the Democratic primary is “rigged” against Sanders, just as he did four years ago.
“The rationale for us is that our votes need to be earned and that we’ve been taken for granted, and the party never moves to us,” said Alyson Metzger, a 54-year-old writer and progressive activist in New York City who supports Sanders. “If they install Joe Biden, I will not vote for Biden. … This is not democratic what’s happening in the Democratic primary.”
For Metzger, not voting for Biden is a matter of conscience. For others, it is also strategy. On “Never Biden” Facebook pages and in Twitter threads, some activists argue that if Trump is reelected, Democrats will fare better in the next midterms and that the party will be more likely to nominate a progressive in 2024. If Biden is elected, they see eight years of centrist governance.
“I can’t vote for Joe Biden,” said Bryan Quinby, a left-wing podcaster in Ohio, saying that “it feels like the party doesn’t want us — the people who were pushing for Bernie Sanders and were enthusiastic about it.”
Noting that his vote was “never guaranteed for the Democrats,” he said that in November, “I think it just means I don’t vote for president.”
Of particular concern for Biden are young voters, including Latinos — the segments of the electorate that Sanders carried by a large margin. Evan Weber, national political director of the Sunrise Movement, a group of young climate change activists, said it is a “real possibility” that young liberals will stay home in November.
While stressing that he would vote for any Democratic nominee, Weber argued, “There’s lots of narratives about why Hillary Clinton lost the election, but one undeniable one is that she did not mobilize the young people who turned out for Obama in 2012 and especially 2008. We hear a lot from pundits about Joe Biden being Obama’s vice president and him being able to recreate the Obama coalition, but one of the core and critical components of the coalition was young people.”
Exit polls from this year’s primaries have found a stark age divide between Sanders and Biden supporters. In Michigan, almost two-thirds of voters under 45 backed Sanders, while Biden captured a third of them. It was even more lopsided among voters under 30: 4 in 5 voted for Sanders.
But Sanders has failed to turn young people out at rates he’d hoped, and among those over 45, Biden won two-thirds and Sanders 1 in 4.
Sanders, speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, reiterated that Trump “must be defeated” and that he “will do everything in my power to make that happen,” even as he vowed to press ahead in the nominating contest.
But while acknowledging Biden’s expanding lead in the primary, he warned, “You cannot simply be satisfied by winning the votes of people who are older.”
John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, said Biden needs to make building a relationship with young voters “a central focus” of his campaign to beat Trump.
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Recent Democratic nominees who have lost, such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, received about 55 percent of the youth vote, he said, whereas former President Barack Obama won 60 percent or more in his two races. “It’s not a coincidence that the youth vote crossed or met that 60 percent threshold in each of those campaigns that were successful," he said.
In the 2016 primary, Sanders dominated the youth vote against Clinton, winning more than 80 percent of voters under 30 in some states. When the general election came, some leading left-wing voices backed the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
This cycle, Sanders has said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would support the nominee, regardless of who it is.
The consequence of even a portion of Sanders’ support evaporating instead of migrating to Biden could be significant in a close election against Trump. And the urgency for Biden to win over a constituency that Sanders has carried reliably has become plain in recent days.
Biden on Tuesday night thanked Sanders and his supporters directly “for their tireless passion,” saying, “We share a common goal. And together, we’ll defeat Donald Trump.”
The next day, his communications director, Kate Bedingfield, was on Fox News arguing that “there is a lot more that unites us than divides us."
"There is a whole lot about our message," she said, "that appeals to Sanders voters."
Re: Sanders Supporters: "Never Biden"
Another reason why Biden is better for the Democrats
A New Threat to the Senate GOP Majority -- Joe Biden
COMMENTARY
By A.B. Stoddard
March 13, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic, tanking markets and prompting fears of recession, has blindsided the 2020 campaign season, imperiling President Trump’s reelection. But Senate Republicans working to keep their majority in November are eyeing a different threat -- former Vice President Joe Biden’s sudden revival in the Democratic primary race.
Biden, a doubted and dismissed phoenix rocketing out of the ash pile, went from left-for-dead to presumptive nominee in an unprecedented 11-day sweep. Just before the South Carolina primary Republicans had already begun celebrating the hoped-for nomination of Sen. Bernie Sanders -- and according to all the polls, Democratic voters were poised to help them. With Sanders as the nominee, House Republicans could hope to take the majority back, and Senate Republicans could preserve their majority, and maybe even grow it.
Yet the furious resuscitation of Biden’s political fortunes has not only positioned his party more strongly against Trump in the general election, but suddenly scrambled the Senate map. Four Republicans up for reelection are now officially behind their challengers (or their most likely challengers) by four percentage points or more. And Biden’s numbers against an incumbent Trump show he is stronger than Hillary Clinton ever was in 2016 against the insurgent outsider most Americans expected would lose.
More important than his wins against Sanders have been the underlying numbers behind Biden’s success this past week. In a majority of the primaries, he is winning a broad and deep coalition that threatens Republicans’ ability to hold the Senate and the White House. With black voters, suburban voters, white voters without a college degree, white voters with a college degree, union and non-union, Republicans and independents, Biden’s breadth of support is remarkable.
In just days, Republicans went from feeling bullish about preserving their majority in the upper chamber to suddenly staring at potential losses across the board in stark relief. Only Sen. Lindsey Graham was willing to be blunt, saying while he thought Trump still had the edge, Biden would be “tough to beat.”
The most vulnerable GOP incumbent is Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, who has run consistently behind John Hickenlooper in polling since the former governor announced a run against him. Another contender in this year’s Democratic primary who had refused a Senate bid but changed his mind when Biden surged is Montana Gov. Steve Bullock. He won his red-state race in 2016 when Trump did as well, and will now challenge Sen. Steve Daines.
And for the most bipartisan member of the U.S. Senate, this cycle started out well but has turned into the fight of Susan Collins’ life. A Public Policy Poll in Maine a year ago showed her with the edge over her likely opponent, 51%-33%, but she is now behind the Democrat there, 47%-43%. Collins’ approval rating is down among Maine voters, who chose Clinton over Trump in 2016 by 57%-33%. (Though her approval with Trump voters rose after impeachment to 59%-26%.)
A new PPP survey shows Arizona Sen. Martha McSally (R) behind Mark Kelly, 47%-42%, which hasn’t budged much from her standing in PPP’s January survey when Kelly was besting her 46%-42%. The poll shows poor approve/disapprove (37%-46%) numbers for McSally, who lost her Senate race in 2018 against Kyrsten Sinema but was then appointed to the late Sen. John McCain’s seat. Independents in that poll chose Kelly, 50%-29%. In the new OH Predictive Insights poll, Kelly is ahead by 49%-42% with 8% undecided and independents favoring him, 58%-29%.
Trump is unpopular in Arizona, a state he needs to hold this fall, and Maine, which he lost in 2016 by only three percentage points. Trump's approval in Maine is 42%-56% and in Arizona it's 45%-51%.
In North Carolina, Democrats secured their preferred nominee when last week Cal Cunningham beat out a more progressive candidate Republicans were spending money to help nominate. Cunningham already leads incumbent Thom Tillis by 48%-43% in an NBC-Marist poll.
Biden leads Trump in polling in all three of these swing states -- Arizona, North Carolina and Maine.
In addition to the four most embattled senators, other campaigns will tax the time and money of the GOP in races that favor Republicans but Democrats could win in a wave election.
In Iowa, Sen. Joni Ernst (R) has seen her approval drop 10 points in the last year, when she was at 57%-47%. While 41% of voters, according to the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll, said they would definitely vote to reelect her, 31% said they would definitely not. Though the Hawkeye State is seen as more reliably Republican than a battleground, headwinds there for Ernst will require the GOP to invest heavily in a state President Obama won twice.
In Georgia, Biden will attempt to turn out the coalition that has made him the presumptive nominee -- suburban moderates alienated from the GOP along with African Americans and non-college white moderates. In large numbers that group would imperil two Republican U.S. Senate seats there. This year, as Georgia has continued to grow more purple, not only is Trump ally Sen. David Perdue running for reelection, but Sen. Kelly Loeffler, appointed to the seat of former Sen. Johnny Isakson (who retired for health reasons), must run in a special election this November as well.
Texas will see an energized Democratic electorate as the party increased its turnout there in 2018 by more than 100% and Sen. Ted Cruz won by only 2.6 percentage points. The Texas GOP is trying to register 1 million new voters and is urging donors who have long sent their money around the country to please keep it in the Lonestar State. While Cruz said he believes Trump and John Cornyn will win Texas, he admitted “it will be hotly contested.”
Even in Kansas, Republicans will also be spending money they don't want to. Barbara Bollier, who was a Republican until a year ago, has a much better chance of beating Kris Kobach should he win the GOP nomination now that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declined to run. Kobach lost his gubernatorial run in 2018 to Democrat Laura Kelly, who will be able to help Bollier’s campaign. While it isn’t likely Kansas will turn blue, precious resources will have to be deployed there.
The other unique liability Republicans contemplate -- but never discuss -- is the potential that Trump cannot help them at all, even in states and districts where he wins. Tim Carney, a conservative writer for the Washington Examiner, wrote in November 2019 that Trump drags down Republicans “like an anchor” because he makes Trump voters (but not Republicans) out of working-class independents and Democrats but makes Democratic voters out of Republicans and independents. Added to the mix is high Democratic motivation and turnout, which has left Republicans losing elections in 2017, 2018 and 2019 in states across the country, including red ones like Kentucky and Kansas. If voters, who still see Trump as the opposite of the establishment, turn out for the president -- but not Tillis -- this fall in North Carolina, Tillis loses. This is because the voters someone like Tillis needs to count on are gone. “While Trump didn’t bring working class white-America into the GOP, he has caused a partisan realignment elsewhere: driving upper-middle class white America out of the GOP,” wrote Carney.
But Republicans are stuck with Trump. Stray and lose the base, or stay and fear the low ceiling as former Republicans stay home or vote Democratic. Currently, GOP senators are not only tied to him but most of their approval numbers are stuck in the low 40s, as are the president’s. And the answer to the coattails question will decide the Senate majority in November.
To mitigate against losses, Republicans are hoping Sen. Doug Jones will surrender his Senate seat in Alabama -- very likely -- and that John James can topple Sen. Gary Peters in Michigan. Biden’s performance in Tuesday’s primary is good news for Peters, not James. Voters in reliably Republican Livingston County, outside of Detroit, turned out in droves for Biden Tuesday, worrying Republicans who see Biden assembling the same coalition that elected Democrat Rep. Elissa Slotkin to that district in 2018 in a suburban-fueled wave. Trump had won the county by 30 points in 2016 but turnout increased there by more than 50% this week. And the day before Michigan voted, the Republican mayor of the all-important Macomb County -- home of the “Reagan Democrats” whom Obama and then Trump won -- announced that though he voted for Trump in 2016 he was now supporting Biden.
Collectively there are headwinds facing all Senate GOP incumbents, from the coronavirus to the impeachment trial Senate Republicans held without witnesses. It was an audacious gambit for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who knew a sham trial -- in defiance of between 65% and 75% of the public wanting witnesses -- could cost Republicans their majority. Besides Collins’ vote in favor of witnesses, none of the vulnerable Republicans inoculated themselves with support of censure or even statements criticizing the president's conduct. Diagnosing Biden with dementia, or investigating his son Hunter, may not be enough to stop the bleeding.
This week a Quinnipiac poll comparing Biden to Trump showed why Republicans prayed for Sanders. On the question of who could better handle a crisis, Biden beat Trump, 56%-40%. On the question of whether they are honest, Biden beat Trump, 51%-33%. On the question of who cares for average Americans, Biden beat Trump, 59%-43%.
Biden’s appeal to a wide range of voters, who are turning out in surprisingly high numbers, shows voters are afraid of a second term of Trump. Republicans hoped Sanders the socialist would be scarier. Biden has problems as a candidate, and he may not win. But right now the only people Joe Biden scares are Republican incumbents.
Re: Sanders Supporters: "Never Biden"
Anyone who doesn't vote for the Democratic Party nominee is a FOOL or worse- an IDIOT, perhaps. If you do, I have to surmise that you didn't learn your lesson in 2016, and have supported the actions of the trump administration to date, because you will once again, help trump. The Bernie supporters did an amazing job of impacting the 2016 election to the favor of trump, so why don't you get it this time? If you vote for any other candidate in the General Election- Green, P&F Party, etc., you are throwing away your vote- a vote that could help remove trump from the WH.
There is a time for standing up for a principle, making a statement, expressing a view, etc.- but now is not that time. I served on the Sebastopol City Council, and sometimes was presented with votes on matters that I did not agree with. Was it better to make a symbolic but meaningless vote that had no chance of prevailing? Once in a great while, but often, if I was going to lose the vote anyway, current day support for a vote on a topic might translate to future support for my issues from my colleagues. It is how politics and policy-making work. Adults learn to pick their battles, especially when there is only one clear path forward..
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Posted in reply to the post by luke32:
Re: Sanders Supporters: "Never Biden"
I really understand the way the die-hard Bernie supporters feel--I am one of them. I am so tired of the same-old, same-old Democratic party status quo--of fighting against progressives because so many of them are beholden to the corporate world. I voted for Bernie in 2016 and was heartbroken when Orange Face ended up occupying our White House even though Hillary won the popular vote by 3 mil. I have been watching as the DNC is sabotaging Bernie again, and other races across the country where progressives have been running against another Democrat and it pisses me off!!! I even have stated that I will leave the party(I would never, ever vote Republican). I REALLY do understand this feeling.
BUT, this time again, there is still way too much at stake--too much this criminal thug and his administration will pull in order to get rid of the middle class and the poor people; our country and the world is suffering greatly due to this evil, hateful guy and his white nationalist group. If Bernie can vote for Biden, like he did for Hillary, his hard-core supporters must also. I live on Social Security and that is all; this group is trying harder and harder all the time to get rid of it and Medicare, etc. etc. I know that he can't do any of this on his own, and while we have the House in Democratic hands, they will not let that happen. Please! for all our sake and the sake of this whole planet, don't not vote for Biden!!! We can not stand four more years of this hell and devastation. I am poor and wouldn't survive.
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Posted in reply to the post by luke32:
Re: Sanders Supporters: "Never Biden"
Well, we saw what in 2016? 12% of Sanders supporters voted for Trump and 8% didn't vote at all?
As to the comments above... I'm sorry. I identify with the plight of progressives in this country. But having grown up on the east coast, and traveling this country a lot... the reality is it is a long uphill battle. There's not going to be a "revolution"...and if there is... like so many revolutions before it- it will fail spectacularly because there is simply not widespread enough support for it in this nation.
The hard truth is- the focus needs to be on congress, and... the individual state governments. Sanders and Warren have accomplished a lot in shifting the discussion on the national level- hell- Bernie has done more in 8 years of running for president then he accomplished in several decades in congress.
But, at the end of the day, the hard cold truth is we have 2 options. Continue moving things incrementally left. Or letting Trump be at the hel while the ship falters and burns to the waterline... and seeing what comes next.
