Why Pundits Can't Comprehend Bernie Sanders

By Waleed Shahid, BuzzFeed

29 February 20

It's the last gasp of a political elite that’s been radically out of touch with the lives of normal people for most of the 21st century.

f you were watching cable TV on the night of the Nevada caucuses, you might have heard Chris Matthews compare Bernie Sanders’ electoral victory there to the rise of the Third Reich. While Matthews has since apologized, it was an astounding and unconscionable moment: one of the country’s most prominent political commentators disparaging the campaign of a man who could very well be America’s first Jewish president. And it revealed something powerful.

A few hours earlier, one of America’s most celebrated Democratic strategists, James Carville, went on air to say the winners in Nevada were Sanders and Vladimir Putin. As I watched, I realized these weren’t just random or offhand comments; they’re the last gasp of a political elite that’s been radically out of touch with the lives of normal people for most of the 21st century, increasingly inept at explaining the enormous pain and discontent felt by the working- and middle-class voters who make up the base of the Democratic Party.

To put it another way, a generational transition is happening in the Democratic Party — and it’s clear that many of its current leaders and talking heads don’t understand why.

From my perspective, the reason a party stalwart representing the last half-century of Democratic politics is losing to an independent, anti-establishment outsider is pretty straightforward. After all, millions of Americans are suffering from the consequences of a generation’s worth of bad decisions made by the political establishment, both Democratic and Republican. The communities torn apart by deportations, those jailed by the rise of mass incarceration, the families reeling from the toll of the war in Iraq, young people trying to live their lives under the yoke of crushing student debt, and everyone suffering from skyrocketing inequality after the financial crisis now simply understand that these crises required the willing complicity of leaders in both parties, including even prominent Democrats like Joe Biden.

The actual problems facing Americans have gotten really bad, and people rightly blame consultants and elected officials, both Democrats and Republicans, for bringing our society to the brink.

Simply put, this is why people are drawn to Bernie. They’re looking for new leaders who either didn’t contribute to those crises or — even better — have spent their entire careers opposing the policies that led to them. They are looking for leaders whose solutions actually scale up to the problems facing our society, because they understand there’s an entire generation of politicians who were on the wrong side of some of the defining fights of our lives, and Joe Biden embodies them.

And yet, it’s clear that few of the people you see discussing politics on cable TV understand that. They insist Biden’s poor showing has been the fault of lackluster debate performances. Just as they failed to understand Trump’s rise, they fail to see that their theories have been discredited. And they’ve all but called Democratic voters stupid, because these talking heads are unable to grapple with the obvious: Sanders is winning by speaking to the hopes and fears of a rising generation of Democrats who look and think a lot more like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than Joe Biden.

There are signs of hope, however. Progressives like Alexandra Rojas and Abdul El-Sayed are now providing commentary at CNN that raises the level of discussion to a much higher level. Yvette Simpson is often sparring with Rahm Emanuel and Chris Christie at ABC News. And Anand Giridharadas has been holding his own network accountable and it sounds like the message is being heard. But the shift is happening at a glacial pace, and in the meantime, cable TV keeps on embarrassing itself on a daily basis. The reason is simple: the lives of many of its talking heads are totally divorced from the enormous pain of having an unaffordable medical bill, or $200,000 in student loan debt, or not having even $500 in the bank.

Many in my generation see this clearly. We are diverse, worse off than our parents, and came of age during the Iraq War and the financial crisis. We understand the existential threat of the climate crisis, and see an authoritarian right-wing government that wants to suppress multiracial democracy at every turn. The Republican Party, despite having won the popular vote only once in my lifetime, nevertheless controls the Presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court. And top scientists at the UN tell us we have about 10 years to act in order to stave off ecological collapse.

To us, things look and feel deeply, deeply broken, which is why a political revolution seems a more pragmatic and necessary vehicle for hope than Biden’s prediction of a post-Trump epiphany among Republicans.

On an even deeper level, my generation, despite being plugged in and connected, feels deeply alone. The movements we built under Obama — Occupy Wall Street, a network of immigrant DREAMers, the climate movement, Black Lives Matter — have been fueled in part by a deep desire to find community and identity in a country that is increasingly unable to respond to our aspirations and tells us that we must fend for ourselves. Sanders, on some deep level, has given voice to these individual movements by linking them together into a song of solidarity: “Are you willing to fight for someone you don't know?”

Amid such a compelling offer, the smug and empty “liberalism” of the supposedly serious people in charge finds itself unmoored, bereft of ideas to solve our many crises. Sanders’ big idea is to return the Democratic Party to its roots in the powerful labor and civil rights movements of the mid-20th century. The universal social programs Bernie Sanders is fighting for are not radical — they’re commonsense and cost-effective ways to provide the basic things we all need to thrive. In most European countries, his agenda would belong in a center-right party. It’s why Democrats haven’t been convinced by the yearslong fear-mongering about his candidacy.

As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says: “We aren’t pushing the party left, we are bringing the party home.”

My mother is a union member who experienced the cruelty of navigating our byzantine health care system after suffering a stroke three years ago. My dad is angry watching my two younger siblings suffer from a mountain of student debt while they try to catch up with soaring rents. They’ve lived in this country for decades and feel under attack by this president and the racism he’s encouraged among our citizens.

The first time they ever voted was for Barack Obama, because he gave them hope.

This time, like many of the immigrant and working-class voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, both of my parents are supporting Bernie Sanders. The TV pundits and wealthy consultants can’t explain it. But it’s because they feel someone finally understands their struggles and is willing to fight those who created those problems in the first place.

It’s hope and change they can believe in.

A Brokered Convention Would Be a Disaster for the Democrats

By Emily Bartlett Hines, Jacobin

29 February 20

All of Bernie Sanders's rivals are open to giving the Democratic nomination to someone besides the candidate with the most delegates at the end of the primary. This is an absolutely horrible idea.

t’s tough to reach deep into the recesses of history and remember the February 19 Democratic debate, but a crucial moment transpired after two hours of the standard squabbling and platitudinizing. Viewers were presented with a surprising coda: moderator Chuck Todd asked the six contenders, “Should the person with the most delegates at the end of this primary season be the nominee, even if they are short of a majority?”

Certainly not, said Michael Bloomberg: “Whatever the rules of the Democratic party are, they should be followed.” In an atypical show of consensus, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar all agreed that the party should “let the process work.” Bernie Sanders was the lone dissenter: “I think the will of the people should prevail.”

Sanders’s response elevated the straightforward democratic principle of “whoever gets the most votes wins” above the abstruse protocol of the Democratic party — whereby, if no candidate breaks the 50 percent threshold, the convention moves to a second vote in which 764 elected officials and assorted distinguished Dems, the superdelegates, can break the self-imposed stalemate by adding their votes to those of the 3,979 pledged delegates. Superdelegates can vote for whoever they want, and their votes far outweigh those of ordinary citizens, by a ten-thousand-to-one ratio.

One might ask, though, is it really fair to insist on scrapping the superdelegates now? After all, as a recent Esquire piece argued, “The rules are the rules. You all agreed to run as members of the Democratic Party and, as such you all agreed to abide by the rules that party set down for nominating its candidate.”

But there’s a problem with this logic: Democrats are trying to win an election, not a rule-following contest. And besides, rules that are blatantly undemocratic probably shouldn’t be followed. Following such rules will alienate the voters they most need to attract. And coronating a candidate who came second, third, or fourth in votes would be disastrous for their short- and long-term electoral prospects.

A Brokered Convention Would Hand Trump a Highly Effective Attack

Donald Trump may not be blessed with great policy expertise or moral gravitas, but he does have a knack for zeroing in on criticism of his opponents that’s often accurate and effective. His attacks on Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry so troubled her that she foolishly took a DNA test to prove it (and failed to do so). His claims that Hillary Clinton was “crooked” and Marco Rubio a “choke artist” similarly directed public attention to already apparent weaknesses in their public personae.

Any Democratic opponent will face insults from Trump — but if that opponent is a person who didn’t get the most votes, the put-downs will write themselves. Trump will savagely attack them as a loser — someone who’s fraudulently seeking to govern all Americans when they couldn’t even win their own party’s primary. What comeback will they have? That “rules are rules”?

The party, too, will fare badly in this scenario. Democrats have frequently criticized the electoral college as enabling undemocratic minority rule. In March 2019, Warren tweeted that “by getting rid of the electoral college and replacing it with a national popular vote, we can protect our democracy and make sure everyone’s vote counts.” Agree to become the nominee in a process dominated by a small group of insiders, and they’d be handing ammunition to the argument that Democrats don’t really care about democracy.

In a Crowded Field, Pluralities Are Inevitable

One might argue that a candidate who didn’t get a majority of the votes, well, doesn’t have a majority of the votes. Isn’t it undemocratic to hand them the nomination when the majority voted against them?

But this logic, too, has a flaw. In an election format that allows many candidates to run (eight, as of February 2020), it’s very likely that no candidate will pass the 50 percent threshold. And failing to clear that barrier isn’t a sign that the top vote-getter is opposed by everyone else. In Sanders’s case, polls show him as the most common second choice of people who support other candidates, and beating his Democratic opponents in hypothetical one-on-one matchups.

A ranked-choice voting system might more accurately reflect the preferences of voters whose favorite candidate doesn’t make it to the top. But with no mechanism in place for the millions of Democratic primary participants to realign once their votes have been cast, the choice is to either accept the plurality winner as the closest to a majority we have, or to toss those votes in the trash.

There’s No Such Thing as a “Moderate Consensus”

There’s an added subtlety to the “front-runner isn’t actually winning” line of argument. Defenders of a brokered convention argue that such an outcome might reflect an underlying consensus because Sanders’s opponents share the quality of being moderates.

This was the contention of a recent NBC article titled “Bernie Sanders isn’t the frontrunner in the Democratic race. The moderates are.” It read, “In Iowa and New Hampshire, the moderate share of the vote beat out Sanders’ and Warren’s. Iowa gave 54 percent of its votes to Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Biden .?.?. Nationally, with Mike Bloomberg in the mix, the moderates are polling well ahead, garnering 48 percent to the progressives’ 39 percent.”

But this method of classifying candidates reflects the priorities of pundits, not those of ordinary people. In the real world, most voters don’t award their support based on ideological abstractions like “moderate,” or view the other moderates as essentially allied with them.

Suppose the superdelegates tried to make a pick that would appease the moderation-loving majority. Each choice presents problems.

Klobuchar admirers enthused about the prospect of a female president might be irked if she were passed over for, say, Biden. Fans of Biden’s extensive experience are unlikely to view him as interchangeable with a thirty-eight-year-old small-town mayor. Mayor Pete die-hards might not be thrilled to switch their allegiance to Klobuchar, who taunted the former onstage with lines like “I wish everyone was as perfect as you, Pete.” (Buttigieg doesn’t call himself a moderate anyway — he’s said he’d be “the most progressive nominee we’ve put forward in a generation.”) And with Bloomberg coming dead last on surveys of which candidate “shares my values,” almost no one would be happy to see their top choice picked over for him.

The Sanders-versus-moderates framing is nonsensical: If a non-winning candidate is coronated in Milwaukee, not just Bernie’s supporters but everyone else’s will be furious. The way to have the fewest supporters angry that their candidate lost is to nominate the candidate with the most supporters.

Democrats Can’t Afford to Spurn New Voters

A first-place finish for Bernie may not be an inevitability — after all, some commentators still assure us that the electorate hungers deeply for moderation. But for now, his supporters are driving a rise in turnout and a huge bump in participation by young and first-time voters. In Nevada, voter turnout broke records: two-thirds of voters aged seventeen to twenty-nine supported the socialist, along with most first-time caucusgoers (over half those who participated), hospitality workers on the Las Vegas strip, and independents.

If this trend continues, a huge number of people nationwide will take part in electoral politics for the first time to support Bernie Sanders. Many don’t identify strongly as Democrats and may not be swayed by appeals to “vote blue no matter who.” (They certainly have little investment in the obscure “process” Bloomberg et al. praised on the debate stage.) But their votes are needed to reverse Republican majorities in the Senate and elsewhere. If the party were to signal its disdain for them by undemocratically selecting a nominee they don’t want, their votes could be lost to the Democratic Party for many election cycles to come.

Democratic candidates and party officials should follow Sanders in affirming that “the will of the people should prevail.” If they don’t, the rest of us should think strategically about how best to avoid a brokered convention. By lending their votes and volunteer time to the candidate likely to get the most delegates, they can increase the chances of that candidate breaking 50 percent and avoiding electoral disaster.