Bernie Sanders didn't win any larger argument

[Gothmog]

In the real world, sanders did not win any major argument https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanders-didnt-win-any-larger-argument/2020/03/19/39b9a402-69f2-11ea-9923-57073adce27c_story.html

As pressure mounts for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to abandon his presidential bid, a narrative seems to have taken hold among his supporters and on cable TV, and it goes like this: Sanders may have all but lost the nomination fight, but he won the larger ideological argument, and he’s fundamentally changed the Democratic Party. His movement must be reckoned with.

To which I can only say: If this is what it looks like to win the argument, I struggle to imagine what it would look like to lose. In any way that counts, Sanders’s vision for the party has been soundly and consistently rejected....

This idea that Sanders has somehow won, even while we all thought he was losing, seems to rest on two assertions: one, that exit polls tell us the voters actually agree with his proposal for nationalized health care; and two, that he changed the conversation to the point where all the candidates were forced to adopt his agenda.

Neither withstands much scrutiny.

Let’s be real. Exit polls are all fine and good, but votes are votes. If Democrats really sided that strongly with Sanders on the issue they routinely say is the most important in the campaign, he’d be winning.

A raft of other polls on health care will tell you that it all depends on how you ask the question. According to one conducted last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation, most people who say they support Medicare-for-all also think they’d be able to keep their own insurance. (Under Sanders’s plan, they wouldn’t.)

And if you ask them to choose between building on the foundation President Barack Obama laid or a Sanders-style overhaul, a strong majority chooses the more moderate approach.....

And in his second run for the nomination, Sanders has performed not better but worse, failing to turn out the huge numbers of younger voters he predicted. In fact, you could say Sanders’s trajectory is the exact opposite of Reagan’s; while much of the media (me included) assumed he and Warren spoke for an ascendant wing of the party during the Trump years, it turns out the uprising was more limited than we thought.

Sure, Biden should say all the right things to unite his party. Sure, he’ll be willing to give some things away in the party platform, which has about as much influence on governing as I do on the Yankees’ lineup.

But hard as this may be for some millennials to accept, there’s only one winner here. Sanders doesn’t get a participation trophy.
The only thing he’s owed is a chance to exit with grace.

[William769]

1. Sanders is like a gnat in the sweltering hot weather in Florida. NT

[Cha]

2. Thank You! Jeeze!

To which I can only say: If this is what it looks like to win the argument, I struggle to imagine what it would look like to lose. In any way that counts, Sanders’s vision for the party has been soundly and consistently rejected...

Whoa... I like this..!

But hard as this may be for some millennials to accept, there’s only one winner here. Sanders doesn’t get a participation trophy.
The only thing he’s owed is a chance to exit with grace.

Mahalo, Goth

[Gothmog]

61. Hey Cha

[mcar]

3. He needs to concede

It's time to move forward.

[ucrdem]

4. He's having a hard time dealing with this.

Which is strange because I never thought he really expected to win anything except a permanent bit-part as provocateur. But it's starting to sound like he believed his own baloney. Which ... is not a good sign.

[George II]

6. He's beginning to look like a 21st Century Harold Stassen.

[ucrdem]

7. That's giving him more credit than perhaps he deserves.

Stassen at least seems to have been a serious if unlucky candidate. Bernie's seriousness can be seen in his behavior over the last week.

Incidentally do we know if he's returned yet to DC? I couldn't find the answer in Google News.

[True Blue American]

102. Bernie returned

For the second vote on the stimulus. He was not there for the first.

[Cha]

8. So I had to look up Harold Stassen.. I knew

the name but not what he was most "identified" with.

Big difference, though..

Stassen sought the presidential nomination again at the 1952 Republican National Convention, and helped Dwight D. Eisenhower win the nomination by shifting his support to Eisenhower. After serving in the Eisenhower administration,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Stassen

[NCProgressive]

5. There are flies that orbit a charging bull's head

They are annoying but they can't stop or even slow down the bull.

[DanTex]

9. Sanders won the issues, and with voters under 45. Biden won on electability.

The future is clearly with the Sanders movement. One problem is that the climate won't wait for the under 45 voters to become the under 55 voters and hold a majority. The flip side is that Bernie and his movement, including people like AOC are having success moving the party and the discussion as a whole to the left. For example, in 2016 a $15 minimum wage was derided as a "unicorn" idea, but now even the centrists in the race support it. The majority of Dems (and the majority of the American people even) support Medicare for all.

[George II]

10. No he didn't! What are these "issues" that Sander won? The majority of Democrats AND....

...the majority of Americans support universal healthcare, any one of the several plans that have been proposed. The Sanders people have lumped Biden's, Buttigieg's, Klobuchar's, even Warren's plans into one and falsely call it "medicare for all", even though more are in favor the other plans than vs. the onerous "medicare for all". In fact there are more against it than in favor of it.

My father told me when I was very young that a politician's first priority is to be elected, anything else falls short. "Winning the issues" is pointless (and false anyway) if one isn't in a position to advance those isssues.

[Locrian]

13. so going forward....

we're going to have millions of people out of work (no employer health care and little $$) - a devastated economy, people who are nearing retirement who have lost $100,000s ....

What type of health care should be proposed? "Free market" type healthcare? Like the current system with not cost controls? What does it look like? People who are locked into a job (what "choice" do you have for HC?) and even WITH coverage risk going bankrupt with a major illness.

I liken this to the end of WW2 when the Great Britain etc were devastated. What do you propose, in light of the current system and it's ability to take care of people not just with COVID-19 but the 60,000 who die each year who have no HC?

I really want to know because I don't think the US will survive (except as a third world country) w/o some type of universal HC focused on the citizens and not profits. There's no mathematical way that you can have a HC system that delivers billions to insurance companies and is accessible to everyone. I fear that most of the other plans try to have it both ways - and I don't see a way to deliver on that. It will *always* favor profits over people.

[Demsrule86]

15. The kind that we can pass quickly...millions of people's lives depend on it...can't have some huge

plan that takes years...a public option makes sense and using the ACA...M4A does not at this point.

[George II]

16. We have the infrastructure of the ACA in place, along with REAL Medicare (not some faux "for all")

[Aquaria]

39. Medicare 4 All is not the panacea you think it is

To get everyone covered under it would take trillions of dollars. How do you pay for that? And how do you transition from private insurance without putting millions of jobs in limbo or jeopardy?

Furthermore, most people out here who have dealt with Medicare in the real world know something all of you pie in the sky people don't, which is that if your goal is to get rid of private insurance, well, you're going about it in the worst way imaginable. You will not get rid of private insurance with M4A. In fact, it will be as necessary with M4A as it is now, because--wait for it:

MEDICARE DOES NOT COVER EVERYTHING TODAY!

Are you aware of the fact that you can max out Medicare benefits? Or that you must pay 20% of all outpatient care, tests and procedures with standard Medicare? Think most seniors can afford to pay 20% of a $50K knee replacement? Because that's what you have to pay if you don't have a supplemental policy.

That's why anyone on Medicare who can afford it has supplemental insurance to cover the massive co-pays, deductibles, extended hospital stays--and more.

So do tell--how it helps anyone to go to M4A, which would probably need to be financed through higher FICA taxes, and then pay for supplemental policies, too? Where are the savings compared to ACA and private insurance through employers? Because, right now, with how Medicare is set up, there wouldn't be any savings by extending it to the population at large. Not as long as it has so many problems for the limited population it serves now.

M4A is not a workable solution. All of us who have known the reality of Medicare have been trying to tell all of you this for years now.

[Gothmog]

11. Sanders's secret is out: He has no movement -

I have never taken sanders seriously as a candidate due to sanders complete and utter lack of legislative accomplishments. sanders has not been able to get his fellow Democratic members of Congress to back his agenda and that is not going to change. As I understand it, sanders is now relying on a magical voter revolution to convince republicans to be reasonable. sanders has no magical voter revolution or movement backing him up. sanders has a cap of around 30% of the Democratic voters and that does not constitute a movement or revolution

Link to tweet

For months — for years, really — the media have reported that the Democratic Party has gone far left. They have treated social media as a barometer of the party’s political attitudes and characterized center-left candidates as out of touch with their own party. They have done so despite the triumph of moderate Democratic House candidates in 2018; despite the failure of left-wing Democrats to flip a single House seat; despite the polls showing a substantial percentage of Democrats consider themselves moderate or somewhat liberal; and despite the failure of super-progressive presidential candidates to attract the most critical element in the Democratic Party (African Americans).

With this faulty premise, the media’s coverage has been at times wildly off-kilter. It was easy for anyone caring to look closely to see that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) did not “win” a single debate, because his ranting and raving merely reinforced the fervor of his own cult while turning off the rest of the party. The media have been obsessed with the “likability” of female candidates, never considering that Sanders’s angry and rude demeanor would turn off women, who make up more than half of the Democratic electorate. A simple question — “Who is he gaining by all this yelling?” — should have been front and center in the media’s coverage. His “movement” was assumed but never examined carefully.....

Sanders’s ceiling turned out to be real, because there are generally less than a third of voters in the Democratic Party willing to embrace wide-eyed socialism, venom-filled rhetoric and utter disregard for the demands of governing (e.g. compromise). Michael Moore does not speak for the Democratic Party any more than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speaks for House Democrats. (I have long maintained that the person who has the best read on the party as a whole is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; get to her left, and you are in no-man’s land.)

The Democratic Party does not live on social media nor does it favor bomb-throwers. If anything, it is desperate to play it safe and find an antidote to President Trump — not an imitation. Voters want the madness, the cruelty, the dysfunction and the stupidity to stop. They have found their safe, reliable and decent candidate in Biden. En masse — in every geographic region and Democratic group — they are telling us that they want the primary to end and the effort to rout Trump to begin. The media might have taken Sanders’s “revolution” seriously, but it turns out that Democratic voters as a whole did not.

[TwilightZone]

12. No, it obviously isn't.

He got hammered among Democrats 2:1 in 2016 and is on pace for similar numbers, or worse, in 2020. His "movement" has made zero progress in the past five years. In fact, it's deteriorated. Half of his 2016 support was clearly anti-Hillary sentiment and his base hasn't grown at all.

It doesn't help that he hired a bunch of hacks like Gray and Sirota and gave tacit approval to jackasses like Joe Rogan and the dirtbag left, and they're undermining anything positive he might have accomplished.

[DanTex]

19. Of course it is! He won overwhelmingly among young voters.

The only question is how quickly are those young voters going to start voting in larger numbers as they get older. They should hurry, because the climate isn't going to pause to wait for them!

Biden cleaned up with 60+ voters who turn out more reliably, but obviously Bernie/AOC/etc. are the future of the party.

[Orrex]

31. That's what Sanders' supporters claimed in 2016

Where were those diehard Sanders voters this time around? Surely their numbers, with Sanders' allegedly passionate Millennial voting bloc, would have propelled him to an easy victory?

Saying that Sanders won overwhelmingly among young voters who didn't vote is like saying the losing team won except for the score.

[DanTex]

32. And they were right. Young voters again went to Bernie by huge numbers.

It might not happen this year, but the fact of the matter is that "Third Way" style pro-corporate centrism has no appeal at all among people under 50. Just look at Mayor Pete, who despite being a millenial got almost no youth support because he was peddling the same old centrism. Bernie's movement, including people like AOC, are the future.

[Orrex]

34. If they'd gone in huge numbers, he'd have won.

And you're guessing that these voters will retain their fondness for Sanders' policies in future imagined trips to the voting booth.

Maybe, maybe not. But at this point it's pure speculation based on nothing other than a desire to make Sanders' campaign seem less inherently futile.

[Aquaria]

41. But they didn't turn out in huge numbers

Winning 80% of 100,000 people is not as important as winning 60% of 2,000,000.

Maybe if BS had comprehended that fact, Biden wouldn't be trouncing him now.

[Aquaria]

42. And if BS's "ideas" had any traction,

He wouldn't have gotten his ass handed to him by voters across the nation. People don't like him, or what he's peddling. They would have voted for him if they find either him or his "ideas" appealing. They didn't.

Winning caucuses in lily-white enclaves and benefitting from vote splitting (hello, California!) is not enough to get a nomination, never mind winning a general election. You'd think BS and his BSers would get the clue for why he keeps getting creamed in diverse states where voters make the call. I mean, maybe you want to see the bright side in winning barely more counties since South Carolina than Biden won in Texas alone, but most people call that kind of shellacking an embarrassment.

[DanTex]

48. Again, ignoring the data.

The exit polls are clear, people preferred Bernie on policy and Biden on electability. The data is inconvenient for people that want to pretend that it's Biden's centrism that attracted voters to him. It wasn't. Voters just wanted someone who would beat Trump, and they thought Biden was the one for that, even though they preferred Bernie's policies.

[Gothmog]

64. Think Joe Biden Has a Young Voter Problem? Think Again.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/23/think_joe_biden_has_a_young_voter_problem_think_again_142733.html

When you look at the CNN and Quinnipiac numbers, Biden also appears to be meeting Barack Obama’s 2012 standard—among voters under 30, he beat Mitt Romney 60% to 37%. And even if he’s a little behind Obama’s pace with young voters in the YouGov and Emerson polls, Biden is outperforming Obama with the senior citizen vote. Obama lost the 65-and-over vote by 12 percentage points, while Biden wins with seniors in every March poll except Emerson. And in that one, he only loses by four. In other words, Biden has broader generational appeal than Obama.

Why is he doing rather well with young voters in general election polling, but so poorly in primary voting? One reason is that most Democrats appear ready to accept Biden as their nominee. In the CNN poll, only 8% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they definitely or probably would not vote for Biden in the general election. As Biden leads Trump by 10 points in the CNN poll, that’s an easily manageable loss on his left flank.

Furthermore, the pool of young voters for the general election is wider than in the Democratic primary. About 26 million people under 30 voted in the 2016 general election. That’s 2 million more than the number of people who have voted so far in the 2020 Democratic primary, of any age. In all likelihood, many of the young people who are not Democratic primary voters are also not of the “Bernie or bust” variety—after all, they couldn’t be bothered to vote for Sanders in the primary in the first place.

[Gothmog]

100. sanders young voters never showed up

Link to tweet

[Gothmog]

45. Biden does not have an issue with young voters in the real world

Link to tweet

[ehrnst]

72. Why do you think that he coudn't inspire them to register and get to a polling place on a Tuesday?

[Gothmog]

104. Memes and online polls do not vote

Link to tweet

[Aquaria]

40. I still suspect

That a substantial percentage of the most vicious berners are ex-Ron Paul supporters. The behavior is eerily similar.

[Demsrule86]

17. Biden won and that is that...and M4A will never pass Congress.

[DanTex]

20. He won by cleaning up with older voters. Bernie and progressives are the future.

No, M4A won't pass congress today, and even if it did, neither Trump nor Biden would sign it. It's a longer term goal, and it's an example of why it's so important for progressives to challenge at all levels of government.

[William769]

22. Time is not on Bernie's side. nt

[Demsrule86]

23. If Sander got younger voters, he could have won...they didn't show up Dan...his base

got smaller. Sanders is 78 years old, he is not the future. We need to work for universal coverage...doesn't have to be M4A...my sis in law will spend the rest of her life in a nursing home...she is 67...mostly due to the shitty physical therapy medicare provides after she broke her leg. We can do better. Medicare is expensive and I just don't think it is that great.

[DanTex]

27. He did get younger voters by huge margins. Turnout was the problem.

It always is with young voters.

The enormous margins Bernie won with among young voters is another inconvenient fact that centrists always ignore because it shatters their narrative, similar to the fact that more Bernie voters voted for HRC in 2016 than HRC voters voted for Obama in 2008. It doesn't fit the centrist worldview, so centrists act like those facts just don't exist.

But they do. And Bernie/Our Revolution is obviously the future of the Democratic Party. The only question is whether the future can get here fast enough to do something serious about climate change before it's too late.

No, it won't be Bernie himself, he led the way to this point, but it's gonna be someone like AOC. It's funny, because Pete actually is a millenial, but he got almost no youth support because that style of centrist/pro-corporate Democrat simply doesn't have any appeal with voters under 50. The older generation is into Bill Clinton style centrism, with the deregulation, free trade agreements, "Third Way", and all that. But not the youth.

[Aquaria]

43. Woulda coulda shoulda

Does zero for you.

Furthermore, the bad news for your fake revolution is that those young voters grow up, and stop believing political fairy tales. The older those voters get, the more they drift toward the middle to varying degrees. This fact does not change, regardless of how much you wish it to the contrary.

[Gothmog]

52. The Gauzy Myth of the Sanders Campaign

I never considered sanders to be a serious candidate. sanders has zero major legislative accomplishments in large part because none of his fellow Democrats in Congress support his agenda. I do not understand the concept of a voter revolution . Without such a magical voter revolution, none of sanders' agenda could be adopted and I am not comfortable in relying on a magical voter revolution

I am not only one to doubt the seriousness of sanders as a candidate https://newrepublic.com/article/156883/gauzy-myth-sanders-campaign

After Tuesday night, the undeniable truth is that the entire Sanders campaign was predicated on a gauzy myth. If there were ever hidden armies of would-be Democratic voters yearning for a visionary presidential nominee uncontaminated by the compromises of life, then these Bernie Brigades still remain well camouflaged.

Sure, as Sanders stressed in his Wednesday statement, some of his policies are popular with primary voters. In Michigan, exit polls showed that replacing private health insurance with a government program had the support of nearly 60 percent of the people who went to the polls on Tuesday. But since the February 29 South Carolina primary, most Democratic primary voters have been unwilling to buy the entire Sanders package: politically unattainable goals, such as canceling $1.6 trillion in college debt, combined with attacks on corporate interests and the “billionaire class.”

After Sanders’s two presidential runs, voters possess a pretty clear-eyed sense of who he is. He is a gadfly, a goad, and a left-wing Pied Piper. These can be valuable traits in politics since the moderate, accommodationist wing of the Democratic Party sometimes needs outside pressure to force it to focus on causes larger than the next election. But Sanders was never cut out to be a traditional president forging alliances, brokering compromises, and dealing with the messiness of governing in a bitterly divided democracy. That simply isn’t Bernie’s skill set. And his lifelong rigidity would have become an even larger governing problem if he ever succeeded Trump as president.

What Democratic voters have created by rallying around Biden is the American equivalent of the Popular Front, which, in the 1930s, was a broad, multiparty alliance against fascism in France and other democratic countries. The exit polls from Michigan echo a sentiment found in almost all primaries—voters, by a 58-to-37 percent margin, want a candidate who can defeat Trump more than someone who agrees with them on all issues.....

Sanders will undoubtedly fight on in the hopes that he can shape the Democratic platform. The problem with that strategy is that, even if Biden were to commit to supporting, say, Medicare for All, as a price for party harmony in Milwaukee, it would be a meaningless pledge. Currently, fewer than one-third of the Democrats in the Senate support eliminating private insurance. And if Chuck Schumer succeeds in getting the chamber back in Democratic hands, the new additions to their ranks are likely to be moderates like John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Steve Bullock of Montana, none of whom support Medicare for All.

There was never going to be a magical voter revolution and there was never any substance to sanders' campaign or any chance that sanders' agenda would be adopted in the real world

[showblue22]

26. The young folks today will not get older and still be in his "movement."

What likely will happen is they will realize their naivety and have a good chuckle.

[DanTex]

30. Of course they will. It's a generational shift.

It won't be Bernie, it will be someone like AOC who takes the lead. But the 90s style pro-corporate centrism is on its way out, and only has support with people over 50 or 60. The younger generations are into FDR style social democracy. Socialism polls well with them. They whole red-baiting doesn't work with them because they weren't around for the cold war.

Aging WP columnists might hope that this new generation will make a hard right turn when they get older, but it's not happening.

[Orrex]

35. If they didn't vote for him, you can't say that he won them. It's really that simple.

And, if they vote in the future for policies similar to those that Sanders and others have pushed, then he won't have won them in the future, either.

Many of the policies that he's endorsed are good; some are DOA for a number of reasons.

But, sure. We get it. It's important for Sanders' supports to craft a narrative in which he was a viable candidate done in by DNC machinations, a hostile media, and those stubborn old voters. So be it.


You'll still be voting for the Democratic candidate, yes?

[DanTex]

36. They did vote for him. Just look at the exit polls.

Or you can just ignore that data that runs contrary to your centrist narrative.

But the future is with the progressives like AOC, that much is clear. Hope as you might that the under-50 voters are going to turn into pro-corporate centrists, it's not going to happen. The majority of Democrats support every major policy of Bernie's, and among under-50s the level of support is enormous. Socialism polls favorably among them. They are progressive down the line.

Bernie has changed the political landscape. He's even got a centrist like Biden supporting some progressive policies like a $15 minimum wage, at least partial student debt relief, etc. This is the same Biden who voted for the Iraq War and the Bankruptcy Bill and all the rest. It's remarkable.

[betsuni]

44. Joe Biden supported $15 minimum wage in 2015.

"Vice President Joe Biden joined New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at a media event in New York City on Thursday. They were there to celebrate the state's newly minted $15 hourly minimum wage for fast-food restaurants ...."

http://epionline.org/oped/joe-biden-and-the-15-question

[DanTex]

46. LOL. For fast food workers in New York.

[betsuni]

50. Fight for Fifteen started in 2012 and has raised minimum wages around the country.

Nothing to do with Sanders.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=682509

Biden has supported it. Must be a centrist issue. Good thing Bernie adopted it.

[DanTex]

55. LOL. Bernie has been driving the fight for $15. It has everything to do with Bernie.

Yes, it's great that even Biden has now hopped on board. And it's not the only issue where Biden has moved left. He's even gone back on his own bankruptcy bill. The fact that a long-time centrist like Biden is taking these positions is a testament to the strength of Bernie's movement and his influence on the party.

[Aquaria]

59. Reality

So hard for the "anti-Establishment" to get.

[betsuni]

60. All this seems to be an excuse to repeat the word "centrist."

[Codeine]

66. "Pro-corporate centrists", please.

If we’re playing Buzzword Bingo I want all the spaces.

[Aquaria]

51. The problem with this straw you clutch so desperately

Is that you do NOT know how the youth in general would have voted, if they all had. You knew why those motivated enough to vote in a primary did so. But for the others? The numbers could be all over the place.

Consider this: 37% of those 18-29 voted repuke in the 2016 election. But here's the kicker: That's how the same age demographic voted in 2012 for Romney. Both numbers are higher than those who voted for McCain, but, lower than the numbers who voted for GW Bush in 2000 and 2004, percentage wise. During the 90s, young voters supported Clinton, but roughly the same number of them as now voted repuke. During the 80s, they went overwhelmingly for Raygun the traitor.

?1478885415

So I wouldn't count on the youth vote going where you think it will, never mind where you want. While they've swung left in recent years, a strong conservative element exists within their ranks. Since that's the case, the ones who vote Democratic are probably on more of a spectrum than you think. I'd have to go look at some more numbers, but if even 1/4 of the 18-29 voters are moderates or only somewhat liberal (unlikely), then the youth vote isn't as in the tank for your guy or his "ideas" as you think.

[DanTex]

57. Again, you ignore the exit poll data, which is understandable because it totally contradicts

everything you are claiming. I get that you really really really want the younger generations to embrace pro-corporate centrism, but it's just not happening.

Yes there have been times when younger voters were more conservative. But not now, the data is crystal clear on that. There was a millenial running, Mayor Pete, and he got basically zero support from his own generation because of his centrist politics. The young people of today are solidly progressive.

[redstateblues]

58. According to the exit data hard left lost to moderate in a landslide

[Orrex]

62. But their "huge numbers" weren't enough to do shit for him

The question isn't "how many who voted for Sanders voted for Sanders?" but rather "how many did Sanders fail to bring to the polls?"


Now you're playing that bullshit game so beloved by post hoc rationalizers: find something in the other candidates that is similar to something Sanders said/did/thinks, and credit Sanders for changing that candidate's mind. It's baseless speculation at best, raw bullshit cherrypicking at worst.

Look, as long as you vote for the Democratic candidate, I don't give a damn if you want to pretend that Sanders wasn't an inherently failed candidate from day one. Sanders the divider. Sanders the Democrat of convenience. Sanders the avowed foe of Democrat and Republican alike.

[Orrex]

63. Incidentally, I love how you tag dissenters as "centrist"

As if your sacred candidate is the only possible benchmark and pure and acceptable progressive thought, electability or consensus-building be damned!

Kind of like clockwork in that regard; after you spend some time getting nowhere with your imaginings and rationalizations, you start flinging "centrist" at anyone who doesn't fall in line behind you.

Next up you'll complain (like Sanders) that the media is out to get him, or you'll insist (like Sanders) that the DNC is out to get him.


Anything to avoid facing the twice-demonstrated fact that Sanders is a weak presidential candidate who runs weak presidential campaigns.

[Gothmog]

47. Think Joe Biden Has a Young Voter Problem? Think Again.

The real world is a great place. Here are some facts https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/23/think_joe_biden_has_a_young_voter_problem_think_again_142733.html

Since Super Tuesday, four general election trial heat polls have been released that break down the results by age. Biden, who beats Trump in all four surveys, is the leader among young voters in all of them, usually by blowout margins.

CNN has Biden winning the under-35 vote over Donald Trump, 64% to 33%. For Quinnipiac, it’s 59% to 30%. YouGov and Emerson published data for the under-30 vote. For YouGov, Biden was up 55% to 23%, and in Emerson, it’s 56% to 44%.

How does that compare to the last two presidential elections? Regarding Hillary Clinton’s performance, Biden does generally better. In the 2016 exit poll, she beat Trump 55% to 36% among under-30 voters, and 51% to 41% among voters in their thirties.

When you look at the CNN and Quinnipiac numbers, Biden also appears to be meeting Barack Obama’s 2012 standard—among voters under 30, he beat Mitt Romney 60% to 37%. And even if he’s a little behind Obama’s pace with young voters in the YouGov and Emerson polls, Biden is outperforming Obama with the senior citizen vote. Obama lost the 65-and-over vote by 12 percentage points, while Biden wins with seniors in every March poll except Emerson. And in that one, he only loses by four. In other words, Biden has broader generational appeal than Obama.

[DanTex]

49. LOL. Yeah, against Trump, of course Biden does better with younger voters.

That has nothing to do with the primaries, of course.

[Gothmog]

53. LOL the real world is a nice place

Link to tweet

So if, from day one, they didn’t think they needed more than 30%, why would they actually run a campaign and build a culture designed to win more than his 30% ceiling? As that article notes, even way back in early 2019, Sanders was picking fights and creating enemies out of potential allies.

We saw that in Sanders’ refusal to broaden his message to bring in more people. When I said exactly that on Meet the Press, that “the problem with Bernie Sanders is that he has the exact same message he had four years ago” when he lost to Hillary Clinton 60-40, the response from the Sanders campaign was, well, this:

Link to tweet

If your message wasn’t a majority message four years ago, and you want to win, wouldn’t you tweak it? They didn’t. Proudly and explicitly did not tweak it. They had zero intention of growing new support by broadening and expanding their message. (Sanders famously refused to even inject more biography into his stump speech to humanize him more.)

Sanders and his campaign saw that their ceiling was 30%, and they built an entire strategy around winning with 30%. That means that instead of seeing the other 70% of voters as allies, they saw them as THE ENEMY. Even when there was ideological alignment.

[Gothmog]

75. Message From Hillary

Link to tweet

[jorgevlorgan]

18. Folks are going to believe what they want, regardless of the reality

The idea that the system fundamentally works on a basic level is and will continue to be proven wrong. If Sanders didn't win any larger argument now on this issue, he will in 2 months after we see a massive collapse of industry, and millions dead as a result of towing the line.

[Demsrule86]

24. It would take years to put every person in the country on Medicare...and the cost would be

enormous. We need to get a pubic option. Also, pay for Cobra as Obama did...those are things that can work right now or in two months.

[jorgevlorgan]

70. new deal style policies would ease the pain of the millions who

Will be suffering as a result of this crisis. Medicare for all would be great, but a living wage and paid sick leave are mandatory in a time like this along with student debt forgiveness.

[Aquaria]

38. Reality says otherwise

*BS can win with the under 45 voters all he wants, but if only a handful of them vote, then it's useless to think that matters any. Youth can't expect to get the candidate they want, or the changes they want--or for anyone to care about what issues matter to them--if they'd rather play video games or stare at their phone screens than get out and vote. Squeaky wheels get the grease in politics. The grease for the Democratic party will be going to women, African-Americans and somewhat liberal/moderate Democrats.

Because they, you know, vote. That's what counts. Not what ifs and maybes.

*Medicare 4 All--REJECTED. Especially once pollsters started asking people if they wanted to give up their private insurance for it. They didn't:

KFF polling finds more Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents would prefer voting for a candidate who wants to build on the ACA in order to expand coverage and reduce costs rather than replace the ACA with a national Medicare-for-all plan (Figure 12). Additionally, KFF polling has found broader public support for more incremental changes to expand the public health insurance program in this country including proposals that expand the role of public programs like Medicare and Medicaid (Figure 13)

https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/

*AOC has done NOTHING to advance the party. A flea could have won her district as a D, and most Democrats who aren't hard left distrust her, dislike her, or both. Really. You might want to find out what Democrats who are somewhat liberal to moderate have to say about her in other forums, online and off. Let's say that there aren't very many fans. In fact, the consensus is that she needs to focus on becoming a legislator more, and picking Twitter wars with people less. She's not helping herself there, and she's definitely not helping the party any.

*A substantially increased minimum wage was on the policy wish-list LONG before Sanders or Warren took it up. The amount called for varied, but a generous minimum wage hike was long part of the Democratic platform. No need to claim credit for that, when it is wholly undeserved. Plenty of Democrats have written the legislation for it, but, huh, not BS. Funny how that works. He's a legislator. If he's so gung-ho on that issue, where is his legislation? Why hasn't he gotten off his back bench and put forward a bill, gathered up co-sponsors and done the necessary parlaying to get it passed?

Well, maybe because it would be a first for him. It's not like he has even a mediocre record as a legislator.

*They party hasn't shifted any further left than it was in 2008, or, heck, 1992. It's scarcely changed, in all those years. Sure, it now supports LGBT rights more than it did in the past, but that's about the only major change that's come down. There is little difference between the Democratic party now, and the party of 30 years ago in the support for fair taxation, ameliorating poverty, women's rights, legal abortion, workers, the environment, gun control (which BS has a terrible record on), and more. Maybe if BS and his supporters had read any of those platforms, rather than flinging feces at them and at REAL Democrats in general, they wouldn't look so ignorant about reality.

[Codeine]

65. You have no idea what young voters want

because they don’t vote. They may want Bernie, Elizabeth, or even Mr. Tangerine Man — no way to tell unless they actually vote, but they don’t, so who cares?

By the time they do vote it’s entirely probable they’ll vote for regular old mainstream Democrats like Biden or Warren (who is frankly a far superior torchbearer for the Left than the independent senator from Vermont.)

[Walleye]

101. A majority of Democrats just don't like Bernie. It's not that complicated

[Demsrule86]

14. I am so glad you posted this...K&R

Thanks Goth...great article.

[Gothmog]

37. You are welcomed

[Orrex]

21. They offered similar bullshit rationalizations when he LOST in 2016

And they used those bullshit rationalizations to justify his refusal to endorse the candidate or to remove himself from the spotlight.

"He wants to stay in it to steer the discussion," and so on. Obvious bullshit as soon as it was uttered, but it played well with his supporters because it's what they wanted to hear.

Sanders' bid has been futile for a while now, and if he had any intellectual honesty about it, he'd have recognized it and withdrawn.


But here we are.

[Demsrule86]

25. +10000

Great post...

[showblue22]

29. Sen. Sander's will never admit or realize

He was wrong on anything. He truly believes he is the only one with the answers to fix the world. No one can convince him otherwise. He throws out insinuations of things being "rigged." He can't be wrong or rejected, there is no way! It must be rigged.

[Orrex]

33. Yeah, he's a big fan of the "fake news" accusation

And many of his supporters dutifully follow him down that path.

Part of the problem in his campaign, like what's detailed in the OP, is that many of Sanders' supporters (even here on DU) seemed simply unable to believe that anyone might have reservations about him as a candidate or as a president.

To them (again, shown here repeatedly on DU), a person is either sensible and supports Sanders, or is part of the DNC plot against him. There was/is no reasonable gray area.


I suspect that, as in 2016, we'll again see a flurry of similar post hoc rationalizations to explain his loss and his withdrawal.

[betsuni]

28. He was arguing with himself.

He didn't change anything except convince some people his "movement" was real. He keeps doing that thing of claiming Democrats told him that usual Democratic issues he adopted were radical and too extreme. It's a fantasy.

[NoMoreRepugs]

54. Give Bernie his participation trophy and be done with it.

[Tarheel_Dem]

67. "The only thing he's owed is a chance to exit with grace."

But he won't do that "with grace" or otherwise.

[NurseJackie]

68. "Sanders's vision for the party has been soundly and consistently rejected..."

Sanders’s vision for the party has been soundly and consistently rejected....

I've always rejected his Socialist vision, and his smears and divisive lies against Democrats and the Democratic party. It's very satisfying to see his campaign go down in flames. It was a spectacular implosion. A huge fail. Even his marginal "wins" in states that were expected to be huge blowouts for him, ended up being huge disappointments and embarrassments.

[Hortensis]

69. "Sanders's vision for the party has been soundly and consistently rejected."

Well, yes, but of course? Sanders "vision" despises liberals and we're America's liberal party.

Ridiculous.

Trump's "vision for the party" would have failed if he'd tried to run as a Democrat also.

Sanders needs a far-left party, but every time one was formed it turned into a circular firing squad over which far-left dissident faction had The One True Vision. Seriously.

[oasis]

71. +1000

[Gothmog]

73. From the Hoarse Whisperer

Link to tweet

[OnDoutside]

76. Ouch!

[Gothmog]

74. Why Can't Bernie Accept That Democratic Voters Didn't Want Him?

Link to tweet

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-joe-biden-2020-voters-establishment.html

Even many progressives who accept Biden’s nomination as a conscious, non-flukey choice by Democratic voters have insisted on portraying the Sanders agenda as the true winner. Many of them have cited polls showing a majority of Democratic primary voters favoring Medicare for All.

It is certainly true that most Democrats would prefer a single-payer system. I would absolutely prefer a single-payer system, and would happily pay higher taxes to say good-bye forever to employer-sponsored insurance. But Democrats are not unaware that Biden opposed this policy. It was heavily — nay, obsessively — litigated throughout the campaign. The topic consumed large portions of almost every single debate. If Democrats overwhelmingly chose Biden anyway, perhaps they bought his argument that the political barriers to full single payer are prohibitive, and that building on Obamacare to expand coverage makes more sense.

The Sanders campaign was highly successful in turning the race into an ideological referendum. What Sanders failed to anticipate is that doing so would ensure his defeat. Asked last year if they “would rather see the Democratic Party become more liberal or become more moderate,” Democrats chose more moderate by a 54-41 percent margin. Slightly more than half of its voters identify as either moderate or conservative, and slightly less than half identify as liberal. And Biden ate heavily into the liberal vote, dominating among those who identified as “somewhat liberal.”

The Democratic Establishment certainly played an important role in the contest. Its party elite helped coordinate the non-Bernie vote, foiling his plan to capture the nomination without expanding his share much beyond a third. The Sanders movement has remained genuinely indignant that it was unable to win the nomination and steer the party in a direction opposite of the desire of most of its voters by exploiting a divided opposition. But the Sanders plan for minority-faction rule, while it briefly seemed likely to prevail, always required denying the rest of the party a chance to vote up or down on his revolution. He lost for one simple reason: The process gave the voters, right or wrong, what they wanted.

[bluedye33139]

77. For me, the M4A litmus test excluded me from the revolution.

I support the ACA, and I believe that expanded Medicaid right now is bringing health care into millions upon millions of working-class and poor households. I have seen with my own eyes in Washington State that Medicaid has been a godsend for working-class and poor families. I wholeheartedly support expanded Medicaid, and I believe that adding a robust public option to the healthcare exchanges would be another way to get healthcare to people who need it.

I am one of those problematic people who mistrust the idea of putting everyone on Medicare. I am just not sold on it, and whenever I have discussed this with a Sanders person, I learn that I don't support Medicare because I don't care about human beings, or because I don't know things about politics, or because I am stupid, or because I'm a bad person. These are the arguments that have been offered to me as persuasion, and they failed.

I don't think persuasion was the goal. I think the insults were the goal. My trust level for Sanders and his movement is very low. The M4A litmus test excluded me from the revolution, and I don't think I'm alone.

[betsuni]

81. +1

[Laelth]

78. He DID win the larger argument.

The Democratic Party is fundamentally liberal now, and ideas that were considered “crazy” four years ago are now mainstream.

I look forward to Joe Biden making Bernie Sanders’ platform a reality.



-Laelth

[TwilightZone]

79. Nope.

The platform has contained many of the ideas he supposedly introduced for several cycles now, and Democrats have been fighting for most of the same things for decades. Some of them have actually gotten things accomplished.

The Medicare for All bill wasn't even his. John Conyers introduced Medicare for All in 2003 and every year after. Sanders (who "wrote the damn bill" ) filed a parallel bill 14 years later and somehow he thinks he deserves credit.

Politics didn't begin in 2015 when Sanders started running for president.

[Laelth]

80. Honestly, I don't care who deserves the credit.

I am thrilled to have a truly liberal party, at last, and I am willing to give Bernie at least some credit for that. You should try it. It won’t hurt nearly as much as you think.

Go Joe!



-Laelth

[betsuni]

82. What ideas were considered "crazy" four years ago?

[Laelth]

83. M4A, UBI, Green New Deal (just to name three).

If you can’t see that the party has become vastly more liberal over the past four years, then I feel sorry for you. From my perspective, the Democratic Party is much better now than it was four years ago.

-Laelth

[betsuni]

84. Every four years the party platform becomes more progressive. That's how time works.

AOC: "No matter what, time advances."

Medicare for All isn't new, the success of the ACA was what made people more comfortable with government involvement in health care. Green New Deal was coined by Thomas Friedman in 2007 and Obama ran on Green New Deal in 2008. Hillary Clinton was going to add a program called "Alaska for America" to create a fund that would use revenue from shared natural resources to pay a dividend to every citizen, but she couldn't make the numbers work.

None of Bernie's ideas are new but he claims they were considered "radical" four years ago, and his supporters are no more progressive than many other Democratic voters.

[Laelth]

89. Perhaps he takes more credit than he is due.

I won’t argue with that, but he can say he has been a constant force pushing progressive ideas, and he deserves some credit for that. No?



-Laelth

[The Magistrate]

90. Not Really, Ma'am

Anything that might post up in black on the credit side of the ledger is drowned in the red ink recording to his debit the wreckage he has caused. 'Bernie' did not single-handedly put Trump in office, but like the little girl in the old 'Shake-and-Bake' commercial, 'Bernie' can proudly say "I helped!" On the face of it, he seems determined to provide the same assistance this year.





"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

[Laelth]

91. I see the red ink. I am not fond of it, either.

I wish that Bernie was a team player, but he’s not, and he never has been.

It is what it is, and he is what he is. It pains me to see dedicated and loyal Democrats wasting valuable energy on Bernie at this point. The nomination process is effectively over. Bernie is irrelevant, now. Time to move on.

-Laelth

[The Magistrate]

92. Unfortunately, Ma'am

Until he stands down, he is not irrelevant, but rather is a standing menace. I would that it were otherwise, but it is not.

It does seem to me the best course is for the Party and its leadership to proceed as if he is not there, and take the actions they would if only one Democrat remained of the field. That is, after all, the actual state of affairs....





"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

[Gothmog]

85. Not in the real world

I never considered sanders to be a serious candidate. sanders has zero major legislative accomplishments in large part because none of his fellow Democrats in Congress support his agenda. I do not understand the concept of a voter revolution . Without such a magical voter revolution, none of sanders' agenda could be adopted and I am not comfortable in relying on a magical voter revolution

I am not only one to doubt the seriousness of sanders as a candidate https://newrepublic.com/article/156883/gauzy-myth-sanders-campaign

After Tuesday night, the undeniable truth is that the entire Sanders campaign was predicated on a gauzy myth. If there were ever hidden armies of would-be Democratic voters yearning for a visionary presidential nominee uncontaminated by the compromises of life, then these Bernie Brigades still remain well camouflaged.

Sure, as Sanders stressed in his Wednesday statement, some of his policies are popular with primary voters. In Michigan, exit polls showed that replacing private health insurance with a government program had the support of nearly 60 percent of the people who went to the polls on Tuesday. But since the February 29 South Carolina primary, most Democratic primary voters have been unwilling to buy the entire Sanders package: politically unattainable goals, such as canceling $1.6 trillion in college debt, combined with attacks on corporate interests and the “billionaire class.”

After Sanders’s two presidential runs, voters possess a pretty clear-eyed sense of who he is. He is a gadfly, a goad, and a left-wing Pied Piper. These can be valuable traits in politics since the moderate, accommodationist wing of the Democratic Party sometimes needs outside pressure to force it to focus on causes larger than the next election. But Sanders was never cut out to be a traditional president forging alliances, brokering compromises, and dealing with the messiness of governing in a bitterly divided democracy. That simply isn’t Bernie’s skill set. And his lifelong rigidity would have become an even larger governing problem if he ever succeeded Trump as president.

What Democratic voters have created by rallying around Biden is the American equivalent of the Popular Front, which, in the 1930s, was a broad, multiparty alliance against fascism in France and other democratic countries. The exit polls from Michigan echo a sentiment found in almost all primaries—voters, by a 58-to-37 percent margin, want a candidate who can defeat Trump more than someone who agrees with them on all issues.....

Sanders will undoubtedly fight on in the hopes that he can shape the Democratic platform. The problem with that strategy is that, even if Biden were to commit to supporting, say, Medicare for All, as a price for party harmony in Milwaukee, it would be a meaningless pledge. Currently, fewer than one-third of the Democrats in the Senate support eliminating private insurance. And if Chuck Schumer succeeds in getting the chamber back in Democratic hands, the new additions to their ranks are likely to be moderates like John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Steve Bullock of Montana, none of whom support Medicare for All.

There was never going to be a magical voter revolution and there was never any substance to sanders' campaign or any chance that sanders' agenda would be adopted in the real world

[Laelth]

87. No. The arguments haven't turned into reality yet.

You’re right about that part.

Sanders is a powerful symbol of a lasting truth—that those of us on the left are right 90+% of the time. Bernie’s appeal is related to his symbolic value.

Question for you. I honestly don’t know the answer, here. Did Joe Biden vote for or against the repeal of Glass-Steagall? That was one of those times when the left wing of the party was right, but the moderate Democrats joined with the Republicans to do something we warned them against. I suspect Sanders voted against the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

-Laelth

[Gothmog]

93. You do not take into account that the messenger has poisoned the message

There are a good number of hard core Democrats who are not happy with sanders attacking the party and attacking the presumptive nominee. I was a delegate to the National Convention and I was very upset with sanders delegates engaging in planned stunts of booing John Lewis, Elijah Cummings, Stacy Abrams and others. sanders was asked to stop these stunts and refused. sanders also did not condemn the booing of Hillary Clinton by one of his surrogates and other stunts.

Be glad that Georgia has moved its primary. The Texas delegation shares a bus to the main convention sites with the Georgia delegation there were members of the Georgia delegation who were very mad at sanders for not stopping the booing of John Lewis and Stacy Abrams. If there is a primary in Georgia, you will see this stunt be brought up by real Georgia Democrats who are still mad at sanders.

The messenger affects the message. sanders message is not helping his cause by staying in and by having his surrogates make bogus attacks on Joe Biden. Sirota and Grey and ex-Intercept people and the latest attack on Biden is pissing off a ton of hard core Democrats. BTW. sanders hiring and not firing of Sirota and stein supporters also affects the effectiveness of his attempt to win support for his message. sanders has shown bad judgment in hiring and not firing Sirota. Have two Jill Stein supporters at the top of his campaign are also signs of bad judgement. This poor judgement was been noticed by real democrats.

sanders has passed no significant legislation due to the fact that he is not liked and does not try to work with members of the Democratic party. For example it was Senator Bennett who got improvements in the CARE act on uemployment and sanders is taking credit for the hard work of Senator Bennett

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

I really doubt that sanders has helped his message in the real world at all.

Again in the real world, sanders is not winning and his message is largely being ignored by the bulk of the party.

[Gothmog]

86. sanders's secret is out: He has no movement - The Washington Post

I have never taken sanders seriously as a candidate due to sanders complete and utter lack of legislative accomplishments. sanders has not been able to get his fellow Democratic members of Congress to back his agenda and that is not going to change. As I understand it, sanders is now relying on a magical voter revolution to convince republicans to be reasonable. sanders has no magical voter revolution or movement backing him up. sanders has a cap of around 30% of the Democratic voters and that does not constitute a movement or revolution

Link to tweet

For months — for years, really — the media have reported that the Democratic Party has gone far left. They have treated social media as a barometer of the party’s political attitudes and characterized center-left candidates as out of touch with their own party. They have done so despite the triumph of moderate Democratic House candidates in 2018; despite the failure of left-wing Democrats to flip a single House seat; despite the polls showing a substantial percentage of Democrats consider themselves moderate or somewhat liberal; and despite the failure of super-progressive presidential candidates to attract the most critical element in the Democratic Party (African Americans).

With this faulty premise, the media’s coverage has been at times wildly off-kilter. It was easy for anyone caring to look closely to see that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) did not “win” a single debate, because his ranting and raving merely reinforced the fervor of his own cult while turning off the rest of the party. The media have been obsessed with the “likability” of female candidates, never considering that Sanders’s angry and rude demeanor would turn off women, who make up more than half of the Democratic electorate. A simple question — “Who is he gaining by all this yelling?” — should have been front and center in the media’s coverage. His “movement” was assumed but never examined carefully.....

Sanders’s ceiling turned out to be real, because there are generally less than a third of voters in the Democratic Party willing to embrace wide-eyed socialism, venom-filled rhetoric and utter disregard for the demands of governing (e.g. compromise). Michael Moore does not speak for the Democratic Party any more than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speaks for House Democrats. (I have long maintained that the person who has the best read on the party as a whole is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; get to her left, and you are in no-man’s land.)

The Democratic Party does not live on social media nor does it favor bomb-throwers. If anything, it is desperate to play it safe and find an antidote to President Trump — not an imitation. Voters want the madness, the cruelty, the dysfunction and the stupidity to stop. They have found their safe, reliable and decent candidate in Biden. En masse — in every geographic region and Democratic group — they are telling us that they want the primary to end and the effort to rout Trump to begin. The media might have taken Sanders’s “revolution” seriously, but it turns out that Democratic voters as a whole did not.

[Laelth]

88. Sanders can't win the nomination.

I thought that he should have dropped out after Super Tuesday, but I still think that he has won the arguments (about policy) that have defined our party for the past two Presidential cycles.

At least within the party, itself.



-Laelth

[Gothmog]

94. sanders is not popular in the party

I admit that I never considered sanders to be a serious candidate and never understood sanders appeal. sanders has no significant legislative accomplishments in his time in Congress in large part because sanders never bothered to attempt to get his fellow members of congress to support his programs. In the real world, it takes hard work and getting along with people to get major legislation passed. I was not surprised with sanders admitted that he does not try to get along with his fellow members of congress and that he was not good at pleasantries

Link to tweet

I agree with the NYT description of their decision not to endorse sanders in that sanders is too inflexible and that he is not able to compromise. Compromise is key to getting legislation adopted in the real world

Link to tweet

I admit that i do not understand sanders magical voter revolution that sanders claims will enable him to get his agenda adopted. I do not believe in magic and I have seen no evidence that sanders has a magical voter revolution.

Here is on one more question

Link to tweet

Merely announcing a proposal is meaningless in the real world One needs votes to get a major piece of legislation adopted and sanders has not shown that he can do this in the real world

Again I am well aware of sanders and his complete lack of legislative accomplishments and do not understand why he should be taken seriously on these proposals. sanders is not winning people over to his message in the real world and sanders lack of legislative accomplishments show that sanders is not winning support inside the party

[Gothmog]

106. Why did Bernie Sanders drop out? The progressive majority he needed doesn't exist

There was no magical voter revolution

Link to tweet

Biden’s vision has now won out: He is the apparent Democratic nominee after Sanders suspended his campaign Wednesday following a mid-pandemic Wisconsin primary marred by vast polling site closures and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that effectively invalidated many absentee ballots. (Sanders said Monday, given the risks to voters, his campaign would not engage in traditional efforts to get them to the polls.)….

And in particular, his decisive win over Sanders in the primary — without even campaigning in many states — further highlights the limitations of progressive politics in America, at least in winning a national campaign.

Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, made a bad bet on the existence of a national progressive majority (as did Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who ran as a progressive populist but dropped out after Super Tuesday). It turns out there's nothing even close.

In fact, it’s not even clear that a progressive majority exists within the Democratic Party. What does exist is a moderately center-left party with a vocal progressive element.

Sanders frequently said on the campaign trail that he was leading a “multigenerational, multiracial movement,” pledging to mobilize an army of new, young voters. But it turns out older and moderate voters are the ones that grew as a share of the Democratic primary electorate since 2016 — and they favored Biden by a wide margin.

Take the South Carolina primary on Feb. 29, which Biden won, or the 10 of 14 states he captured on Super Tuesday: In all, he appealed to the same coalitions that boosted Democrats so strongly in the 2018 midterm elections, turning out large numbers of suburban voters, while maintaining support from longstanding elements of the Democratic coalition, particularly African American voters.....

Still, with the 2020 Democratic primary process essentially over, it’s clear that the hard-core Democratic left was deluded in their assertions that they were the new Democratic majority. They are going to need a better grip on reality if they are to be successful at the national level moving forward

[Cha]

95. Kick

[Gothmog]

96. Hey Cha

Link to tweet

[Cha]

97. Thank you for that, Tweet, Goth! Please check out my OP

with Klion's meme in it from Hawaii Delilah..

https://upload.democraticunderground.com/1287690692

Link to tweet

[Scurrilous]

98. ...

[Gothmog]

99. How 'Never Bernie' Voters Threw In With Biden and Changed the Primary

sanders was appealing only to 30% of the party and after South Carolina the rest of the party moved to Joe Biden to stop sanders.

Link to tweet

Rarely has political momentum flipped as quickly as it did in the first half of March, as Mr. Sanders lost serious ground to Mr. Biden before the coronavirus slowed their race. There are well-known reasons for the shift: Moderate candidates like Mr. Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota rallied around Mr. Biden. He enjoyed demographic advantages, particularly with black voters. And turnout among young voters and liberal nonvoters did not surge, failing to reshape the electorate as Mr. Sanders had hoped.

But beyond ideology, race and turnout, a chief reason for Mr. Biden’s success has little to do with his candidacy. He became a vehicle for Democrats like Ms. King who were supporting other candidates but found the prospect of Mr. Sanders and his calls for political revolution so distasteful that they put aside misgivings about Mr. Biden and backed him instead.

In phone interviews, dozens of Democrats, mostly aged 50 and over, who live in key March primary states like Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan and Florida, said that Mr. Biden’s appeal went beyond his case for beating President Trump. It was his chances of overtaking Mr. Sanders, the only candidate in the vast Democratic field they found objectionable for reasons personal and political.....

These voters’ willingness to unite against Mr. Sanders helped Democratic Party leaders stave off his insurgent campaign and has made Mr. Biden the all-but-certain Democratic nominee. The convergence behind Mr. Biden also highlights a critical difference between this year’s primary and what happened to the Republican Party in 2016. Four years ago, establishment Republicans were openly skeptical of Mr. Trump after his victories in early primary states, but a fractured field and split primary vote allowed him to amass an insurmountable delegate lead, reshaping the party in the process.....

Ahead of Mr. Sanders’s presidential run in 2020, his campaign did not concern itself with smoothing tensions among voters who supported Mrs. Clinton in 2016. He did not seek the endorsements of many party leaders, who were always unlikely to back him, but could have been swayed from being openly antagonistic to ambivalent.

As a result, after a strong finish in Iowa and wins in New Hampshire and Nevada, Mr. Sanders did not benefit from an assumed truth of presidential campaigns: that early-state victories help bring in voters from other factions. Instead, people like Lori Boerner of McLean, Va., said Mr. Sanders’s performance sent them searching for a candidate who could stop his rise, and after the South Carolina primary, they landed on Mr. Biden.

Relying on the vote of 30% of the Democratic Party did not work when the rest of the party disliked sanders and so selected a candidate who would stop sanders from being the nominee

[Gothmog]

103. Bernie Sanders is out. And the insincere praise begins.

Link to tweet

Democrats, aided by the mainstream media, are now putting out two rather disingenuous storylines. First, “No one ever changed the party as much as Sanders.” Second, “Now begins the struggle to win over the Bernie Bros.” It is understandable that some Democrats — eager to avoid a schism similar to that which occurred in 2016 — are falling over themselves to assuage Sanders’s ego, but let’s not get carried away.

The “Bernie changed the party” line suggests that the party did not overwhelmingly choose a center-left successor to President Barack Obama. But it did! And it has rallied around someone who rejected Medicare-for-all, a wealth tax, left-wing isolationism and the entire “capitalism is evil” stance. Sanders got beaten badly week after week, never changing his message. That message simply did not register with more than about 30 percent of the party. Twitter does not represent the party. The party did not shift far left, as many in the media predicted (egged on by the loudest voices on the left). If anything, Biden’s wins show that the heart of the party rests with moderate African Americans — to whom all Americans are indebted for lifting a viable, electable nominee to oust President Trump. Sanders’s “movement” is far smaller than he would have liked us to believe.

As for winning over his followers, consider a recent poll showing that about 15 percent of Sanders’s supporters intend to vote for Trump if Biden is the nominee. It is hard to fathom the mindset of someone who would prefer an unfit narcissist who opposes virtually every principle and value Democrats hold dear to Obama’s vice president. It is of a piece with those who preferred Jill Stein in 2016. There is no reaching such people. Soliciting them is a waste of time.

The rest of the Sanders coalition should not need much courting. They’ve already signaled they will line up behind Biden and have expressed their determination to oust Trump. Other than not gratuitously attacking them, no great effort should be required to keep them in the fold. (Ironically, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been far more successful in advancing progressive policy ideas with Biden, including her plans on student debt forgiveness and bankruptcy.)

[Gothmog]

105. Bernie Sanders Didn't Win the Ideas Primary, Either

Link to tweet

To hear Sanders tell it, he lost the battle, but won the larger war. In reality, however, it’s hard to see Sanders’ presidential campaign as anything other than a defeat.

His signature “Medicare for All” proposal was repeatedly bludgeoned in the presidential debates, fatally infected Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, and ultimately rejected by most Democratic voters in favor of Joe Biden’s proposal of a public health insurance option. More broadly, the Sanders strategy of making big promises with huge price tags, wrapped with the “socialist” label, sent most Democrats into a panic once he appeared to be nearing the nomination.

He lost. His campaign is over. He will not be the next president. And if his loyalists want to make future gains, they need to learn lessons from that defeat, instead of pretending that they have already won.

In his concession/victory speech, Sanders based his claim on two data points. First, he said, “in so-called red states and blue states and purple states, a majority of the American people now understand that we must raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, that we must guarantee health care as a right to all of our people, that we must transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, and that higher education must be available to all regardless of income.””.....

But there’s a big difference between superficial support for abstract concepts and devout support for concrete policies. Support for Sanders’ list of largely simplistic-though-popular principles splinters once respondents have to grapple with policy details, consider counter-arguments or choose from among multiple proposals

Take Sanders’ advocacy of a free college education for every American. As a principle, it speaks to the idea that everyone should have the ability to go to college, regardless of their origins or economic status. A December New York Times poll of Democrats and Democratic-leaners found broad support for making college affordable to all. But there’s a big difference between “affordable” and “free.” Just 30.5 percent of respondent agreed that “the government should make public colleges free for all Americans, regardless of income,” while two-thirds of Democrats believed that either wealthy families or most families should pay tuition....

Has Sanders helped to broaden the political conversation? Has he legitimized proposals once deemed too radical for consideration? Has he galvanized younger voters and helped pull the center of gravity in the Democratic Party further to the left than it was 16 years ago? Yes, yes and yes. But that is well short of having “won the ideological struggle.”

Democratic voters on Super Tuesday and after vehemently sent a message that there are limits as to how far left their party should go. If another democratic socialist wants to run for the presidency in 2024, she or he (probably she) should understand that the ideological struggle has not been won, and figure out what should be done differently in order to win it.