With Bernie Sanders suddenly in the driver’s seat to be the Democratic nominee, we have been hearing and will hear much more from many moderates and mainstream liberals on cable TV and on social media about how Sanders will guarantee defeat to Donald Trump in the fall, and that will it will spell disaster for Democrats across the board. Many Democratic voters take their cues from such figures.
In this diary I’d like to challenge this widely-held but erroneous assertion.
First of all, just based on the only real quantifiable way of guessing how the election may go this fall, Sanders beats Trump in the Real Clear Politics average of the head-to-head polls:
What’s more, Sanders does about as well (better in fact) against Trump as the two centrists, Biden and Bloomberg, who are often cited as being better able to beat Trump.
If you look at swing state polls, again, Sanders does just about as well as his centrist competitors.
Another common argument that you hear for why Sanders can’t possibly win is that America will never elect a Socialist, and indeed there is a recent poll showing that “67 percent say they have reservations or are ‘very uncomfortable’ with a candidate being a socialist”.
However, what people citing this poll often fail to mention is that the same poll showed Sanders, a household name who almost everyone knows is socialist, defeating Trump head-to-head 50-46.
Also, a different poll by Data for Progress specifically tested the effect of explicitly mentioning that Sanders is a socialist to potential voters compared with not mentioning it, and they found that it really didn’t have much affect at all.
I think what we can conclude from the data is that Americans are both uncomfortable with a candidate who is a socialist, and that Americans are also quite comfortable with supporting the socialist Bernie Sanders over Donald Trump. I think we can also conclude that the American people are very complicated.
But what the data clearly does not affirm is the notion that a socialist cannot possibly win the election. Also, given that every Democratic nominee in the last 50 years has been branded a socialist by Republicans, and given that most voters probably have few particularly searing memories of the Cold War, there is reason to doubt that such attacks have the resonance many establishment Dems and liberals seem to think.
Another frequently cited reason for why Sanders would be a disaster is the fate of past Democratic candidates who were seen as being too far to the left, with the example of George McGovern, who lost 49 states to Nixon in 1972, usually being mentioned. The problem with this comparison is simply that the demographics of the 2020 election will be much different from those of 1972.
To highlight what I’m talking about, in 1988 Michael Dukakis lost the White vote 40-60 to George Bush, which was almost identical to the 39-59 margin that Barack Obama lost Whites by to Mitt Romney in 2012.
Yet Dukakis won just 10 states and 111 electoral votes while Obama won 31 states and 332 electoral votes. The reason for the differential in outcome was that in 1988 Whites made up 85% of the electorate whereas in 2012 they made up just 72%. As you can see, in 1988 Nonwhites went almost as overwhelmingly for Dukakis as they did for Obama. But clearly Obama fared much better than Dukakis.
This year Whites are projected to make up less than 70% of the electorate. For that reason alone, there is virtually no chance that Sanders will get blown out the way McGovern or Dukakis did.
None of this means that Sanders is a lock to win either. Demographics are not necessarily destiny as Hillary Clinton would tell you. But it does mean that the election will almost certainly be fairly close, as every election since 2000 (aside from 2008) has been, which means that Sanders definitely has a chance to win.
But this is not merely a diary about what the data says or how applicable certain moments in political history are, but is also a warning to listen with some skepticism what mainstream centrist and liberal thinkers, figures, and opinion-makers, and those who generally subscribe to their thinking have to say.
To be clear I’m not picking on the rank and file, average people who might subscribe to that thinking, I know many myself, my mom is this way. I can understand the apprehension that many moderates and traditional liberals feel about Sanders’ chances, especially among older Democrats who lived through the Cold War when there was such a stigma are socialism, when it was such a potent line of attack in politics, and when Democrats regularly suffered humiliating wipe-outs in presidential elections for two decades.
But to such Democrats, I would just point out how often the conventional wisdom espoused by the kinds of moderates and traditional liberals you see on MSNBC or on Twitter or read in the op-ed pages of the NY Times and Washington Post has been proven wrong.
Many of them were the same folks who assured us in 2016 that Trump could not possibly win and that Hillary Clinton could not possibly lose. These were folks who’ve said that Sanders had no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, primarily because he supposedly could not win Nonwhites, yet today he is the clear Democratic front-runner by virtue of his sweeping victory in Nevada yesterday that was powered by support from Nonwhites. These were folks who said Sanders would never win over Blacks, yet today’s Morning Consult poll shows Sanders leading among Blacks.
Just to name a specific example of what I’m talking about, influential center-left pundit and columnist Jonathan Chait, who is not infrequently a guest on MSNBC and whose pieces are often cited credulously by mainstream liberals and Dems, just today wrote a piece titled “If Democrats Aren’t Terrified of Bernie, They’re Not Paying Attention” and a few weeks ago wrote another hysterical anti-Sanders piece titled “Running Sanders Against Trump Would Be An Act of Insanity”.
Sorry to pick on Chait here, but he was also the guy who wrote a piece back in 2016 titled “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination” in which he predictably argued Trump would certainly lose (how’d that turn out?) and even more unforgivably argued that —
If he does win, a Trump presidency would probably wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency. It might even, possibly, do some good.
Chait is also the political Nostradamus who wrote this the day before the 2016 election:
So maybe you should take what people like Chait say with a huge grain of salt.
What I’m ultimately arguing here is for people to think for themselves and question the assumptions of the various establishment centrist and liberal figures and people who repeat their views, and who as the reality of a Sanders nomination begins to dawn upon them will grow even more hysterical and insistent with their claims about how we need to stop Sanders because he will destroy the Democratic Party.
As I’ve tried to lay out above, the usual arguments you hear for their predictions of certain doom for Sanders that they voice with such unshakable conviction are simply not validated by the data and are often based on nothing more than gut feelings and outdated political assumptions. And as I’ve also noted, the people espousing these views who have been wildly off the mark about virtually every major political trend and outcome over the last half-decade or so.
Again, this is not to argue that Sanders is guaranteed to win this fall. In fact, given the public’s satisfaction with the economy, I would argue Trump is the slight favorite no matter who the Democrats field as their nominee. But Sanders also has just as good a chance as any other Democratic candidate, if not better, at defeating Trump this fall.
So I implore you all to be deeply skeptical when you hear establishment voices saying Sanders is doomed to fail since they don’t have much evidence or a track record of accurately determining who’s electable. Again, look at where we’re at — the last two presidents we’ve had are Barack Obama and Donald Trump, both of whom the purveyors of conventional wisdom on the center and left originally insisted had no chance of winning. The Democratic nominee is almost certain to be Bernie Sanders who the purveyors of conventional wisdom insisted had no chance of winning the nomination.
Maybe, just maybe, those spouting the conventional wisdom simply don’t know what they’re talking about anymore.