Bernie Sanders: The Democrats Dilemma
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
The American presidential primaries began in earnest on February 3, 2020, with the now infamous Iowa caucuses.[1] Iowa is a small mid-western state with a population of 3,155,070. Almost 85% of its residents are white – hardly representative of the U.S. as a whole, yet this is where the voting begins every four years to nominate candidates to the Democratic and Republican parties. It is a process of thousands of local meetings held across the state where voters come together to “caucus” for their chosen candidates. While most American states have simple ballot voting for candidates, the Iowa system choses its delegates based on a complicated formula “initial alignment votes” and “final alignment votes” that are used to determine the statewide number of “state delegate equivalents” for Iowa’s 41 delegates to the Democrats nominating convention
One thing is clear: democratic socialist Bernie Sanders won the popular vote with 42,672 first choice votes, about 6,000 votes more than former South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. However, the byzantine caucus system apportioned 13 delegates to Buttigieg and only 12 to Sanders.
Sanders’ strong showing in Iowa was followed by a narrow victory on February 11 in the New Hampshire primary — another small and racially unrepresentative state — but an important bellwether of voter sentiment on the road to the nomination. Sanders won with 25.7% of the vote, Pete Buttigieg came in second at 24.4%, followed by a surprising strong third place finish for Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar at 19.8%.[2] The dismal fourth place finish for Senator Elizabeth Warren of neighboring Massachusetts at 9.2% is of concern to the left because she and Sanders represent the anti-corporate wing of the electoral field.
Support for Sanders’ is surging with a strong base of young people and working-class voters. Amazingly, more than 1.5 million people have donated to his campaign with an average contribution of only $18. Unlike other candidates, who rely on major donors from Wall Street and corporate America, Sanders’ grass roots effort has shattered all previous records by raising over $121 million dollars — $25 million in January 2020 alone.[3]
Despite Bernie’s initial successes, many Democrats have raised concerns about whether Bernie is the best candidate to beat Republican President Donald Trump on November 3, 2020. Beating Trump will require a “united front” of voters who may not be ready to support Bernie’s more radical “social democratic” proposals. For example, Sanders has championed Medicare for All and free college tuition for all, policies that are long established in Europe but viewed as very radical in the United States.
The U.S. “winner-take-all” Electoral College system does not lend itself to building electoral support with your preferred candidate in the election and then making parliamentary alliances after the election to form a government. In the case of the U.S., it will require broad unity behind one candidate for the Democrats to defeat Trump.
While the corporate-controlled news media is constantly degrading Bernie’s chances, there is a strong argument that he is the best candidate to form the broad coalition needed to beat Trump. In a head-to-head match-up with Trump, Bernie Sanders is the best candidate to:
- Peel off white, working-class voters who helped elect Trump in 2016 out of disgust with neo-liberal Hillary Clinton;
- Inspire a grassroots movement for social and economic justice along with the passion and energy of millennials that is essential for the on-the-ground, door-to-door mobilization needed to beat Trump;
- Perform especially well in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – the three states that went to Trump by a margin of only a little more than 80,000 votes in 2016.
The Sanders’ candidacy — and his prospect of becoming president — seriously threaten the neo-liberal Wall Street regime and the military industrial complex that have so richly profited from America’s unbridled “frontier capitalism.” For that reason, the Democratic Party establishment will stop at nothing to prevent his nomination.
After the 2016 Democratic Convention debacle, where unelected “super delegates” carried the vote for Clinton in the first round of delegate votes, the Democratic Party was forced to prevent them from voting in the first round in 2020. However, party officials will still allow these unelected delegates to vote in the secondand any additionalrounds in a “brokered” convention, where these delegates would likely tip the nomination away from a progressive candidate.
The nominating process is still in its very early stages and a lot can happen before the July 13-16 convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The biggest day of the primary process is “Super Tuesday,” March 3 when 14 states vote including California with 400 delegates.[4]
Bernie Sanders will likely maintain 20-30 percent support because of his long history of principled stands on the issues that matter most to working class families. With many candidates in the field, he may have the most delegates, but not enough for a first ballot majority at the convention. A first ballot victory requires 1990 pledged delegates – elected in primaries and caucuses – for victory. If the delegate vote goes to a second round, Sanders is likely to lose to a more moderate candidate because of the votes from 771 unelected super delegates. That would rekindle charges of the party once again rigging the nomination — and it could destroy the unity needed post-convention to defeat Trump. What a depressing scenario!
That is the Democrats dilemma: Unless there is a first ballot consensus, the party could suffer a deep and ugly split. With the pro-corporate Democratic establishment so determined to stop Sanders and the transformation of the party by any means, this might result in defeat in November and the nightmare of four more years of Trump.
That’s an unacceptable outcome. In the remaining months, we must build a determined mass movement of progressive Democrats, independents (unenrolled voters) and the emerging socialist tendency to help Bernie win on the first ballot or find a consensus candidate who unites Americans of good will who want to save democracy and defeat Donald Trump. This is a not an election to allow self-righteous ideological purity to obfuscate the need for a huge political uprising to block Trump from securing a potentially disastrous second term.
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[1] 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Iowa_Democratic_caucuses
[2] Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “Bernie Sanders Scores Narrow Victory in New Hampshire Primary,” New York Times, February 11, 2020, at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/us/politics/bernie-sanders-new-hampshire-primary.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage.
[3] Eliza Collins and Chad Day, “Bernie Sanders Raised $25 Million in January,” Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-sanders-raised-25-million-in-january-11580986800; K.K. Rebecca Lai, Josh Katz, Rachel Shorey, Thomas Kaplan and Derek Watkins, “The Donors Powering the Campaign of Bernie Sanders,” New York Times, February 1, 2020, at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/01/us/politics/democratic-presidential-campaign-donors.html.
[4] “Super Tuesday,” from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday#2020
Bernie Sanders: The Democrats Dilemma is nice overview and roundup of the state of the Democratic Party primary at the time of its publication by two good friends and longtime respected and dedicated activists. The article highlights correctly the very real possibility of a “brokered” convention, something that has worried me for the past four months, and has increasingly worried me with Bloomberg’s recent rise in the polls and the cover he is receiving from elites, including Afro-American politicians. Likewise, Biden’s recent commanding victory in South Carolina increases the possibility of a brokered convention. However, the last paragraph of Peter’s and Rand’s article is troubling and overly conciliatory, with its emphasis on the need to focus on a possible compromise candidate, which seems far too early and currently unnecessary to lock on to such an institutional/insider strategy, not to mention an unwarranted overly defensive stance.
I fear the constant mainstream media onslaught, with a myopic focus on formalistic pseudo-mathematics (i.e., comparing Bernie vote totals to “moderate” vote totals) and dubious descriptions of voter behavior as strictly an expression of ideology on a “moderate/left” axis, is having an effect on progressives. However, this media narrative is premised on completely wrong assumptions about voters. Let’s interject a bit of information and counterfactuals:
(1) The largest percentage of Biden voters choose Bernie as their second choice, reflecting that Bernie and Biden share a similar coalition of voters, i.e. primarily multiracial working class, putting aside for the moment generational voter differences and support among Latinos;
(2) Bernie has the highest number of support among self-described “moderates,” according to a recent ABC poll – Bernie (25%), Biden (24%), Bloomberg(19%), and when combined with Bernie’s 41% support among “liberals,” Bernie’s support total rises to 66%;
(3) Among “moderate” candidates a significant number of their voters choose Bernie as a second choice over other “moderate” candidates.
(4) A recent YouGov/Yahoo poll shows that Bernie beats all other Democratic Party primary candidates in a head-to-head matchup – Klobuchar (+ 21), Buttigieg (+17), Bloomberg (+15), and Biden (+4);
(5) The above makes sense only if you look at the good evidence suggesting voters choose candidates, in part, based on non-ideological factors, such has: Favorability and Trustworthiness – on which Bernie holds commanding leads in all polls to date – and Electability, on which despite a constant media counter narrative, a recent poll puts Bernie at 30%, more than double the nearest moderate! And, in poll after poll Bernie beats Trump, even in some red states like Florida;
(4) Further, 82% of democrats, and 55% of all voters, support Medicare for all, and, despite vote totals and uniform “moderate” opposition in Iowa, NH, Nevada, and South Carolina exit polls showed that 60%, 71%, 66%, and 55% of voters, respectively, in these state primaries favored Medicare for All; and,
(5) Finally, Bernie with his emphasis on Medicare for All is the most trusted candidate on health care, despite that all “moderates” oppose Medicare for All.
Point: In the real world of voting behavior, the numbers do not add up as media pundits would have us believe, unless you start from a false premise, in this case that voters share the ideological distinctions imposed on their choices.
So, let’s not get gas lighted by phony addition games, fallacious ideological analyses, and the stoking of overwrought fear about Trump, which are nothing more than attempts to manufacture consent and reinforce opinion around neoliberalism. There are things worse than clown-fascist, incompetent Trump – namely, a competent, elitist/authoritarian, not so undercover racist, sexist, and champion of global finance-capital, who will sooth us to sleep with phony woke cultural messaging, gun control proposals, market solutions to Climate Change, and claims of defending democracy and civility, i.e. Bloomberg. Hope we don’t get fooled again!
What we need, in addition to a strategy for getting a progressive majority or reaching a consensus on a comprise “moderate” candidate, is a strategy for street demonstrations and real people power pressure to force Democratic Party elites to give the nomination to Bernie, if he has the largest plurality coming into the convention. We must scare the shit out of Democratic Party elites with the very real possibility that a large number of voters and activists could sit out the Election. This will be particularly important if elites are stupid enough to try to foist on us a ticket of Bloomberg and some progressive Black woman (Stacy Abrahams) Vice President, which is the elites’ preferred strategic move, and one we should be ready for. However, after the South Carolina primary results, the elites are more likely to unite around a Biden nomination, again with African American VP to quell a potential progressive wing rebellion when the nomination is taken away from Bernie. It is also with noting that without a chance of winning the nomination or even any state, including Massachusetts, through the popular vote, Elizabeth Warren is playing a very conscious game of depressing the Bernie delegate count, all in the hopes of playing a role at the convention, and maybe the delusional fantasy of being a VP pick. We should be ready for all three of these nomination scenarios – Biden, Bloomberg, and Warren, in descending order of likelihood – but most importantly we need to organize demonstrations and rallies in Milwaukee should elites try to steal the nomination. As Bernie said this past summer at the AFL-CIO: “If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it’s time that the working class of this country won that war and not just the corporate elite.” It is time to fight and organize, comrades, not plan our retreat, at least not yet!