Bernie’s Revolution Came — and Went

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Thursday, March 05, 2020

Bernie Sanders fans are agog and depressed at Super Tuesday results that have completely deflated the Sanders campaign and made Joe Biden a front-runner in the nominating process. That rat Mayor Pete and Amy Klobuchar and the big wigs at the DNC orchestrated the timing of dropouts and endorsements to maximally help Joe Biden’s once moribund campaign. Then the stock market rallied, and the bastards had the gall to even tell the public it was because of Sanders’s demise.

So Sanders fans are calling it a coup. It’s true that upwardly mobile Dem moderates have rallied around Biden. But that’s not why the Sanders campaign is on a glide path to destruction. It wasn’t a coup that did them in, it was a proletarian revolution.

The argument that Sanders was electable rested on him building on top of the work he did in 2016. In the primary against Clinton, he won states such as Minnesota, getting 61 percent against Clinton’s 38. His strong groups were young voters of all kinds, and he was running away with non-college-educated white voters, a group that Clinton bled to Trump in the general election. In the intervening years, Sanders did lots of leg work visiting Hispanic parts of the country, particularly in California. And Hispanics started coming over to him, which was crucial for his victories in Nevada and California. He really did do better among Hispanics this time.

But, just as Clinton crushed Sanders in the South, where Black voters predominate, so too did Joe Biden. In South Carolina, Biden won churchgoers and women. He won older voters, and he did especially well among black voters, winning that group by a 44-point margin. He even won those who said the economic system needs an overhaul and among voters who favor single-payer health care, suggesting that Sanders’s platform barely even registered among voters.

But the really ominous trend for Bernie Sanders is that his coalition is shrinking in the matchup against Joe Biden. Minnesota switched to a primary from a caucus system, and Biden won 38 percent to Bernie’s 29 percent; he also won non-college voters over Bernie 41 to 36. And crucially, he won white non-college graduates (fully 40 percent of Minnesota’s electorate) 44 to 32.

So it’s true that Amy Klobuchar’s and Pete Buttigieg’s endorsements are consolidating upwardly mobile suburban voters for Biden, particularly women. But the more sobering truth is that Bernie’s coalition is shrinking, and the great proletariat — America’s working families — are defecting to Joe Biden. The Minnesota and Oklahoma results suggest something about where states such as Michigan will go in the rest of the race; it won’t help Bernie if Biden softens him up across the Midwest.

Instead of being seen as an ideological candidate, Bernie is favored most by young college graduates who feel strained, and by voters in the Northwest, where there is a tradition of prairie socialism. The revolution of a multiracial working class that Bernie talks about swept across the country on Super Tuesday. It chose Joe Biden.