By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, March 04, 2020
Bernie Sanders suffered the political equivalent of a
near-death experience on Tuesday night. But while some might react to the shock
of that encounter resolved to reform their reckless ways, Sanders appears
determined to forge ahead on precisely the same course that brought him to the
edge of defeat.
If any one event is responsible for the Vermont senator’s
spectacular implosion across the country, it was Biden’s nearly 30-point
victory in South Carolina, which gave the Democratic Party’s institutionalists
the cover they needed to endorse Biden in droves, earning him 72 hours of free,
positive media coverage. But there would have been no deluge of endorsements
for Biden if the alternative to the former vice president wasn’t a cantankerous
eccentric with an unwavering commitment to antagonizing the members of the
party he seeks to lead. If Sanders could change his ways, he probably would.
But it’s become quite clear in the wake of Super Tuesday’s defeats that he’s
incapable of that kind of reformation.
Adorned with all the trappings of defeat on Tuesday
night, Sanders assured his supporters that he would continue his crusade
against the “political establishment.” And in a subdued press conference on
Wednesday afternoon, he delivered. Sanders lashed out at “the venom” toward his
campaign in the “corporate media.” He attacked not just Biden but his
supporters, whom he denigrated as “the corporate establishment.” He added with
no small measure of derision that Biden’s victory last night propelled the
stock market to pare back some of the losses it has sustained amid fears over
the outbreak of Coronavirus—something that is surely of some comfort to the 100
million Americans exposed to the marketplace via their 401K plans. And rather
than moderate his rhetoric, he doubled down on the language of insurgency. “We
are talking about a political revolution,” Sanders insisted.
This is just the sort of thing that made Biden’s
resurgence possible. “Sanders has made no effort to reach out beyond his
voters, his movement, his revolution,” said Democratic pollster Stanley
Greenberg in a recent interview with the Atlantic’s
Ronald Brownstein. Another Democratic veteran, who requested anonymity to go a
bit further than Greenberg, was even more thoroughly antagonized: “It turns out
that s****ing all over the party you want to win the nomination of is a bad
strategy.”
It’s not just Sanders’s penchant for alienating potential
allies that backfired. By his own admission, Sanders’s strategy—his very theory
of the race—is being disproven before his eyes.
At that press conference, Sanders embarked on an
introspective aside when he asked himself if he was satisfied with the number
of young voters his campaign has turned out to the polls. “The answer is no,”
he confessed. Nevertheless, he added, if you look at the states he won, like
California, it’s clear that his campaign is amassing the support of most of the
party’s core demographics—young people, minorities, and women.
Indeed, while Sanders won the support of a staggering
number of young voters, they were a smaller proportion of the Super Tuesday
electorate than they were four years ago. That should come as no surprise. The
signs that the new coalition of unlikely voters Sanders’s promised to energize
was not materializing were apparent well before voters went to the polls on
Tuesday. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Sanders prevailed (or nearly
prevailed) not by building a new Democratic Party from the ground up but
appealing to the existing one. Sanders’s aides dismissed this inconvenient
fact. Who cares if their candidate is winning? But if the narrowness of
Sanders’s coalition didn’t matter when he was winning despite that fact, it
surely does now that he’s losing because of it.
If anyone was expecting a course correction from the
self-described democratic socialist, they’ve not been paying close attention to
the senator’s career. Win or lose, rain or shine, Sanders is who he is. Even if
he could moderate his personality and amend his views to appeal to a wider
audience, he doesn’t seem inclined to give his political adversaries the
satisfaction. Sanders’s diehard fans were probably thrilled by their
candidate’s trademark recalcitrance. In all likelihood, so was Joe Biden.
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