The Fire Berns Out

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

In 2016, Bernie Sanders got 13.2 million people to vote for him in the Democratic primary —  good for 43 percent. We can now surmise that a chunk of that total represented Democrats who simply wanted a non–Hillary Clinton option.

In this cycle, about 4.5 million out of 15 million voters in the Democratic primary voted for Sanders — just under 30 percent in a much more crowded field.

As Sanders’s second bid for the presidency falls short — once again against an elderly Washington figure who served in the Obama administration — you will hear a lot of arguments that “Bernie Sanders failed” and a lot of counterarguments that “even though he didn’t win, Bernie Sanders transformed the Democratic Party.” Sanders illuminated both the powers and limits of socialism in the internal debates among Democrats.

Sure, socialism carries much less of a stigma in Democratic politics than it did a decade ago. Polling continually indicates that America’s young people have a much more positive attitude toward socialism than their parents and grandparents did. But that is a separate question from whether an openly socialist candidate can win elections — though it is worth noting that the two biggest Democratic Socialists of America victories in 2018 came from the wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the Democratic primaries of deep-blue House districts.

The response of the rest of the party to Sanders’s rise proved illuminating. Democrats feared that a 2020 cycle with Sanders atop the ticket would risk their House majority, destroy them in swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania, and obliterate them in red states.

In theory, socialism is supposed to appeal to the working class, including the white working class, which drifted toward Trump in 2016. But on Super Tuesday, Joe Biden ran ahead of Sanders among white non–college graduates in the states that Biden won, and the former vice president largely kept it close among this demographic in the states that Sanders won.

In California, where Sanders won (and the final tally is still being tabulated), exit polls indicated Sanders narrowly won white non–college graduates, 36 percent to 30 percent. In Colorado, Sanders won this demographic, 29 percent to Biden’s 17 percent.

In Virginia, Biden won white non–college graduates, 46–32 percent. In Massachusetts, Biden won white non–college graduates, 42–34. In Oklahoma, Biden won white non–college graduates, 34–24.

In Minnesota, Biden won among this demographic, 44 percent to 32 percent. And that was with a wild disparity in campaign resources: “Sanders held a large rally in St. Paul on the eve of the election and had campaign staffers organizing in the state for months. Biden, by contrast, never campaigned in Minnesota as a 2020 candidate and had a single paid employee based in the state.”

In North Carolina, Sanders narrowly won among white non–college graduates, 32 percent to 27 percent. The bad news is that Biden crushed him among nonwhite non–college graduates, 56 percent to 22 percent. And this points to the other glaring deficiency in Sanders’s appeal: Older and middle-aged blacks just aren’t interested in what he is offering.

The Sanders campaign really, really tried to win over black voters this cycle, and they can point to some growing support among younger blacks. But looking at the results of this cycle so far, Sanders and his team largely failed. Interestingly, African Americans are more likely to have positive feelings about socialism than other demographics. But in most states, they overwhelmingly gravitated to Biden instead of Sanders. Either they didn’t like Sanders’s vision of a socialist America, or they simply didn’t believe that Sanders could win the election in the first place.

In December, Ruby Cramer laid out what appeared to be a slightly tweaked and refocused message of the Sanders 2020 campaign. Instead of discussing abstract economic figures and the richest 1 percent, Sanders was going to discuss inequality in more human terms, focusing on the hardships of Americans who aren’t often discussed in national debates:

Bernie Sanders is sorry for your troubles, but that’s not the reason he’s asking you to talk about them — which he is, everywhere he goes. He wants you to talk about your medical bill — the one you can’t pay. He wants you to talk about losing your house because you got sick. He wants you to talk about the payday loans you took out to keep your kid in school. About the six-figure student debt that’s always on your mind. About living off credit cards, or losing your pension, or working multiple jobs for wages that won’t be enough to support your family.

“Who wants to share their story?” he’ll say. “Don’t be embarrassed. Millions of people are in your boat.”

Sanders’s argument to the electorate was that if you are struggling economically, it is not your fault, it is the fault of an unjust American system. This argument has the advantage of being less antagonistic than merely demonizing the wealthy. Some people do fall down the economic ladder or fail to rise because of factors they can’t control. Perhaps a more relevant truth is that those who start life in challenging circumstances have far less room for error. A middle-class or wealthy teen can skip school, smoke marijuana, drink alcohol underage, go through a period of lousy grades, or commit a small crime such as shoplifting, and nonetheless enter adulthood with more or less minimal consequences. Those who grow up in poorer neighborhoods, single-parent homes, fewer responsible adults around, fewer support networks, etc., have a tougher time compensating for those early mistakes in life.

Americans can recognize injustice in their country, but they aren’t quite willing to take that last step of believing that their country is fundamentally unjust. And they probably aren’t convinced that a dramatically more powerful and intrusive federal government is certain to improve their situation in life.

It may simply be that a campaign built around mobilizing struggling Americans hit two simultaneous roadblocks. The first is that this demographic is particularly difficult to motivate and get to the polls. Early last month, Chris Arnade, the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, wrote, “Non-voters are a big block & make up most of my book & are very removed from political process which they don’t trust or care about. Voting for them is about institutions that have failed them or screwed them over. Courthouses, schools, town centers. Why sign your name to something that is gonna maybe get you jury duty? And that cynicism is often justified, especially for the poorest.”

The second question is whether there are enough mobilizable voters in this demographic, compared with middle-class and upper-class voters likely to oppose those policies, or at best greet them warily. As David Frum summarized, “the Sanders campaign is a bet that the 2020 race can be won by mobilizing the Americans least committed to the political process while alienating and even offending the Americans most committed to it.”

Who fueled the Sanders victories in this cycle? Young voters, very liberal voters, and Latinos. In the end, the Bernie Sanders campaign became a movement heavily driven by white college students. Some would argue that in America’s economic and social hierarchy, white college students are much more privileged than they think they are. College students are largely inexperienced in the workforce, less likely to be married, less likely to be parents, much less likely to be homeowners, and because they have limited earnings, carry less of a tax burden. If you believe that socialism works only in theory and leads to disaster in practice — Sanders himself insisted that the Soviet Union doesn’t count as an example of socialism — it is unsurprising that the youngest and least experienced voters in the electorate would be the ones most attracted to that system.

A movement of young voters, very liberal voters, and Latinos can take a candidate pretty far in a Democratic primary; just not far enough. That 20 to 30 percent of the Democratic electorate will look indomitable in a crowded field but wither in a one-on-one race — and if socialism can’t win a majority in a Democratic primary, it can’t win a general election nationwide. It is conceivable that in future cycles, a younger or nonwhite candidate could win more votes running as a socialist. Then again, Sanders was no slouch at firing up a crowd, and even his opponents thought he was honest about what he wanted and consistent in his beliefs.

The back-to-back close-but-no-cigar campaigns by Sanders illuminate a thorny problem for Democrats: The party probably can’t win in 2020 with Sanders atop the ticket, but they can’t win without Sanders voters, either.