In 34 national surveys conducted from October 2018 to early April, Joe Biden, who is expected to announce his presidential bid on Thursday, led of all competitors.
Then, in an Emerson College poll conducted two weeks ago, Bernie Sanders, a candidate with substantial liabilities as well as marked strengths, pulled ahead of Biden for the first time, 29-24 percent.
Sanders is also doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire, sites of the first caucus and primary.
One consequence of these developments is summed up in the headline of my colleague Jonathan Martin’s April 15 story, “‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Are Agonizing Over His Momentum.”
In this light, I asked a group of Democratic and liberal-leaning consultants, pollsters, economists and political scientists what the likelihood of a Sanders’ nomination was, what his prospects would be in the general election, and how Democratic House and Senate candidates might fare with Sanders at the top of the ticket. When necessary, I offered them the opportunity to speak on background — with no direct attribution — to encourage forthcoming responses.
The answers I got from Democrats who make their living in politics revealed considerable wariness toward Sanders — the response many Sanders supporters would expect.
“Point 1, I am very worried about Bernie. Socialism is a problem word,” a Democratic operative with ties to the party establishment said:
Sure he has a “stick it to the elites” message that could explain it, but it’s a problem. Point 2, Democrats are doing very well in the suburbs. Bernie could threaten that shift with an economic frame that is just too much for them. He could become a huge problem in the suburbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Orange County, etc. where the key Senate and House races will take place.
“Bernie is one Democrat who probably cannot win,” said a second operative:
— I worry about his style for swing women voters. His proposals are good and have agenda-setting strength. I think his language of no alternative-no compromise-socialist will spook too many voters.
In the most important election in the lifetime of many Democrats — with Trump poised for a second term — the electability of the Democratic nominee is the top concern.
Sanders has never been tested in a general election. His only experience running against Republicans has been in Vermont, a state ranked third most liberal in the nation and second most Democratic, according to Gallup
Democratic primary voters and caucus goers are more liberal than voters in the general election, including the Democratic electorate as a whole. They are more likely to be comfortable with the idea of socialism and more tolerant of what the Daily Mail called Sanders’ “very 1960s love life,” of the content of Sanders’ early writings and of his son born outside of marriage — matters, for better or worse, that are of concern to socially moderate and more conservative voters on whom much is riding in this election. Early voters are also likely to be less critical of his erratic work history and of his hand-to-mouth existence before becoming mayor of Burlington. Overall, they are more likely to be charmed by his idiosyncratic career path, a path possibly less alluring to a more mainstream audience.
Sanders’ early writings are described in a 2015 book, “Why Bernie Sanders Matters,” in a 2015 Mother Jones profile by Tim Murphy and in a Salon article by Henry Jaffe.
Jaffe wrote:
— Drawing on the teachings of Wilhelm Reich that Sanders had embraced in college, he argued in an essay for the Freeman that cancer may be caused by emotional distress. That was especially the case, he wrote, with breast cancer, which he attributed to sexual repression of young girls, referring often to The Cancer Biopathy, Reich’s 1948 book that proposed a direct link between emotional and sexual health, in particular the dire consequences of suppressing “biosexual excitation.”
Jaffe reported that in the 1969 Freeman essay, Sanders asked, “How much guilt, nervousness have you imbued in your daughter with regard to sex?” and continued with the question,
— If she is 16, 3 years beyond puberty and the time which nature set forth for childbearing, and spent a night out with her boyfriend, what is your reaction? Do you take her to a psychiatrist because she is “maladjusted,” or a “prostitute,” or are you happy that she has found someone with whom she can share love? Are you concerned about HER happiness, or about your “reputation” in the community?
Murphy, in the Mother Jones article, describes Sanders’ lifestyle in the 1970s:
“He was living in the back of an old brick building, and when he couldn’t pay the electric bill, he would take extension cords and run down to the basement and plug them into the landlord’s outlet,’ says Nancy Barnett, an artist who lived next door to Sanders in Burlington. The fridge was often empty, but the apartment was littered with yellow legal pads filled with Sanders’ writings.
“When he was eventually evicted,” Murphy wrote, Sanders moved in with a friend.
In 1969, Sanders, who has been married twice, fathered a son, Levi Noah Sanders, with a third woman with whom he briefly lived, Susan Campbell Mott.
Sanders and his supporters have argued that his early history is part of a no longer relevant past and that he intends to run on his platform, not on his personality or personal life. Nonetheless, if Sanders wins the nomination, Trump and his Republican Party are certain to try to make the young Bernie Sanders a major issue.
What are the politics of Sanders’ commitment to democratic socialism?
An August 2018 YouGov survey found that 26 percent of voters had a favorable view of socialism (6 percent “very favorable,” 20 percent “somewhat favorable”) while 42 percent had an unfavorable view (31 percent very, 11 percent somewhat).
While Democrats in the survey were favorable on the topic of socialism, 46-25, independents and Republicans were not, 19-40 and 11-71.
During the primaries, Sanders is unlikely to face demands for a persuasive response to charges that the domestic spending programs he supports — Medicare for All, a federal job guarantee, a Green New Deal, free tuition at public colleges, universal child care — would cost trillions of dollars. The libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University estimated that Medicare for All alone would cost “$32.6 trillion during its first 10 years of full implementation,” which would require tax hikes on the middle class as well as on the rich and corporations — a sum that would, in fact, be virtually impossible to raise or procure.
Sanders’ fondness for the word “revolution” led an opinion columnist for The Washington Post to criticize him for his “angry, unrealistic call for ‘revolution.’ ” The revolution he called for while he was running against Hillary Clinton, The Times reported in 2016, was virtually identical to the revolution he was calling for in 1984. The website of Our Revolution, which describes itself as “the next step for Bernie Sanders’ movement,” begins with the words “STAND UP! FIGHT BACK!” and ends with a call to action: “It’s time to warrior up! See you on the front lines!” The militant tone of this manifesto is more jarring than Sanders’ campaign rhetoric, which is at pains to describe what he proposes not as socialism, but as “democratic socialism” along the lines of the Scandinavian model.
do about it.
Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at M.I.T., who has thought deeply about global and domestic inequality, draws a clear distinction between socialism and social democracy. In Acemoglu’s view, which he expressed by email, Sanders’ “economists don’t understand basic economics. They are not just dangerous, they are clueless.” Socialist regimes “from Cuba to the eastern bloc have been disastrous both for economic prosperity and individual freedom.”
Acemoglu questions Sanders’ economic sophistication, arguing that social democracy, when practiced by competent governments,
— is a phenomenal success. Everywhere in the west is to some degree social democratic, but the extent of this varies. We owe our prosperity and freedom to social democracy.
The trick, though, Acemoglu argues, is that social democracy “did not achieve these things by taxing and redistributing a lot. It achieved them by having labor institutions protecting workers, encouraging job creation and encouraging high wages.” Sanders does, in fact, often define his vision in these terms, but apparently has failed to persuade many economists (although he has persuaded some).
Jagdish N. Bhagwati, an economist at Columbia and an expert in development economics and international trade, who likes Sanders and supported him in 2016, is critical of Sanders’ policies. In a phone interview, Bhagwati described Sanders’ thinking as “a little bit naive,” displaying little “understanding of the complexity of the issues he raises.” Sanders, Bhagwati says, is in great need of “first-rate people to sort things out.”
In Bhagwati’s view, if Sanders continues to propose solutions to major problems “from the heart and not the head,” he will “not get anywhere other than shadow politics.”
David Autor, who is also an economist at M.I.T. and who specializes in technological change and globalization, described Sanders’ platform as
— chock full of fuzzy math and wishful thinking. But that seems to be a sound basis for electoral platforms these days, especially when proposed and enacted by Republicans.
Autor continued:
— Bottom line: I don’t think this election will turn on policy ideas, factual claims, or even thinking of any substantive kind. American electoral politics has become purely expressive: how much do I identify with my candidate? How much do I hate yours? The balance of these competing forces seems to determine the winner.
A third M.I.T. economist, Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the foremost scholars on the effects of information technology on employment and productivity, wrote me:
— Advocates for Bernie Sanders often argue that ‘socialist’ policies have worked in places like Denmark. That’s half right. While Denmark provides a generous welfare state its model can better be described as progressive capitalism.
He pointed out that Denmark has no minimum wage and
— takes a “flexicurity” approach to labor markets which allows entrepreneurs to hire and fire people easily, boosting dynamism and new business creation. Meanwhile government health care and other benefits means even people who are laid off aren’t destitute.
Sanders, Brynjolfsson wrote,
— is right that many Americans have seen their real wages fall or stagnate over the past 20 years, but successful nations have maintained the right mix of capitalism and public investment needed to create more widely shared prosperity.
At a more subjective level, Sanders’ rhetorical tone of righteous indignation has served him well with Democratic voters, but it remains untested among the independent and swing voters who cast ballots only in the general election.
Democrats are banking on making the 2020 election a referendum on Trump. How likely are the more controversial aspects of Sanders’ politics to blunt that strategy and turn the contest into a referendum on both Trump and Sanders?
A March NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 50 percent of all voters described themselves as “very uncomfortable” with Trump’s bid for re-election, and another 9 percent said they have “some reservation.” None of the Democratic candidates were viewed with the same level of discomfort, but Sanders had the highest percentage of voters, at 37 percent, who were “very uncomfortable” with his campaign, along with 21 percent who said they have “some reservations.”
In other words, Sanders carries a lot of baggage.
At the same time, he brings to the contest three major strengths that would be important in the general election.
First, he gets strong backing from young voters. A late March Quinnipiac survey found, for example, that Sanders won 26 percent among Democrats under the age of 45 and 16 percent among those over 45. One of Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses in 2016 was a failure to turn out young, Democratic-leaning voters.
The second Sanders asset is the exceptionally high levels of support he receives from small donors who contribute $200 or less. In this election cycle, Sanders has not only raised more than any of his competitors, at $18.2 million, but a higher percentage of his receipts, 84 percent, has come in amounts under $200.
A third advantage Sanders brings is the appeal of his anti-corporate, anti-rich message to a segment of populist Trump voters — those who backed Sanders in the 2016 primaries and shifted to Trump in the general election.
Two large surveys — one by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the other by the Voter Study Group — showed that in 2016 12 percent of Sanders’ primary voters cast ballots for Trump in November. If Sanders could return a substantial share of that 12 percent, which translates roughly to 1.58 million voters, to the Democratic fold, it would significantly enhance the party’s prospects up and down the ticket.
On Monday, the Sanders campaign released internal campaign polling by Tulchin Research that shows that at the moment Sanders is running ahead of Trump in the three key industrial states that gave Trump his 2016 Electoral College victory.
When voters were asked, “If the election were held today, who would you vote for, Bernie Sanders, the Democrat, or Donald Trump, the Republican,” Sanders led 52-41 in Michigan, 52-42 in Wisconsin and 51-43 in Pennsylvania.
An August 2015 Tablet article by Jas Chana describes the empathy Sanders demonstrated for the working class during his successful campaign for mayor of Burlington, Vt. in 1980. Often accompanied by Alan Abbey, a local reporter, the two
— would go from “the bluest of the blue” neighborhood in Burlington, the Old North End, characterized by its rickety houses, walking up through the increasingly affluent neighborhoods to eventually reach Burlington’s wealthy New North End. Abbey would stand behind Sanders as he knocked on each door, furiously scribbling into his notebook as the disheveled candidate, dressed in a “frumpy winter coat,” discussed gritty issues, like the state of the sewage network and garbage pickup schedule, on the door steps of Burlington’s residents. Abbey said Sanders did not try to present any “grand socialist ideas” — rather, as Sanders puts it in the 1997 book he wrote with Huck Gutman, “Outsider in the House”: “I listened to their concerns and supported their grievances … as I stood in kitchens and stood on front stoops in low-income houses, I heard the bitterness in their voices.” According to Abbey, the message Sanders conveyed was a simple one: that “this is your city and it’s time to take it back.”
One element of Sanders’ appeal to the white working class is that unlike many of his competitors for the nomination, he has mostly spoken about his proposals in universalistic terms.
When I asked them what they thought, political scientists were far less critical of Sanders than the Democratic operatives and consultants were. Matt Grossmann, for example, a political scientist at Michigan State, has a generally optimistic view of Sanders’ bid:
— Sanders would be attacked as a socialist and even (unfairly but perhaps effectively) as an anti-American communist sympathizer, who wants to transform America into Venezuela. Republicans would attempt to make the election into a choice of saving America or letting it fall to socialism, rather than a referendum on Trump.
That said, Grossman continued, Sanders
— has advantages. He is better known now and perhaps harder to make into a scary and foreign symbol. He has a very effective message on class and political reform that Clinton lacked. He could more effectively paint Trump as a corrupt plutocrat who sold out the people he promised to help to aid rich cronies. Besides his socialist image, his platform is well-honed for a message of change with clear benefits: health coverage, climate action, and soaking the rich to help the middle class.
Contrary to those who argue that Sanders creates fissures in Democratic ranks, Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, argued that such divisions are unlikely to occur:
— Trump himself will reunify Democrats, and polarization could deliver 90 percent of Democratic votes to any party nominee, even a controversial one. Party unity doesn’t guarantee victory, of course, but it’s an essential ingredient.
Robert Stein, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, argued that a Sanders nomination would not harm Democratic candidates running for lesser offices:
— There is no evidence (or reason to suggest) Sanders is any more (or less) of a drag or accelerator for Democratic turnout in Texas or nationally. Here in Texas he has the strong vestige of people who worked on his 2016 campaign and who have maintained an active presence in the 2018 campaigns.
Stein pointed out that
— the biggest boost in Democratic voters in 2018 came from new registrants, persons under 45 and nonwhites. Sanders polls well with these voters. It seems more than likely that persons who voted in 2018 will show up for the 2020 Presidential election, a condition that bodes well for Texas Democratic fortunes.
Matthew Hale, a political scientist at Seton Hall University, does not share Stein’s view:
— Sanders would likely win New Jersey against Trump just because the registration numbers and Democratic machine would make it happen. But it wouldn’t happen with enthusiasm and it could be close. If Sanders is the nominee, it could likely cause 2 or 3 house seats to flip back to Republicans.
New Jersey, Hale continued,
— is a blue state, a Democratic state but it is not a progressive one. The Democrats that people in New Jersey like are middle of the road and that is not a Democratic Socialist like Bernie Sanders.
Democratic primaries, as I mentioned earlier, are hardly a proving ground for how well a democratic socialist — and a self-declared social and cultural outsider — will sell in November, something Trump and the Republican Party are already gearing up to turn into a major 2020 issue.
The question extends beyond Sanders. Democratic constituencies competing to pick a candidate to square off against Trump next year face a difficult-to-resolve problem. Will they find themselves flying blind, entangled in a cause more than a campaign as they leave too much of the middle-of-the-road electorate behind?
