Progressives (Liberals)

Sanders is in second place in national polls, nearly 9 percentage points behind Biden, according to the most recent RealClearPolitics average. He is second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire. The latest CNN poll found he has the highest net favorability rating of any Democratic presidential candidate.

While Sanders’ supporters complain relentlessly that he has received less attention from the media than other candidates, he has also avoided sustained criticism that some of his rivals have suffered. That could be helping him, especially compared with Warren, who has recently come under fire from the left and center for her health care plan.

“If you really think about it, Bernie hasn’t been hit a lot with anything. It’s not like he’s getting hit by other campaigns,” said Michael Ceraso, a former New Hampshire director for Pete Buttigieg’s campaign who worked for Sanders in 2016.

A court ruling last week putting the Affordable Care Act further in jeopardy may provide the opening Democrats have been waiting for to regain the upper hand on health care against Republicans in 2020.

At the most recent Democratic presidential debate, candidates largely avoided discussing the lawsuit or Republicans’ years-long efforts to dismantle Obamacare, and instead continued their intra-party battle over Medicare for All.

But Senate Democrats, Democratic candidates and outside groups backing them immediately jumped on the news of the federal appeals court ruling — blasting out ads and statements reminding voters of Republicans’ votes to repeal the 2010 health care law, support the lawsuit and confirm the judges who may bring about Obamacare’s demise.

“I think it’s an opportunity to reset with the new year to remind people that there’s a very real threat to tens of millions of Americans," Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview. "We Democrats are always striving to improve the system, but, at a minimum, the American people expect us to protect what they already have."

Personally I think it shows a man with a inventive mind with new ideas...

Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, argued that two factors — fund-raising demands and the effect of the social media on candidates and their staff — are turning the nomination contest into “some kind of purity game to see who can be the most leftist.”

In the case of social media, Begala declared:

Democratic Twitter is dominated by overeducated, over-caffeinated, over-opinionated pain-in-the-ass white liberals. Every candidate, and every staffer, checks Twitter and other social media scores of times a day.

The second and more significant factor is what Begala described as the unintended consequences of “the obsession with small donors.” Democrats legitimately “want to break the stranglehold of big money,” Begala wrote, but

when the D.N.C. made accumulating small donors a centerpiece to debate eligibility among two dozen potential candidates, that’s when the unintended consequence kicked in. Small donors are often more motivated, more activist, more engaged, more ideological. In short, more leftist. They’re less likely to send in five bucks to a candidate who says, “I’m going to preserve Obamacare, maintain private insurance, and add a public option so anyone who wants to can join Medicare” — even though that’s where most Americans and most Democrats are.

Begala said he has

spoken with numerous state party officials and congressional campaigners who have traced the leftward lurch of the presidential candidates to the small donor problem. The tyranny of the small donor cannot be underestimated.

His supporters are loyal, and in Iowa they don’t really have eyes for anyone else.
[...]
A recent poll from The Des Moines Register showed that, among likely Democratic caucusgoers who said Mr. Sanders was their top choice, 57 percent said their minds were made up; according to The Register, no other candidate registered above 30 percent.

Those figures alone could portend a strong showing for Mr. Sanders at the caucuses, where candidates must receive at least 15 percent support at a caucus site to collect that site’s share of state delegates.

“Bernie Sanders is definitely being underestimated in Iowa,” said John Grennan, the Democratic chairman in Poweshiek County, Iowa.

“Part of his durability is that he has 15 to 20 percent of the caucus who are absolutely committed to voting for him no matter what,” he said. “In a field that’s split between at least 10 major candidates, that 15 to 20 percent counts for a whole heck of a lot.”

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There are other factors that have helped Mr. Sanders in Iowa. Because his backers are so loyal, opponents have been unable to penetrate his base, if they have tried to at all. Part of the reason is that Mr. Sanders’s strategy revolves around engaging people who typically don’t participate in the political process, a highly difficult group to target; even the Sanders campaign acknowledges it is a risky strategy. Another factor is sheer resignation: His rivals just don’t see the point in trying to pick off supporters who probably won’t budge.
[...]
And though Mr. Sanders’s detractors see a numbing repetition in his message, his supporters see his constancy as one of his biggest assets: Mr. Sanders, for instance, has absorbed much less criticism on Medicare for all because he has championed it for decades. Ms. Warren’s evolving position on how to pay for it has hurt her with some voters.
]...]
Since his heart attack, Mr. Sanders has often seemed lighter and more relaxed, a change from the gruff intensity that for years marked his public appearances. His campaign frequently posts videos of him shooting hoops, and he recently took a few pitches of batting practice at an event at an indoor sports facility in Burlington.

At the same time, there is little indication, in Iowa and elsewhere, that Mr. Sanders is attracting more supporters beyond those who backed him in 2016 and young people who were not old enough to vote then. In interviews with dozens of people at his campaign events in recent months, nearly all said their support dated to his first presidential run, or earlier; at events for other candidates, hardly anyone mentions Mr. Sanders as a top choice.

“From my conversations, it appears that people are not ambivalent about Sanders,” said Jeff Fager, the Democratic chairman in Henry County, where Mr. Sanders battled Hillary Clinton to a tie in 2016. “They are either behind him, or he is not on their list of potential candidates.”

That steady support could be enough in Iowa, whose complex caucus system favors on-the-ground enthusiasm, especially if excitement for other candidates wavers. The challenge, however, is that Mr. Sanders is effectively gambling that those who do not usually vote will now show up on a cold Monday night in February to participate in what could be an hourslong, sometimes disorganized process.

Kurt Meyer, the Democratic chairman in Mitchell County, in northern Iowa, said he saw signs that Mr. Sanders’s organization might have trouble turning out potential caucus attendees in his rural region.

“The Sanders organization in the predominantly rural counties I am most familiar with is not particularly strong,” he said. While he suggested that it might be easy to underestimate the totality of Mr. Sanders’s support, he also said it was far from clear that the voters Mr. Sanders was counting on would show up on caucus day.

Aides to Mr. Sanders provide few details on how they are wooing supporters, but they express confidence that their strategy is working. The campaign said in late October that it already had more commit-to-caucus cards, a loose measure of support, than it did in January 2016.

Just as it did that year, Mr. Sanders’s team is trying to connect with people in new ways. His campaign canvasses at farmers’ markets and outside drugstores. One field organizer, Conrad Bascom, has started holding phone banks at a Casey’s General Store in rural Garner largely because the location was a convenient meeting place and the Wi-Fi was reliable.

“It happened pretty organically,” Mr. Bascom said, during one such phone-bank event in early December. “It very quickly became a habit.”

Trying to change any minds on this site is an exercise in futility.

At least Bernie Sanders is an equal-opportunity misanthrope. He doesn’t like rich people, and it turns out he doesn’t necessarily like poor people, either.

At the CNN town hall on climate change, a questioner asked the socialist senator if he’d be “courageous” enough to endorse population control to save the planet. Sanders answered “yes,” and then, after referring to abortion rights, endorsed curtailing population growth, “especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies.”

He’s looking at you, sub-Saharan Africa.

The Sanders riff is the latest instance of a rising anti-natalism on the left, which has gone from arguing that carbon emissions are a problem to arguing that human beings are a problem. They release carbon emissions, don’t they? Q.E.D.

When a proposition has the support of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who questions the morality of having children, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, who has discussed punishing people for having children, it’s on the way to universal assent among a certain segment of soi-disant thoughtful progressives.

A headline in the New York Times even asked, “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” Thus proving that, whatever our other virtues, we are at times the most ridiculous and self-loathing species.

Undergirding the anti-natalist position is the belief that we are facing a global catastrophe, such that additional babies will tip the planet into uninhabitability for everyone. This goes beyond the best evidence, and discounts the human capacity for adaptation that is one of our chief attributes.

The view that human beings are an unsustainable drain on limited resources goes back to the 18th-century thinker Thomas Malthus and, more recently, the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Ehrlich thunderously pronounced, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”

In the event, we figured out how to make agriculture more efficient and have been feeding people just fine (when not prevented from doing so by wars and other man-made calamities). Nonetheless, Ehrlich hasn’t stopped predicting the explosion of his population bomb ever since, telling The Guardian recently that the collapse of civilization is “a near certainty.”

In his original work, Ehrlich put an emphasis on overly fertile Third World countries, just as Bernie Sanders did the other night. But if consumption and carbon emissions are the concern, it’s rich people in developed countries who are the bigger problem and should be dealt with accordingly (a task for which Sanders is dismayingly well-suited).

What are we to make of an agenda that seeks to diminish the number of human beings overall and to make those who enjoy material prosperity less wealthy?

Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute notes how rising incomes — considered an unalloyed good by anyone who experiences them — invariably increase energy consumption. Insofar as a sweeping anti-development, anti-consumption program like the Green New Deal is “diametrically opposed to the aspirations of nearly all individuals,” he writes, it is “antihuman.”

At a more fundamental level, the anti-natalists have a gross materialistic view of humanity. For them, we are a series of inputs and outputs, and if one particular output is considered undesirable (in this case, carbon emissions), it reduces the value of human beings altogether. No one who isn’t a cracked ideological extremist or perversely blinkered economist actually looks at people this way. It doesn’t account for relationships or for joy, for the wondrous distinctiveness of every person, no matter how poor or humble.

People aren’t a burden; they are a resource and a gift. Any movement that regards them any other way is profoundly misguided and deeply anti-humane. Build windmills if you must, but don’t try to scare people out of having children — or much worse, facilitate abortions — in your zeal to shave some fraction of a degree off the global temperature 80 years from now.

Bernie Sanders addressed a crowd of thousands at a beachside rally in Los Angeles last Saturday, capping a six-day swing through the most populous US state.

“Our campaign is not only about defeating [Donald] Trump, our campaign is about a political revolution,” Sanders said. “It is about transforming this country, it is about creating a government and an economy that works for all people and not just the 1%.”

The sight of the cheering crowd would have been hard to imagine just two months ago, as Sanders recovered from a heart attack and a fellow progressive senator, Elizabeth Warren, surged past him in the polls for the Democratic nomination.

But since then, Warren has slipped back, and Sanders has regained lost ground, demonstrating the resiliency of his leftwing campaign. Those strengths have some in the Democratic party wondering: could Sanders actually win the nomination the second time around?

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Warren was 12 points ahead of Sanders and virtually tied with former vice-president Joe Biden in early October, shortly after Sanders’ heart attack. But since then, Warren has been slipping, and Sanders has pulled ahead of her. The polling average now shows Sanders in second place once again – averaging 19.3% in national polls, putting him eight points behind Biden and four points ahead of Warren.

“I believe people should take him very seriously. He has a very good shot of winning Iowa, a very good shot of winning New Hampshire, and other than Joe Biden, the best shot of winning Nevada,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to Barack Obama, told Politico. “He could build a real head of steam heading into South Carolina and Super Tuesday.”

Sanders does certainly seem to be learning from some of the pitfalls of his campaign in 2016, when he lost the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. For example, Sanders was criticized for performing far better in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, which are mostly white, before losing to Clinton in the more racially diverse states of Nevada and South Carolina.

This time around, Sanders has made significant efforts to reach out to voters of color, specifically Latinos. Polls show Sanders is the top choice among Latino voters, and the candidate held a Spanish-language town hall on Sunday in Las Vegas, Nevada, alongside Ocasio-Cortez. That outreach could prove critical in states like California, where Latinos make up about 40% of the population. Given that California awards nearly 500 delegates, about 10 times as many as the first caucus state of Iowa, performing well there is key to winning the nomination.

But Sanders’ greatest asset – a core of solid support – is also shared by Biden.

The Democratic presidential primary has proven surprisingly stable so far, with Biden continuing to lead even as candidates previously considered potential frontrunners, like Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke, have exited the race.

Like Sanders, Biden has a solid base of supporters who have not abandoned him, despite negative coverage in recent months. The Vermont senator would need the dynamics of the primary to shift in some significant way to pull ahead of the former vice-president.

This is one reason why many centrist Democrats remain unconvinced Sanders can form a winning Democratic coalition.

“He can’t win the nomination,” Matt Bennett, the co-founder of the center-left thinktank Third Way, told Politico. Bennett and some of Sanders’ other critics have argued the senator’s ceiling of support is too low to ultimately defeat his primary opponents.

But if his 2016 campaign proved anything, it’s that Sanders thrives on low expectations. Many Washington insiders scoffed at Sanders’ first White House bid, until he fought Clinton to a draw in Iowa and scored a decisive victory in New Hampshire. Today, Sanders is offering the same message that he did four years ago: “Don’t underestimate me.”