At this point, I'm pretty sure that the Bernie Sanders campaign is about 99% likely to lose. I mean, I'd love to be wrong about this, but honestly, I don't think I am. I just wanna write a little about that, so bear with me.
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I don't think Bernie's campaign had any illusions about this and realized they couldn't count on the anti-Hillary vote remaining with Bernie, and they knew they needed a strategy to make up those votes.
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Their strategy was non-voter turnout and running against "the establishment" by trying to link the Democratic establishment with general Washington malaise and the GOP and everything else voters loathe.
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Most of this, it turns out, are bad strategies. We know they're bad because Bernie is losing. (This is generally the point where pro-Bernie folks get upset because they think the strategies *should* work. In a just universe they might well do. But they don't here.)
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Relying on nonvoter turnout mostly didn't work for Bernie. This really isn't surprising because left-wing campaigns the world over have concentrated time and again on turning nonvoters into voters and it doesn't work very often.
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Some of this is because a lot of nonvoters are nonvoters not because of systemic barriers to their electoral participation, but because democratic apathy is a thing that happens. Not all, by any means. But a lot of them.
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There's this general idea prevalent on the left that if the nonvoting masses were just presented with an option offering policies For Them then they'd turn out in droves to vote for said option. Again, it would be great if this were true. It conclusively is not true.
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(If you don't believe me, go look at countries with mandatory voting. Left-wing parties do not do substantially better in those countries, because most voters don't pay close attention to policy. Sad but true.)
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So nonvoter turnout was a bad strategy. I wanna digress for a bit and talk about a *good* strategy Bernie's campaign utilized, which was pushing for the Latinx vote.
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This was Bernie practicing traditional politics and I don't think it's a coincidence that this was the biggest success of his campaign. Bernie targeted Latinx voters with promises specifically meant to appeal to them, and courted Latinx political leaders for assistance.
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It worked splendidly! So why didn't Bernie try to duplicate that success with other major voting segments within the party? Because he *didn't do that* and during the campaign there was no shortage of comment from those segments about that.
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This leads me to problem two with Bernie's campaign, which is: it's kind of dumb to run against the Democratic party when you are running to be in charge of the Democratic party.
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Most Democrats - and polling and study bears this out - *like the Democratic party.* They don't worship it in the way that the GOP base does, where it's a fanatic cult breeding back in on itself. It's a pretty grounded "it's not perfect, but it's all right" sort of like.
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There are plenty of reasons for this and most of them aren't bad ones and it's not because Democrats are stupid or brainwashed. It's the view that incremental progress is still ultimately progress. You can disagree with this; I often do. But that's why Democrats like their party.
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Here is where I think we have to separate Bernie from his campaign staff, because I don't think Bernie loathes the Democratic party especially. But key members of his campaign absolutely do.
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David Sirota, for example, is a good left-wing journalist and activist. However, he is *absolutely one hundred percent not the person* you want in a senior position in a campaign to win the Democratic leadership.
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All of the anti-party messaging exacerbated one of Bernie's key problems, which is: he is running to be the leader of the Democratic party while he is *not even a member of the party*. Do not think for one second that doesn't matter.
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There has been an open invitation for Bernie to join the party for years and he's never taken it. I can understand why: he values his independence, and he would certainly lose some of that as a party member. But these are the prices you pay for party acceptance.
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I mean, Bernie could have run for President as an independent! He didn't, because, well, he would definitely lose and almost certainly cause the victory of the candidate he did not want to win. Bernie's not stupid. So he runs for the Democratic nomination.
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But running for the nomination when you aren't a Democrat certainly inspires some "you don't even GO here" animus from party members. A bit of an aside for a moment about Democratic party members.
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Leftists really love to characterize Democratic insiders as corrupted by institutions - and it's true to a certain extent, definitely. But politicians are human beings, and I don't think any Democrat wakes up in the morning and says "welp time to make the world worse!"
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Republicans, sure. But Democrats? They look at the compromises they make as the price of getting anything good done.
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(Someone privacy locked just tweeted "Joe Manchin?" at me and yeah, okay, Joe Manchin probably wakes up in the morning looking to make the world worse. Fuck him.)
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Anyway, one of the Bernie campaign's go-to things this past year has been "Bernie voted against [X]." A big one is military appropriations bills. Vote for Bernie, because he's not a warmonger voting for more war and so forth!
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But if you talk to an establishment Democrat, they'll tell you: military appropriations bills are what keep about two percent of the entire country employed. It is *not easy to turn the country on a dime* unless you want to disrupt and hurt people.
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And yeah, Bernie voting against these bills and then campaigning on it probably rankles establishment Democrats a bit, because "Bernie gets to vote his conscience while the rest of us have to do the real work." I'm not saying that's *right.* But that's how they probably feel.
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And how people feel about you matters, because, um, that's a lot of what politics is. Which brings me to point C: Bernie and his campaign are genuinely bad at this.
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The "Bernie Bros" thing is overblown to an extent, because all campaigns have toxic elements to them; Bernie's were just more visible because they were Extremely Online to an extent not as great for other candidates. So I get saying it wasn't fair for people to focus on the Bros.
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But people *did* focus on them, and the campaign's strategy for dealing with this perception problem was the same one they always employ for everything: do nothing and double down on their core message.
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I honestly think the Bros non-issue could have been disposed with simply, just by having Bernie say publicly in a prominent speech "I don't like it when people make personal attacks on other Democratic candidates, whether they're my supporters or other candidates'. Cut it out."
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Or words to that effect, anyway. Remember how much credit John McCain got in 2008 for confronting that racist lady at that one rally? And John McCain sucked.
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