Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign event, February 27, 2020, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Sanders ended his presidential run today.
“Together,” Bernie Sanders told his supporters as he announced his withdrawal from the 2020 presidential contest earlier today, “we have transformed Americans’ consciousness as to what kind of nation we can become.”
As claims made for campaigns go, that’s a whole lot truer than most. In the days and years between 2015, when he first declared his candidacy for the presidency, and this morning, when he announced he was suspending his second presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders was the primary catalyst of a shift leftward in the nation’s political consciousness. He wasn’t its primary beneficiary: In 2016, he lost the Democratic Party’s nomination, winning a little over 40 percent of primary voters; this year, he lost again, winning roughly 35 percent support from those voters.
But exit polling in virtually every primary state this year that’s already voted—states he won, states he lost—shows majority support among Democratic voters for single-payer government health insurance. And ideas that once were at or even beyond the margins of our political discourse—a $15 minimum wage, free tuition at public colleges and universities, universal child care, a tax on wealth, worker representation on corporate boards, an end to mass incarceration, and socialism itself—have either won near-consensus support among Democrats or at least have experienced double-digit jumps in support in the polls.
None of these ideas were advanced by Bernie alone; as he himself repeatedly said, his campaign was about “us,” not just him. SEIU pushed the $15 wage; Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin promoted codetermination on corporate boards; the new and old civil rights movement demanded an end to mass incarceration. As for the dreaded “S-word,” socialism itself, polls showed Americans under 30 preferred it to capitalism as early as 2011—before Wall Street had been Occupied; when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was still in college; when most Americans could not have picked Bernie out of a police lineup.
What prepared the ground for Bernie’s success was the 2008 Wall Street–generated crash and the hugely unequal recovery that followed—just as the 1929 crash and the ensuing Great Depression prepared the ground for the New Deal and the rise of the 1930s left. That doesn’t in the slightest diminish Sanders’s achievement, any more than the Depression diminishes the achievements of Franklin Roosevelt, the CIO, or the ’30s parties of the left. More than anyone else, Bernie created the current American left, but just as much, by running for president, he revealed its existence—surprising the nation, surprising the left, surprising himself.
When Bernie began discussing the possibility of running for president in 2014 and 2015, he envisioned his campaign as being largely educational—raising the profile of policies that needed greater public exposure. Once he declared his candidacy, however, man and moment met. Young people in particular flocked to his speeches and threw themselves into his campaign; millions more Americans began contributing to his campaign than had ever contributed to any campaign before; he began winning primaries, powered not just by the votes of the young and the liberal, but by white working-class voters as well.
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By that last measure, this year’s primary results had to come as a disappointment. He maintained his hold on the young and the relatively recently young: In almost every state, he won a majority of voters under 30 and a plurality of voters under 45. But he lost his hold on white working-class voters—those who remained in the Democratic universe—to Joe Biden. In hindsight, it appears that many of the working-class whites who went for Bernie in 2016 were really voting against Hillary Clinton. When the option of Biden was presented to them, they left Bernie’s column and moved over to Joe’s.
If Bernie were withdrawing from the race at a normal time in our political history, it would be prudent to equate his achievement to that of a figure with politics diametrically opposed to his: Barry Goldwater. When Goldwater ran for president in 1964, he was trounced by Lyndon Johnson, and his anti-government, anti–civil rights policies were regarded as aberrations, outliers in the nation’s storehouse of political ideas. But the Goldwater movement not only stayed in place after his defeat, it grew—so much so that 16 years later, Ronald Reagan was elected on Goldwater-esque principles, and the nation shifted radically to the right.
In the days and years between 2015, when he first declared his candidacy, and this morning, Sanders was the primary catalyst of a shift leftward in the nation’s political consciousness.
What we don’t know today is whether the coronavirus crisis will accelerate the nation’s shift toward Sanders-esque policies, whether this transition already portended by Bernie’s support among the young will come more quickly than a Goldwater-length incubation because of the horrendous descent of the nation’s economy in the face of the pandemic. Consider, for instance, the fate of employer-based health insurance in a moment when millions of Americans are losing their jobs every week. According to projections by Health Management Associates, should unemployment reach 17.5 percent—a figure that some experts view as a median (not high-end) loss under current conditions—then 23 million Americans would lose their employment-based health insurance. It’s not surprising that under these conditions, support for Sanders’s signature policy—Medicare for All—is rising. A March Morning Consult poll found 55 percent support for Medicare for All, which was a nine-point jump over its level of support just one month earlier.
Moreover, in a time of pandemic, when more Americans may need immediate health coverage than ever before, neither Medicaid nor the Affordable Care Act provides such coverage quickly enough. (President Trump, of course, has refused to re-open the sign-up period for the ACA in the 38 states whose programs are run by the federal government.) All of which suggests that the immediate beneficiary of Sanders’s withdrawal—Joe Biden—might find this a moment that provides ample cover should he decide to move closer to embracing Medicare for All—temporarily, as an emergency measure, and permanently, say, by expanding its coverage to Americans under 25 and over 50. If joblessness and gig work and low pay are to be a larger part of the American economic landscape than they were before—and that’s highly likely—then those modifications of policy are no more than prudential.
Rather than submit to a Trump second term, the vast majority of Sanders supporters will likely vote for Biden this fall. How actively they’ll involve themselves in autumn’s campaign depends on Biden, on how he’ll move to embrace or accommodate some Sanders priorities. The kind of energy normally required to wage winning campaigns comes disproportionately from younger volunteers, of whom Biden has had precious few.
This afternoon, eight organizations of young progressives—the Sunrise Movement, Justice Democrats, and United We Dream among them—released an open letter to Biden requesting he embrace and commit funds to a Green New Deal, abolish student debt, create a wealth tax, and other liberal positions. They asked that he not include Wall Street or health insurance executives on his transition team or in his Cabinet, and that he include on his campaign’s policy teams and his transition team such liberal leaders as Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, and Katie Porter; union leaders like SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry and the Flight Attendants’ Sara Nelson; and the policy advisers to his fellow ex-candidates Elizabeth Warren, Jay Inslee, and Sanders.
Exit polling in virtually every primary state this year that’s already voted shows majority support among Democratic voters for single-payer government health insurance.
Sanders himself will surely negotiate with Biden over a range of policies. The long game—in which his youthful legions come to dominate American politics as the young legions who backed Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy in 1968 came to dominate much of the nation’s politics in later years—is with him. Today’s pandemic may boost his chances in the short game as well: Who can say how many Americans will realize the folly of employer-based insurance if the coronavirus shutdowns persist for many months?
Either way, Sanders’s impact on American history will have been substantial. Since 2008, millions of Americans have been moving left in reaction to an increasingly unequal and dysfunctional economy, but it was Sanders who turned this inchoate movement into a force for a more egalitarian nation.
That’s his page in the history books. That’s his glory.
