John Locher/AP Photo
Don’t look now, but Bernie Sanders is surging in the early states.
With six days until the Iowa caucuses, the political establishment has arrived at a troubling realization: It might be time to take this Bernie Sanders guy seriously. In the past few days, polls have shown Sanders breaking dramatically from the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire. Polls have shown him leading in Super Tuesday states California and Utah, while he’s climbed meaningfully in early states Nevada and South Carolina.
In the aftermath of Sanders’s ascendancy, various corporate gatekeepers and big-money representatives are scrambling—with little coherence or success—to put together a last-minute campaign to slow him down. The justification for such action, of course, is that the political establishment and their corporate henchmen, self-styled paragons of pragmatism and stewards of lucid, sober thinking, need to protect the electorate from a wild-eyed radical who is dangerously out of touch with America.
But the last-second freakout tells us less about the Sanders campaign than about those political elites themselves, whose political instincts are so alarmingly wrongheaded that they’ve managed to ignore an obvious risk to their continued status until a week before voting begins. If anyone has revealed themselves as inept to the point of disqualification, it’s the anti-Sanders neighborhood watch.
Sanders has been in the race since last February, which means he’s spent some 350 days shattering donation records, building a committed fan base of millions, and never exiting the top three in polling, while spending the majority of the race in second place. Meanwhile, he’s run up a long list of high-profile endorsements from prominent politicians and celebrities. This is not someone who snuck up on the field.
If anyone has revealed themselves as inept to the point of disqualification, it’s the anti-Sanders neighborhood watch.
Of course, Sanders was a close runner-up during the last presidential cycle, who never really stopped running once Donald Trump was elected. His years of building political infrastructure and track record of appealing to young voters was evident four years ago. He came close to taking out Hillary Clinton, an overwhelming favorite with massive institutional advantages that no 2020 candidate matches. It’s somewhat unfair to say that the political powers that be should’ve seen Sanders coming from a year off; they’ve had the entire latter half of the decade to apprehend his candidacy.
Instead, in what could go down as one of the all-time blunders, these brilliant political prognosticators set their sights on Elizabeth Warren, thinking that she, and only she, could break through the establishment blockade. As soon as she came within a hair’s breadth of front-runner status, the centrists pummeled her with precisely the kind of attacks that they could have applied to Sanders, deeming her too liberal for the electorate and questioning the details of her Medicare for All plan.
Incredibly, after weakening virtually the only other candidate appealing to the party’s progressive wing, the center-left decided to never contest Sanders. They made the assumption that he couldn’t grow his base, despite a fractured field that only required him to come close to his 2016 numbers to gain a lead. They saw the candidate with the most money, the most volunteers, and poll numbers at or near the top in the early states, and decided he wasn’t worth the effort.
These are the strategic geniuses we should trust, not only with a general-election campaign against Donald Trump, but with running the country? The people who couldn’t see a Jupiter-sized asteroid headed straight for them?
Now, weeks after it might have been useful, this “loose network” of Democratic operatives and political action groups are putting their heads together, trying to conjure an effective course of action for slowing a Sanders candidacy that is starting to look like a runaway train. So far, the scattershot effort has yet to amount to much. A pro-Israel group, Democratic Majority for Israel, has purchased tens of thousands of dollars in airtime in Iowa for anti-Sanders messaging. Considering that any front group will do, picking a pro-Israel one to help oppose the candidate who could well be the United States’ first Jewish presidential nominee is chef’s kiss level of political sagacity.
It’s rumored that Joe Biden’s super PAC, Unite the Country, will begin attacking Sanders shortly. Meanwhile, a conservative group, the Club for Growth, debuted what is presumably an anti-Sanders TV ad on Monday. In its foreboding 30-second spot, it compares Sanders to both Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt, saying Sanders will do even more than Obama on health care, and spend even more than Roosevelt on his Green New Deal. By comparing Sanders to two of the most well-liked presidents in American history, and promising that he’ll do even more of the signature policy achievements that made them so popular, you can assume that the Club for Growth is trying to elevate Sanders and raise his appeal among rank-and-file liberals, using the super PAC politics of the Democratic establishment against them.
Hillary Clinton claiming that “nobody likes” Sanders last week, or arguing to a captive audience at Sundance that she was much more graceful in defeat in 2008 than Sanders, doesn’t seem to have moved the needle. Neither have resistance heroes like George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum and conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, each of whom have made a go of trying to throw water on the Sanders candidacy. Front-page news items on anecdotal bad behavior from Twitter supporters probably aren’t going to swing a critical mass either. Meanwhile, Tom Perez has stuffed the 2020 DNC nominations list with Clinton apparatchiks as a last line of defense that’s highly unlikely to matter—if Sanders has the delegates to become the nominee by mid-July, he’ll simply take over the convention, long before John Podesta can spring into action.
A bemused Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, responded to the hastily arranged Stop Sanders movement in an email blast to supporters, declaring, “This is it. We knew it was coming.” But if you asked them, even they would be surprised that our supposed superstar political luminaries managed to ignore Bernie for so long. The blind rage towards Sanders, evinced by the corporate wing of the party, seems to have manifested itself as literal blindness toward an enduring front-runner who could only charitably be described as hiding in plain sight.
It is a scenario that is deeply alarming to establishment-aligned Democrats, if not unfamiliar. Four years ago, convinced Donald Trump could not win the presidency, they watched with delight as he snatched the Republican nomination without winning majorities in the states, because his more traditional rivals divided the vote and refused to bow out. Now the exact same dynamic is taking place on their side of the aisle.
The only upside to our interminable death march of a presidential campaign is that it mirrors the unpredictability and fluidity of governing. Campaigns force leaders to identify emerging threats, game out long-term scenarios, and react before insurmountable obstacles swamp them. By simply forgetting about Bernie Sanders, the establishment wing of the party has shown itself unfit for office.
