Historian Matt Karp has written a wonderful piece in today’s Jacobin magazine entitled “The War on Bernie Sanders.” In this piece he details the “virtually unprecedented attack against Bernie Sanders” by the Democratic elites. If you haven’t read his previous two pieces in Jacobin, I highly recommend that you do. His first piece, “The Bernie Coalition” compares the Sanders coalition thus far assembled with the Obama coalition of 2008 who did exceptionally well with high income liberals and contrasts Sanders’ more working class coalition with other popular “liberal” darlings like Bill Bradley. His second piece, “Bernie and the Liberals” amplifies his previous piece by noting that unlike the analysis put forth by the professional pundit class, Bernie Sanders has significant appeal beyond self identified liberals.
This piece really appeals to me because it wasn’t written by a professional pundit and I have blogged here before about sabotage by the party establishment against progressive candidates in my home state. Long time Progessive activists can appreciate how helpful Rahm Emanuel, Steve Israel, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz can be with candidates who don’t fit the rigid ideology of the Beltway Democrats.
Karp rails against what he terms “The Undemocratic Party” by detailing just how many endorsements and amount of money raised in the run up to the 2016 primary season the frontrunner accumulated to attempt to suffocate the field. He compares and contrasts the number of endorsements that various Democrats had compiled up to this point in previous elections. He compares two candidates support.
Consider two Democratic primary challengers on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Candidate A has a strong fundraising portfolio: he has raised $44.9 million in the third and fourth quarters of the past year. Still, according to the national polls, he is favored by just a quarter of the national electorate, and he trails the frontrunner by twenty-one points. He is neck-and-neck with the favorite in Iowa and South Carolina, but is behind by seven points in New Hampshire and by double digits in every other state.
Meanwhile, Candidate B has raised roughly $59.8 million over the third and fourth quarters, plus another $20 million in the past month — all from a historic pool of 1.3 million donors. In the polls, his position is different but perhaps comparable to Candidate A. He trails the frontrunner by fourteen points nationally, but is within three points in Iowa and leads by fourteen points in New Hampshire. In South Carolina and elsewhere, he faces steep deficits.
At this point in the 2008 race, however, Candidate A (Barack Obama) had already secured the endorsements of three governors, two senators, and thirty-one members of Congress. Candidate B (Sanders), despite doing as well or better in fundraising and in the polls, has received endorsements from zero governors, zero senators, and two lonely congressmen.
There is so much delicious content in this piece, I cannot strongly enough recommend this article and its analysis. Professor Karp’s trenchant analysis on liberals against social democracy, and his courage to name names is refreshing. So is it our party or theirs?