Bernie Sanders is the current frontrunner of the Democratic Party. Fivethirtyeight gives him a 53% chance of carrying a plurality of delegates into the Democratic convention. This should be a scary thought to supporters of America as a land of freedom and prosperity, but not for the reasons many propose.
Before going into the reasons we should be worried, let’s look at what we shouldn’t be worried about:
Bernie will not tank the economy — Lloyd Blankfein and other Wall Street elites want you to be scared of supposed socialists. Don’t let them scare you.
Bernie is not a Russian agent — There’s a lot of stuff floating around out there that tries to tie Bernie to Russia explicitly, and it doesn’t amount to much more than fake news.
Bernie is not a communist — He’s most closely aligned with Scandinavian style social democracy, possibly the most inclusive, open and free type of society there is.
Bernie is not racist/sexist/whatever — The Warren camp’s attempt to make Bernie look sexist was unfair, and claims that his economic policies don’t give enough attention to minorities might be debatable but at their best shouldn’t be used to claim that he doesn’t care about minority communities. He clearly cares.
Without belaboring the point or getting caught in the weeds, Bernie Sanders is a good guy with strong values who believes in facilitating fundamental positive change at the public level and deeply cares for the well-being of all people in this nation. He’d probably be a good President.
And yet, we should be terrified of his chances to win the nomination.
Why? For the simple reason that almost all the major political players associated with our election, outside his own team, mutually believe: He’d get demolished in a general election, even against Trump.
This includes insiders from both parties, both Democratic and Republican. It includes Trump. It includes Russia. They’re all convinced that he’d most likely lose, and bigly. And yet for various reasons, no one really wants to properly go after his weaknesses … at least not yet.
Before I go further, it came out while I was already drafting this diary that Max Boot at the Washington Post has written a piece very closely mirroring this one. His writing is better than mine though I’ll be going into a bit more detail. You can read his post here.
Let’s start with some stories describing how each of the above groups is approaching a Sanders nomination (emphasis added in bold):
Swing Democrats:
Moderate Democrats Fear Bernie Sanders Could Cost them the House (by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, NY Times)
In the House, eight of the front-line Democrats, including Representatives Haley Stevens of Michigan, Max Rose of New York and Lucy McBath of Georgia, have endorsed Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor. Others, including several military veterans — Representatives Conor Lamb and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, and Elaine Luria of Virginia — are coalescing around former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Some are reluctant to publicly articulate their fears of a Sanders nomination, not wanting to call attention to the divisions within their party or risk alienating a potential nominee, but several of them privately described a sense of foreboding that has set in over the past two weeks as Sanders has emerged as the top finisher in the first two contests of the Democratic race.
“There is a growing concern among especially those of us on the front lines that we will not only lose the White House but the House of Representatives,” one of them said in an interview, insisting on anonymity to avoid criticizing a potential nominee.
Is Sanders an Election-Year Disaster Waiting to Happen? (by Colbert I. King, Washington Post)
Other establishment Democrats also fear Trump will barnstorm battleground states that Democrats need to keep control of the House and regain the Senate, loudly branding Sanders a socialist — a label many voters find hard to swallow. Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who led Senate Democrats’ campaign arm in 2016, told the Associated Press, “I come from a state that’s pretty damn red. There is no doubt that having ‘socialist’ ahead of ‘Democrat’ is not a positive thing in the state of Montana.”
Republicans:
South Carolina GOP Plans to Boost Sanders to Influence Dem Primary (by Tobias Hoonhout, National Review)
South Carolina Republicans are poised to push voters to support Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in the open South Carolina Democratic primary next week, because they view him as the weakest opponent to face Donald Trump.
Republicans Pray for Bernie as Democratic Nominee (by Burgess Everett, Politico)
Republicans like their chances of keeping the Senate in 2020. But there’s one thing they think would all but seal the deal: Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Some GOP incumbents are practically cheering him on, confident there’s no way a self-described democratic socialist could win a general election against President Donald Trump and that he’d drag other Democrats on the ballot with him.
“It would be good for us to have a nominee like that,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for reelection next year and sounded downright giddy about the prospect of Sanders representing Democrats at the top of the ticket.
Trump Advisors Say Their Ideal Democratic Primary Scenario is Taking Shape (by Shannon Pettypiece, NBC News)
Trump's allies say they see the prospect of a face-off with Sanders as so appealing that they have been making moves to help boost his primary season support. The best scenario for Trump, they say, would be if the Democratic contest continued all the way to the convention, with Sanders battling a candidate backed by the establishment wing of the party.
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"If anything, Republicans are trying to prop Bernie up right now, talking about how it is rigged against him," said a person close to the Trump campaign. "I don't even think any Republicans need to say anything for discontent to be stirred up in the Democratic Party, but Republicans are trolling around a little bit, anyway."
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Trump's campaign has increased its attacks on Sanders in recent weeks, which a campaign adviser acknowledged could help motivate Sanders supporters. But Trump will likely hold back on his sharpest attacks unless and until Sanders emerges as a nominee.
"Republicans will still attempt to define Bernie as a socialist. They just aren't going at him with the sharpest razor they possibly have," said the person close to the Trump campaign. "They just aren't coming at him with the hard-edge oppo hits yet."
And just yesterday, Marc Thiessen, the consummate conservative snake in the grass, was waxing positively about how Sanders might benefit from Biden’s collapse, not so subtly signalling his personal hopes.
Russia:
The Russians, Rooting for Trump, and Loving the Democrats’ Debates (by Julia Davis, Daily Beast)
Russia’s support for Bernie Sanders is not a new phenomenon. During 2017 hearings in Russia’s Federation Council, RT’s Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan admitted that the network spent the largest amount of money to promote Twitter content related to Bernie Sanders—not Donald Trump.
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Russian analysts surmise that Sanders is too radical for most voters, ultimately pushing them away and causing a fraction of Democrats to vote for Trump.
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Russia’s support of Sanders and Gabbard is a continuation of the 2016 strategy that aims to use their candidacies as propaganda fodder—but more importantly, strives to re-elect Donald Trump.
The IRACopyPasta Campaign: Russian accounts posing as Americans on Instagram targeted both sides of polarizing issues ahead of the 2020 election. (Graphica)
These accounts, all linked to the same operation, claimed to represent multiple politically active US communities: black activist groups, advocates speaking out against police violence, police supporters, LGBTQ groups, Christian conservatives, Muslims, environmentalists, gun-rights activists, southern Confederates, and supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump. A minority of posts focused directly on the 2020 election. Multiple accounts praised Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Accounts from both sides of the political spectrum attacked Joe Biden; some also attacked Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.
And for some historical context coming from the Mueller investigation into 2016 election interference, Indictment: Russians Also Tried to Help Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein Presidential Campaigns (by Michael Collins, USA Today)
It turns out Donald Trump wasn’t the only candidate the Russians allegedly tried to help during the 2016 presidential campaign.
A 37-page indictment resulting from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation shows that Russian nationals and businesses also worked to boost the campaigns of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Green party nominee Jill Stein in an effort to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The Russians “engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump,” according to the indictment, which was issued Friday.
But Bernie polls well head-to-head against Trump, so why should I believe he’s a risky candidate?
The reason for this is that Bernie has NOT been battle-tested in any meaningful sense at the national level; the American public knows that he’s a socialist, and while there’s been some basic criticism of his M4A support and other policy planks, he’s not until now been a frontrunner and thus has been spared the vast majority of personal attacks that being in the spotlight brings.
For all the complaints within the Bernie camp that they’ve been marginalized, attacked or unfairly portrayed by other campaigns or the media, the truth is that no other Democratic campaigns have yet been in a position of wanting to risk alienating Sanders voters, and have therefore held back on truly challenging him with some of the more damaging aspects of his history. The same holds true for many in the Democratic party establishment.
Why Aren’t Rival Candidates Attacking Bernie Sanders? (by Gabriel Debenedetti, New York Magazine)
National and early-state polling has shown little indication that many of Sanders’s existing supporters would be willing to back another candidate with the Vermonter still in the race. “So why piss off his people?,” wondered one veteran Democrat aligned with another candidate, concerned about potential backlash. “Why would I go there?”
But this theory of the case has created a race where three of the top four candidates — Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg — have faced somewhat regular incoming from each other in the last few months, while Sanders has taken few direct hits from his serious rivals.
In 2016, the dynamic was that Hillary Clinton’s camp recognized that they were in the driver’s seat for the nomination through almost the entire campaign, and they intentionally avoided truly hard-hitting conflict that might turn away Bernie’s followers. That meant not questioning some areas of Sanders’ record that were decidedly not so progressive.
Bernie Sanders’ Real Problem isn’t Elizabeth Warren, It’s Donald Trump (by Geoffrey Kabaservice, The Guardian)
The gentle treatment he received in 2016 from the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign (which ran few negative television or media ads against him) means that many Democratic voters haven’t yet learned about the distinctly non-progressive positions he has taken on certain issues throughout his senatorial career.
Vermont is one of the whitest states in the nation, as well as among the most rural, the oldest (in terms of the age of its population), and with the fewest immigrants. Sanders, to win elections, had to appeal to hunters, older voters and other socially conservative constituencies. This explains his long opposition to gun safety measures (he voted repeatedly against the Brady bill and measures to hold gun manufacturers liable for the damage done by their products), his comparatively late conversion to the cause of gay marriage (he opposed it in Vermont as late as 2006), and his nativist opposition to certain immigration reforms (on the grounds that they would undercut wages for American workers).
If Sanders wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s a safe bet that African American voters in South Carolina will hear quite a lot from his Democratic competitors about his vote for the so-called “Charleston loophole” that allowed the white supremacist Dylann Roof to get the gun he used to kill nine African Americans at a South Carolina church. And although former vice-president Joe Biden has caught heat for writing what became the 1994 crime bill – which, many progressives claim, resulted in mass minority incarceration – Sanders voted for it as well.
But this is the lighter stuff that Sanders has until now managed to avoid.
The General Election is When Hell Will be Unleashed
The rough stuff is what would come out in a general election, likely starting the moment his nomination becomes certain. Until that point, the goal of the opposition is to boost his chances of securing the nomination; after that point, all the Russian trolls that had been subtly boosting his candidacy and promoting him would turn around and start eating him alive, assisted by Trump and his GOP allies finally bringing out the big knives and flooding Twitter and all other media with bombshells and damaging memes.
More from the Guardian piece:
The chances of Sanders actually becoming president, however, are also close to nil. I say this because in 2016 I got a glimpse of the Republican party’s opposition research book on Sanders, which was so massive it had to be transported on a cart. The Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who got to see some of its contents, declared that “it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn [Sanders] apart.”
According to Eichenwald, the book includes damning material such as the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to Texas where it would be dumped in a poor Hispanic community, that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and that he appeared at a 1985 rally in Nicaragua at which Sandinista supporters chanted “Here, there / the Yankee will die.” And then there’s Sanders’ fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men…
After the Trump campaign and Fox News got through weaponizing this research, the usual conservative charges against Sanders – that his domestic program would cost nearly $100tn over the next decade, that he would ban individual health insurance, send taxes into the stratosphere, and sympathize with terrorists and leftwing regimes – would seem almost benign. The Republican campaign against any Democratic presidential candidate is guaranteed to be ugly, but against Sanders it would be gruesome. The result most likely would be a Democratic wipeout on the scale of Labour’s under Jeremy Corbyn.
That’s why Sanders is the preferred Democratic nominee of Trump and his aides. It explains otherwise puzzling stories such as Trump coming to Sanders’ defense against Warren’s no-female-president claim, saying sexism is “not his deal”. And while living in Washington has made me cynical in some ways, I would not be in the least surprised if conservative dollars are swelling the coffers of Our Revolution, Sanders’ dark-money Super Pac which doesn’t have to disclose its donors.
Sanders would see his support and enthusiasm tank immediately. We often forget that Hillary had a 64% approval rating in 2013 when she completed her term as Secretary of State, before she became the frontrunner for President and both the left and the right went to work on her with a series of smears and personal attacks. She was eventually criticized as a “bad candidate”, but that wasn’t the view of her just a couple years before the election. The GOP/Russia propaganda machine would find ways to directly micro-target anti-Bernie messages to individual voters based on what works, and they’d have nearly innumerable weapons in their arsenal. They would be able to do in months to Bernie what took years to do to Hillary.
Consider this range of attack options: Being socialist doesn’t do the trick? Go after him as a Jew or an atheist. Still doesn’t work? Attack his support for Castro. No? Play up his rape essay. After that, it could be the anti-yankee Sandinista rally, or his attack on your private healthcare, or his deadbeat youth, or his heart attack, or his hypocrisy in being a millionaire, or him being a career politician. And on and on and on. The majority of Americans might be OK with him on any one of those lines of attack, but it becomes much more iffy that a majority would be able to resist all of the potential lines of attack.
The Next Era of Misinformation is Coming and Sanders is Poised to be the Ideal Target
After a lifetime of proudly living his life as an outsider and a wanna-be revolutionary, Sanders provides the opposition with SO MUCH material to attack him that it’s difficult to recall it all off the top of one’s head. And it’s so varied that it would facilitate something even more nefarious: Bernie would be a ripe candidate for the coming next generation of spoofed photography, audio and video (described in a recent episode of RadioLab, “Breaking News”). It would be a monumental task for individuals to keep track of which attacks are based in truth and which are fabricated.
If Miami residents were sent a link with convincing audio of Bernie saying “Castro has really been tremendous for Cuba … if only we could do some of those things here”, how would they know whether it’s false or not?
If there were a photo faked and circulated in black communities in North Carolina showing a young Bernie in blackface, would we be able to effectively debunk it or would it fly under the radar while we focus on the allegations of nuclear waste being spread around Latino communities? Both stories might go relatively unnoticed while we deal with a viral fake video of Bernie saying he wants to raise taxes on everyone to 60%. Did young Bernie stiff his elderly landlord on 6 months’ rent before his first run for mayor? Who knows! We’d be suffocated by an avalanche of negative material with varying degrees of credibility. Did you know that Bernie supported a political party during the Iran hostage crisis that actually sided with the Iranians? That one is true.
Bernie Represents Too Much Risk in a Race we Absolutely Need to Win
The other candidates each have their own weaknesses, and all would certainly be the targets of a shitstorm of false attacks, but none present the opposition with anything close to such a rich supply of material to work with. Bernie’s campaign would be on the defensive for the entirety of the race.
Many swing district Democrats are already preparing to run away from Bernie, and that’s based on the Bernie they know today; the one they would be dealing with in November would be radioactive. The GOP and Russia know this, and they’re quietly hanging back and facilitating his candidacy to the degree that they can, knowing that running against him would give them the opportunity to demolish their opposition across the board.
We’re told that Bernie would supposedly overcome his negatives with a flood of energized new young voters, but so far we have no evidence in these primaries that such a thing is anything other than a hopeful fantasy. What we do know is that Bernie is sitting on a gigantic powderkeg of political vulnerabilities, and our enemies have a box of matches.
A second term for Trump is a clear and present danger to our republic and to the world, and a Bernie candidacy would send us hurtling toward that eventuality. As much as I think Bernie is a good man, a genuine, passionate person that has a lot of positive ideas, and I wish I didn’t have to make this drastic plea, I nevertheless urge you, my fellow Kossacks, to choose another candidate instead to be our standard bearer.
Thank you for making it this far; may we all have something to celebrate when this election is over.