Back in early July, I took a look (here and here) at what Rand Paul or Bernie Sanders would have to do to win their respective nominations and then the presidency. Looking back at those pieces, about the only thing still relevant that I said about Rand Paul was this: “If Rand Paul’s candidacy flames out early enough, [his] voters are Bernie’s for the taking, and he’s going to need them if he hopes to actually win anything.” I also said “I don’t even think Sanders’ potential appeal on the right is limited to Rand Paul supporters. It’s just that I think Paul’s supporters are riper for the picking than, say, Mike Huckabee’s supporters.”
Ah! Yes. Mike Huckabee supporters!
What was Bernie Sanders doing yesterday at Jerry Falwall’s Liberty University?
He was going after Mike Huckabee’s supporters, of course.
And why would he be doing something crazy like that?
Well, here’s some of what I had to say about what Sanders needed to do to win.
If Sanders has a mission, it isn’t to convince the natural constituents of the Democratic Party that they ought to vote for a Democrat. So, if you’re projecting how he’s going to do, you need to evaluate what his prospects for success will be among people who are more conservative or moderate, or who are normally disengaged from the process…
…To win the overall contest, including the presidency, however, he is going to have to achieve a substantial crossover appeal. If he beats Hillary, he’s going to lose a portion of the Democratic coalition in the process, and he’ll have to make up for it with folks who we don’t normally think of as socialists or liberals.
Some of this deficit can be made up for simply by bringing people into the process who would otherwise have stayed home, but that alone will never be enough. If you think the electorate is so polarized that Bernie can’t change the voting behaviors of very many people, then there’s really not even a conceptual way that he could win. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to wait and see if he can appeal to a broader swath of the electorate like he has consistently done in his home state, then the “white liberal” vote isn’t quite as decisive…
…But what should also become clear is that unorthodox candidates can only win by attracting unorthodox coalitions. Arguments that Sanders can outflank Hillary from the left are just wrong, as are arguments that Rand Paul can hold the Republican coalition together and then add enough to it win the Electoral College. No, if either of these gentleman want to win, they need to do it by reshaping the dividing lines, and that’s particularly hard to do in a system with a lot of closed primaries where only registered Democrats and Republicans can vote.
Around the same time I was discussing potential Sanders strategy in an email with a colleague and I basically came out with something bound to upset most progressives if they ever caught wind of Bernie trying it:
Sanders is really popular up in Vermont with dairy farmers and hunters and basically the kind of people who normally watch FOX News and stew about immigrants. He could start cutting a weird kind of Perotesque row through through the thickets, much like Rand Paul hopes to do. But he has to get out of Madison and Portland to do that. I’m thinking about the folks in Chattanooga who wanted to unionize the VW plant. There are a lot of places like that in the South and Midwest where he could build support even if doesn’t makes sense in a strictly Electoral College sense. He needs to go after the [George] Wallace voters, frankly. Take a left wing message to Hillary’s right flank and hope the left stays with him.
I don’t think this is really doable even if he’s imaginative enough to try, but it’s the only way I can see that he could prove us all wrong.
Later on in the email exchange I admitted that my own readers would hang me for heresy if they got wind of my political advice for the Sanders campaign.
Well, yeah, I mean think about what I’m saying.
We have a bunch of people bitching that Bernie, a progressive caucus champion, isn’t getting much support from people of color. And my response is that he should be focused on George Wallace voters. If they understood me correctly, they’d go ballistic.
That’s an acknowledgment that my idea of a potentially winning strategy for Bernie isn’t exactly brimming with sensitivity training. If he actually tried it, I thought at the time, I might be downright uncomfortable with the whole idea.
But I got over myself.
The way Sanders can go after these voters is to do what progressives are always saying the Democrats should do, which is to explain how Republicans (the billionaire class) are ripping them off and rigging the electoral process. He does not need to pander to their bigotry and incite their anger against the wrong people getting redistribution in the form of access to health care or higher education or food stamps or welfare.
Sanders can pander a little bit, too, as he did at Liberty by quoting Scripture to back up his ideas on economic fairness. But that’s pandering (mostly) to people’s better angels.
There’s no clean or pure way to win over the George Wallace bloc of voters, but that’s basically what the Blue Dogs did and we always said there was a better way.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of overlap between Sanders supporters and Paul supporters, but there could be overlap with Sanders and Huckabee, too.
There’s just no way that Sanders can outflank Hillary from the left, but if he can bring in the disengaged and carry a big chunk of the middle, he’ll be cooking with gas.
And he doesn’t have to ignore or sell out black and Latino voters in any way while he’s doing this. Just before he went to Liberty, he was down in South Carolina visiting with mostly black Democrats, including a visit to Benedict College.
The name of the game is getting the most delegates to the Democratic National Convention and then getting the most votes in the Electoral College. Sanders still doesn’t have any clear path to those goals, but his campaign seems to understand that they can’t try to win with the standard Democratic primary electorate and have any hope of success.
After all, he’s not a Democrat. So why would Democrats prefer him to one of their own?
But, hey folks, it’s only political advice. You only get to crucify me if I take money for providing it.
>>There’s just no way that Sanders can outflank Hillary from the left
huh? on economics or foreign policy there’s miles of room on her left, only a republican could get to her right.
the votes aren’t there.
He can run as Vlad Lenin if he wants to. But he can’t find enough votes to Hillary’s left to win, and even if he could, he’d be too far out on the limb to climb back for the general.
Now, Tarheel Dem is right in a sense that talking economic populism is leftist, but I am talking about which voters you’re targeting not so much about what you’re saying.
The missing votes for Sanders have to come from two sources: the previously disengaged (including the far left) and this source of lower class white voters who are as likely to go for Trump or Buchanan or Perot as they are to go for him.
“the votes aren’t there.
He can run as Vlad Lenin if he wants to. But he can’t find enough votes to Hillary’s left to win”
There were in 2008.
Shall we count the ways that Bernie is not Obama and is not going to win with the same coalition in either the primary or the general?
Why wouldn’t he?
One of the great untold stories about the Obama campaign: Obama did pretty damn poorly among Asians and Latinos in the 2008 Primary. Like 60-65% to 30-35% poorly. Yet he completely creamed McCain and Romney with these cohorts in the general election.
Sanders could win the primary just by running the 2008 Clinton playbook plus brute demographic inertia. And if that happens, I don’t see any particular reason as to why Sanders couldn’t rally AAs in the general election as long as he didn’t make his victory racialized and the GOP continued to run a Wallace or Reagan-style candidate.
And here’s the other untold factoid of the 2008 US Presidential Election: blacks were less likely than whites — and much less likely than Asians and Latinos — to put race as a primary consideration for voting. Granted, it was more like 12% to 24%, but that’s still noticeable.
If Sanders does significantly worse than Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Dukakis in the general election then I’ll be extremely surprised.
Please do tell.
Elighten me.
Because honestly when it comes to the general I don’t think you have thought it through.
In any way.
In Vermont Bernie wins like any other Democrat. His most likely path is the same as Obama’s in a general election, though minority turnout will probably look like a cross between ’04 and ’12. You can still win with that.
The split in the Dem primary in 2008 wasn’t left-right. There wasn’t enough difference to trigger one.
The reason why the relatively trivial difference between a proto-ACA with a mandate, and a proto-ACA without a mandate took on such importance was there really weren’t a lot of others — not on policy.
In Iowa it was – it was about Hillary’s vote for the AUMF.
It is the only reason she lost Iowa.
That was retrospective, not prospective. History, not policy.
The two candidates didn’t differ to any detectable degree on what to do in the ME going forward.
And? So what does that have to do with the hypothesis that Iowa voters punished Clinton for her AUMF vote?
For the record once again, I am pessimistic about this election precisely for the current overemphasis on the Presidential race and narrowly on the campaign strategies of the Presidential candidates.
The real battleground in 2016 is control of the state legislatures and the future of state policies. Gerrymander-victimization is a huge issue here. But the state legislature vote has impact up-ticket as well as shaping state policies that reverse current national consensuses.
Let me say it again. I am pessimistic. My poster children for this are the trend from Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Illinois, Ohio — it all looks blue to red no matter how sizable the majority opposing it. Colorado seem to me to be in doubt. And Brown’s drifting tells me that under the surface something is going on in California as well. Plus there is a huge amount of money this cycle focusing on legislatures as a result of what the Kochs have accomplished.
I understand fladem’s concerns, but the point is how do we get out of this mess.
Also, I’m not sure the electorate is so easily definable as ideological segments absent a whole bunch of assumptions about what that segment is attracted to.
“Disengaged” (but then you have to segment that by why they are disengaged) might be a valid segment.
Lower class white voters are all over the lot depending on region, religion, living circumstances and often overlap with “disengaged”. We use it for shorthand. Might be more defined on a state-by-state basis.
Trump, Buchanan, Perot, or not vote at all.
Also “lower class white” does not necessarily equate to “racist attitude”. Interracial family relationships even in the South and even among conservative religious have increased. In the South these days, racist attitudes primarily are associated with Fox viewers and Limbaugh listeners and members of specific congregations of churches (unpredictable by denomination, although obviously not AME of CoGiC).
The magic for Sanders is to get more than the Perot, Buchanan, Trump voters, but also the Paul voters and the socialist far left voters.
And part of that is a portion of even the Huckabee voters.
Basically, it’s picking up all kinds of folks who are just disgusted and disinclined to participate in two-party politics for whatever reasons.
He needs these because he’ll have defections from the center of the party either through sitting it out, not donating, not working to organize, or outright fleeing to the safety of the more status quo candidate even if they happen to be a fairly unhinged Republican.
Of course, if he goes up against a Carson or Trump, he’ll hold more of the center. Against Bush he’ll lose a lot of it, probably fatally.
“Center” is ambiguous.
There is top-center-bottom.
And there is left-center-right.
Bernie loses top-center and top-right and maybe gets a part of top-left.
He also loses top-right and center-right.
Center-center, and center-right deal with middle class issues. They are competitive.
His base at the moment is center-left.
The mobilization required is bottom-left and bottom-center. Bottom-right is completely lost to him.
I’ve not plotted the other candidates to the 9-square tic-tac-toe model, but you get the drift of it. The top-bottom argument is where Sanders frames his speeches, not left-right.
Bush is hard to gauge because he does still carry his brother’s baggage.
The shift comes when the center faces up to the fact that movement conservative ideas are what have created economic and foreign policy catastrophe. The media will absolutely resist this view. The candidate who finally breaks through on this takes down Bush as well as ending Republican credibility of messaging. When the lies are finally perceived to be lies. This is a sort of boundary condition analysis. Yours is more likely and why I am pessimistic of change of policy.
The center most vulnerable to his policies are the professional class, affluent business owners,and people who believe their interests align with the interests of that center. Medical providers and insurance company workers against single payer. Stockbrokers and other financial workers against some of his tax ideas. And they will bring their influence networks of friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers with them. It then is helpful in analysis to identify who those winners and losers of his policies are as his platform comes out. And to realize that a winner on one policy could well be a loser on another, and that which they consider salient is unpredictable.
Well, one way of looking at is that Sanders is dead in Connecticut and New Jersey among white professionals, precisely because they don’t think the ladder they’re on is the embodiment of all evil.
The Schumer, Booker, Menendez wing of the party will flip out.
These are the Dems I grew up with and they’re not going to go for a Socialist in Greenwich or Montclair.
At best, they could be presented with an even worse choice than Sanders and that would be the New York Post’s Page Six Poster Boy, Donald Trump.
The Democratic (monied) center will get very wobbly if Clinton doesn’t pull through.
Then there’s the cultural alienation, and I love Bernie Sanders but he doesn’t pass the “he’s one of us” test in too many places in this country. So, he’s going to bleed all over the floor in places like western Michigan that don’t know a bagel from a pastrami sandwich and think of Bugs Bunny when they hear a Brooklyn accent.
Sanders has to make up for these deficits to have any chance. He absolutely cannot rely on Obama’s coalition. Clinton might be able to, but there’s no way that Sanders can.
He’s going to have to start drawing contrasts on foreign policy and civil liberties to have any appeal to those people. Otherwise, they’ll just write him off as just another statist.
Honestly, this is just a fantasy based on nothing, with the possible exception of the Paul voters.
So me data. Any data to show Bernie has any reason to expect to appeal to these groups.
He did not not in Vermont.
Going after George Wallace voters is flanking Hillary from the left. Socialism is in part about the power of workers over their own lives and not just coffeehouse ideological debates. But you have to realize that the students at Liberty are often offspring of farm or manufacturing workers who moved into small business ownership or sufficiently profitable agribusiness, especially as manufacturing collapsed in the South. In that sense, they are not George Wallace voters at all. But inroads among them makes it easier to get the ears of George Wallace voters.
What you are likely to see happening is the GOP using its local opinion-makers, especially its network of preachers to delegitimize Bernie as un-American. His campaign’s task is to defeat that meme once and for all if he is to win. A second route of delegitimization are the blanket of local Republican newspapers (most all of them are in chains now), Maybe it is time for Bernie to make the concentration of media and how they shape elections a big loud issue pre-emptively.
In further reflection from yesterday, Bernie’s speech plays to an audience that was not there. To the black voters holding their opinions, the entire said that he would speak the truth about racial issues before hostile white audiences. His softened rhetoric is discussing those issues certainly is not sufficient for those votes to move yet. It is however the first step of building a fusion voter majority over an expanded geography. The Democratic primary will be a fight to demonstrate expanded numbers in the South and other solid red area IMO. Because demonstrating that strength is what makes one appear “electable”. The way not to lose the base in the blue areas is to do that with strong Democratic principles and a view of progress if not progressive principles. For Hillary, this means reforming and going beyond the 1992 coalitions that elected Bill Clinton. For Bernie, that means organizing and bringing into the Democratic Party an authentic black-white worker party across the country, something not done since FDR’s era. Looking at the full weekend swing through SC, NC, and VA, it seems that Bernie is working that obvious strategy. And he doesn’t really need obvious black support until the actual primary votes and the post-primary analysis of votes that talk about “Sanders’s surprising strengh among African-Americans given the #blacklivesmattter flap”. That is the trigger event for CBC endorsements.
Both have to demonstrate that not only are they electable but that they can bring in downticket candidates that that allow them to govern to deliver their agendas.
My spidey sense tells me that the 2014 election and the GOP overconfidence in their prospects might have actually broken down the established parties – both of them. Certainly the direct funding of candidates under post-Citizen United rules has undermined the message control of parties and left the possibility of candidates who are loose cannons relative to the parties’ agendas. Where that leaves the intersts of voters remains to be seen. Maybe we will move away from a political environment in which voters are told by media and candidates what their interests are.
I think you are spot on with this. Many have gnashed teeth over the unwillingness of Dem candidates to go into regions and constituencies to argue that their interests are NOT served by the GOP. Few had the guts and fewer had the skills to do it effectively, Sanders may.
The subrosa network of preachers, small station talk show, letter to the editor, Hardee breakfast club commentators is real and worked hard against Clinton, and Obama. But they are a dwindling and increasingly isolated crowd. Their kids don’t rely on them for political information when, if interested, there is so much online. That’s why the Liberty speech was important. If 1/5th of the audience responded a little and passed a link along to friends and relatives, then it grew exponentially. That it the potential. Reach outside the expected channels.
R
Not much direct funding of candidates going on on the Democratic side.
It’s pretty much status-quo-ante stuff, and not much changed by Citizens United.
I prefer calling myself a liberal rather than a progressive. In fact I could be described as a conservative because I want to preserve and improve on the progress made in the past by FDR and the Civil Rights movement I don’t even know what the “progress” in progressives means.
I’ve thought for years now that the way to win back the blue collar Reagan democrats would be to actually talk to them face to face about traditional D values. However things have gone so far out of whack with the religion nonsense and the abortion issue, in fact all social issues that it will take years to get them going in the right direction again. And I blame success of the republicans’ tactics on the democrats to a large extent because they have been too afraid to take a stand. They’ve been too busy taking the money. So – Go Bernie!
Go back and read Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority to see how he and the Reagan campaign put together the conservative coalition. Stripping that ethnic working-class base from Democrats in the cities (the “Archie Bunker” vote) was the first part of the strategy and it soaked up enough of the Wallace voters to allow a Nixon victory. That was before the “value voters” were added to the majority.
In retrospect, I think you need to look at what Jesse Helms did from 1972 onward to understand how those values voter coalitions got added. The segregationist local academies and the religious universities (Bob Jones, mainly, as Liberty and Regent didn’t exist yet) that pandered to them were early on the morality dodge to their racist immorality. Mostly they drew on the Impeach Earl Warren sentiment on civil rights and on the decision banning official prayers from public schools. The prayer amendment is where Jesse Helms started in on the values voters. In 1975, that is during the Ford Administration, the IRS lodged a case against Bob Jones University for forbidding interracial dating (equal protection under law) that galvanized this group of religiously-backed segregationists.
Roe v. Wade was a gimme to increase their numbers and open an alliance with ethnic Catholic voters. And Phyllis Schlafly’s framing of opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment as a fight against creeping lesbianism was the stroke that brought same-sex issues into the mix. By the time Jimmy Carter took office, all of these issues were simmering in state legislatures.
In 1980, Pat Robertson was instrumental in a Washington for Jesus march that sought to mobilize values voters for Reagan, despite not having an overt partisan political tone. It pulled roughly 200,000 marchers.
With the votes of Reagan Democrats (racist Democrats that included a lot of ethnic and union members), the election of Ronald Reagan separated labor and working class voters from the Democratic party and delivered them to the Republican party to be fleeced by the economic powers that be. That was an abstract argument in 1984. It is a critical and painful reality now. Movement conservatism economic policy has failed and failed big. When labor and workers in general realized that they have been led around by their religious values while their pockets have been picked (one cannot yet say it that directly), there is the possibility of a fusion party that defeats any amount of big money.
The challenge of Democratic candidates is how to move the politics forward so that that can been said forthright in the 2020 election when reapportionment is on the line and whatever demographic changes are more powerful.
And that means they also have to understand the relgious scam and grifting that have been going on.
Don’t think that we can leave out the impact of Democrats seeming indifference to the whittling down of private sector union power combined with the Vietnam War in creating the Republican blue collar voters, disproportionately white men.
At this point the Reagan Democrats are mostly dead.
Macomb County Michigan 1980 is almost 40 years ago.
They’re Republicans, now, the few that are left, and their children even more so.
Read Making of the President 1964, Helms did nothing Goldwater did not do first.If you watch the returns from the ’68 election on you tubm, they talk about the decline in Union votes for Democrats.
There were three elements to the working class desertion of the Democrats:
We aren’t winning them back.
Prayer in schools
Law and order
Oh, yes, union voters never warmed up to LBJ. I bet i might know why and you probably do too. It’s initials are Repeal Taft-Hartley.
What you said.
Hey, as long as we’re all clear that calling Bernie the candidate of white resentment isn’t a slur but the open, acknowledged truth. Lololol.
Worker resentment isn’t only from whites.
o/t I’m sorry, but I finally found where Trump gets his material from. Bert Lancaster schooling Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sb-7RJ3658
I believed from the first that Bernie was running for two reasons:
So far, he’s been successful in number 1. He’s trying to be successful in number 2.
Good On Ya, Bernie!
Which is why I support him and want him to stay in the race as long as he can, without believing that he actually has a viable strategy to win either the primary or, still less, the general election. That won’t make his more fervid supporters happy with me, but I can live with that.
That you don’t believe he has a viable strategy is no big deal. I’m sure he does, Bernie’s no amateur. Of course, as I understand the word “viable”, that doesn’t GUARANTEE success, but at least the possibility of success. (Viable: CAPABLE of winning.)
As for #2, I think he has gotten further along with a lot of previously disengaged young people than some might realize. I will readily admit that this is purely anecdotal on my part, based on the conversations I have had with the friends of my young nieces and nephews. But I can only surmise that things like this are happening in a lot of other places just like they are around here, an area which has long been deeply steeped in GOP ideological influence.
Why would anybody be pissed off? He’s not screwing over the oppressed to get these voters so it’s fine and he’ll if that’s what it takes to drag them into the future kicking and screaming at least a little DO IIIIITTTTTTT!!!!!!!
God, this is wrong on so many levels.
“Sanders is really popular up in Vermont with dairy farmers and hunters and basically the kind of people who normally watch FOX News and stew about immigrants. “
So this is just wrong in most ways. Sanders is not popular with Vermont Fox News viewers. As a native Vermonter I have to say this is just horseshit.
He IS popular with some farmers – in part because he defends the diary compact and in part because many farmers are urban escapees. Most native Vermont farmers (OK many) dream of nothing more than subdividing their land and getting out of farming. In the early part of his career he DID attack opponents for being for gun control (by the way, not all Vermont hunters are not Republicans)
I lived in Burlington when he became Mayor. I was there when he won statewide. He won because he built from the left, to liberals to moderates. He won because he was viewed as having been a good Mayor (he clearly was).
The idea that he was able to tap into conservatives the way other Democrats in the state could not IS JUST WRONG.
There is NO evidence from the data to support it.
None.
Zero.
He runs well where Democrats run well. He runs relatively in places like the Northeast Kingdon, like other Democrats.
What is interesting to me is how invested some pundits are in inventing this notion that White Southern Racists could be won over if we just could talk about economics.
It is bullshit. I really can’t overstate how absurd the notion is.
People have been chasing this phantom ever since Reagan, always convinced that in the next election it will finally work. Meanwhile, we all owe our profound and humble thanks to the African American voters who have saved this country from complete disaster.
Democrats faced a decision:
Number 1 is the Great White Whale of liberal politics. It is not going to happen : the cultural and racial gap is too big. So we chased the white suburban vote, and added to that the minority vote.
There are issues with this construct – but I have seen little evidence that there is another one available.
In some ways, Trump maybe kinda sorta represents how ‘White Southern Racists could be won over if we just talk about economics?”
I mean, he’s got a huge cultural gap, too. (And yeah, I realize that the slight flaw in this is that he’s running for the -Republican- nomination. But I mean, is he what this phenomenon looks like?)
Trump is speaking in well recognized code to White Southern Racists on Immigration, which has allowed him to bridge the culture gap.
The thing is, fladem, is that it’s no longer 1972 or even 1994. The Democratic Party doesn’t need ‘Reagan Democrats’ to wield a majority. It just needs to stop the bleeding.
If the 2016 or 2020 Democratic Nominee can do 5% better in the Midwest and 10% better in the Rockies and South with the white working class than 2012 Obama while holding onto to 2008/2012 Obama Coalition, that’s it for the Republican Party. They’re finished. If the Democratic Party got 30% of whites in the South instead of a pathetic sub-20%, we’d have both the Carolinas and Georgia sewn up already.
Hell, if we could get 25% of the white vote in Mississippi instead of 12 or 13 percent, that would be a blue state.
Look at the Arizona exit polling.
There are two ways the GOP could win:
I have little doubt the GOP will try the second route, and the AZ exit polls show how polarization can win.
It won’t last – the GOP is doomed if it doesn’t change. But they can win in this cycle.
And this is what Trump is showing.
It’ll be even easier if the Clinton wing of the Democratic party gets their way and doesn’t even try to get their votes, instead running the standard ‘social liberalism, economic centrist’ playbook.
They’ve completely given up on it. Clinton supporters don’t talk up her coattails
with whiteserr, white womenaw, fuck itanymore, they’re instead trying to convince us that 4 years of gridlock with the possibility of USSC replacements in 2017-2018 will be enough to stave off disaster.I’m not so certain that Bernie Sanders’ own cocktail of ‘social liberalism, economic progressivism’ is going to do the trick either. But he’s at least trying a semi-plausible COA. And again, his plan doesn’t have to work miracles, it just has to work at all.
Must point out a regional difference. The appeal of Reagan to western voters was different from that of midwestern and southern voters. Less race and religion based (excluding the Republican Mormon populations), weaker machine political operations, and a touch of the “Gary Cooper” mentality. (Think Schweitzer in MT.)
Neither wimpy sounding or acting Democrats or Republicans fare well regardless of their political stances. But strident and inauthentic machoism doesn’t play well either. Schwarzenegger won twice in CA because he ran as a liberal Republican — more liberal than many Blue Dogs in other states AND his opponents, while serious and experienced policians, weren’t commanding in either style or substance.
I agree with you, the West and the South are different. And part of the West has turned blue: CO and NV for example. Obama was even close in Montana in ’08.
Not all white Southern workers who vote Republican are so tightly racist that they can’t respond to economic arguments. That is why the Democratic Party in a lot of Southern states did not lose statewide until the 1990s and the trashing of the second Southern Democratic President, otherwise known as the Gingrich Revolution. And then as a result of trade deals he made through triangulation, the mainstays of Southern manufacturing were lost.
For the nomination, Bernie needs only to win a few or one or two very large Southern states. To say what he has to do to win them does not say that his campaign can pull it off. Fusion campaigns are extremely difficult, but it is a fusion campaign that this country very desperately needs in its politics. An ugly win this time is not sufficient to stave off disaster.
It is a matter of enough Southern working types being won over by economic populism to shift the majority over the line in enough states that it destroys the sectional bias (and the Solid South) image of Southern politics.
And yes it runs counter to every trend since Andrew Jackson. But so did the idea of Southerners voting for the “free soil, free labor, free money” party in 1964.
People are confusing winning the nomination and winning the general election.
Most of the southern primaries are closed to Democrats only: and while there are many old white Dem registered voters who have voted GOP for years in general elections, they seldom participate in Dem primaries. (see, for example, the Florida Panhandle)
So the lower income white voters Bernie needs to win in the general are VERY different than in the primary. They are already probably receptive to a politics based on class.
But even here I am skeptical. I was a precinct captain for Edwards in West Des Moines in ’08. Obama won by winning white professional class voters. Contrary to what Boo Man says, there ARE enough of these to at least limit the damage across the South if you can at least a portion of the African American vote.
I am from South Burlington, Vermont. It is a suburb of Burlington, made up of white collar professionals. It is PRECISELY where Bernie broke out from Burlington when he ran state wide. These are the people who are showing up at his rallies. It and a few similar cities in Vermont was where Vermont began the long March from Republican stronghold to the bluest of blue states.
I can stress how wrong BooMan is here. To win Bernie needs to take middle class woman away from Hillary, not working class men.
No, there isn’t. Not until at least 2028, given current urbanization rates and growth with racial minorities.
Again, you are confusing closed primaries with general elections. These are dramatically different electorates.
I would note Virginia has gone blue because of NOVA, not because of a shift in the White Working Class. The same is true in Florida – when we took Hillsborough County (Tampa) in 2012 the target was the suburbs and minorities. I don’t know enough about North Carolina to comment.
You are right across the South in a general election with three exceptions. You are wrong when talking about the Democratic Primary electorate.
Fair enough.
The assumption in your analysis is that people cannot be motivated to change registration. That was an issue for the Republican Party in the South until an overriding issue made it so it wasn’t. Nothing in politics is as fixed as it seems.
I understand your point about professional class political origins. But a substantial part of the professional class of my generation rose from farmer-labor roots and did not forget that it was the policies of FDR that got them where they were. Others were radicalized in the civil rights and anti-war movements. That in itself does not create a majority. That is the continuing fallacy of the liberal-progressive-whatever-the-next-name-is movement.
The professional class in the South is highly Republican and the social norms so litmus-test that that unless you are a politician you pretend to be apolitical if you are out of the social consensus. Because it can result in boycotts of your services or difficulties getting jobs. The working class faces the same issue squared. If Bernie Sanders eventually connects with working class whites, you will not see it coming in opinion polls.
Working class women in the South were also Wallace voters. But your point about Hillary’s women’s vote base is correct, but that is not something that Bernie can easily engineer outside of women responding to a general message of his. His values speech yesterday mentioned the family values of parental leave after delivery, choice, and other policy points of interest to women. Being able to argue that he can deliver policies is really the point he has to demonstrate. As others have said, Hillary has the visible defeat of HillaryCare in 1993 at the hands of Daniel Patrick Monyihan.
Sanders has to expand the map widely to win the general election. That like it or not involves converting a part of the white vote that Republicans took in 2008 and 2012.
As I’ve mentioned before, the African-American vote in 2008 deserted Hillary because of Bill trying to Lee Atwater white voters and because they had a perfectly good black candidate. That campaign stunt likely is not forgotten even though it might have been forgiven.
But you are right, in many places white professional voters regardless of ideology are in the base of the Democratic Party in alliance with minority voters. The Democratic strongholds of North Carolina are the places with large numbers of white professionals as voters. Where those jobs are absent, Republicans have made huge inroads in recent years.
First, the Professional Class Obama won was under 45. I will never forget my caucus: in ’08 in one corner were the Clinton people. The vast majority over 50.
In the other was the Obama corner – made up of white YOUNG professionals. The precinct captain for Obama was a 35 year old pregnant marketing manager. I talked to the Edwards people that night: same thing over and over and it showed up in exit polls.
Young professionals are Democrats because the GOP is seen as intolerant and too religious and two warlike. It is a visceral reaction in my experience: ask them and they will say the GOP is the party of stupid. It is more a cultural than ideological judgement.
Again, this is who Sanders broke through with in Vermont, and this is who is showing up at his rallies.
It is the central irony of Sanders’ appeal that his socialism sold in Vermont, and is selling in this cycle, to professionals. Professionals, I should add, who wouldn’t be caught dead at a political rally of any kind. I get it: that is not supposed to be the way it is. He is supposed to be talking to the working class. But that is not reality.
I don’t really agree Bernie really has to expand the map much. The way to victory is pretty well lit. I think he will be destroyed before he gets close to it when his past starts coming out. But that is really a separate matter.
Perhaps my judgement is clouded, but I have seen this movie before in a way most others have not. The truth is in Vermont Bernie is viewed as an eccentric and smart Democrat. He wins in Vermont the same way other Democrats win.
And if he wins it will be in largely the same manner that Obama did.
Ahh, should he actually take office, we will see quite a difference then.
Sanders opportunity to remake politics happens after he takes office, and not before.
You write:
“The assumption in your analysis is that people cannot be motivated to change registration. That was an issue for the Republican Party in the South until an overriding issue made it so it wasn’t. Nothing in politics is as fixed as it seems.”
Events cause people to change party id – not campaigns. War, Depression, this is what swings voters in large measures.
Elections are fought between the 45’s for the most part.
You see this in the UK, too. A blue-collar worker at this point is more likely to vote Tory than a white collar one.
Honestly, this is true of the left in the UK and in France. The right is animated in many of these places by race (UK IP, Le Front nationalle, even in the Netherlands) and its target is the working class.
But this was true in ’72 then, wasn’t it.
God forbid I am tempted to pull out the Precinct totals from the 81 Mayor’s race that Bernie won. He won in the UVM wards, lost IIRC in the North End (the working class part of Burlington, aka Wards 2 and 3) while the country club area voted Republican.
wrt Bernie needs only to win a few or one or two very large Southern states…
In 2008, McCain was close to but had yet to win the nomination as to the TX primary. McCain’s only actual challenger at that point was Huckabee. Turnout for the TX GOP primary was 1.3 million, voter turnout of 11% — a respectable number of votes in a TX GOP primary.
The 2.9 million, turnout 22%, cast votes in the DEM primary. Clinton 51% to Obama 47%. One the few recentTX presidential primaries that was hot.
The results were in line with the pre-election polling, although it seemed as if Obama may have faded by a point or two at the end.
Nothing odd about the low GOP and higher DEM turnout rates compared to those in earlier elections. The peak turnout before 2008 was in 1988 at 1.7 million. Given the population growth over two decades, the 2.8 million votes in the 2008 DEM primary is consistent with the historical pattern of TX Democratic primary voters. Thus, the open primary in TX has not changed the results from what they would have been with a closed primary.
Next year, TX votes on Super Tuesday. And from everything now known, Clinton should do well there regardless of how poorly she may do in IA and NH. Now, here’s my what if. What do GA and TX Republican and Democratic primary voters do if the nomination for their party is settled by IA, NH, NV, SC and that candidate also has a commanding lead in their state polling? If Trump is out or the nominee, do his supporters vote for him anyway, stay home, or play in the Democratic nomination? Too many possible scenarios to game out and there does seem to be a high level of reluctance on the part of voters to engage in such games. But it’s possible to imagine cross party voting for a second choice if voting for the first choice becomes irrelevant by election day.
My guess is that the result will be randomly decided as it is not clear which candidate any individual cross-voter will decide is the weaker candidate to face their dominant one. You see that problem now in people’s reactions to Trump.
I don’t think most ordinary people are that dishonest when they vote. Crossing over to help nominate the perceived to be weaker opponent is the stuff of political junkies or advance notice, high profile heated situations as there was in MS last year. It’s why when a partisan voter’s candidate doesn’t have a primary challenger, a high percentage don’t bother to vote. That’s why I looked at the past elections in TX to see if I could spot any evidence of crossover voting to assist a perceived weaker DEM candidate. Now, I’m not saying that there couldn’t have been some of that in 2008, but if there was, the opinion as to the weaker candidate would have had to have been near 50/50 for the crossover voters.
At this point Republicans are expressing their dissatisfaction with the party through the polls. They want an anti-immigration, racist, anti-abortion Christian fundie candidate not beholden to the GOP PTB. But even there they don’t have a dream candidate — and have to overlook shortcomings in Trump, Carson, and Fiorina. They also can’t agree on the style they prefer — loud-mouthed bombast, measured and calm, and whatever the hell it is that Fiorina does (probably trashing Clinton is enough for now). A complete mystery as to when or if they settle down by election day and who will be the beneficiaries.
I really don’t think you can see very far past IA and NH. If Hillary loses both she will be out of money and trailing nationally. She will be much more wounded than she was heading into Texas. The press will be feasting on her carcass.
Closed versus open primaries are a very big deal. IIRC Clinton won the vast majority of closed primaries, and Obama won the open primaries exception NH. In any event I doubt you will be seeing a large number of conservative white voters in the Democratic Primary.
In ’88 wasn’t Bush the elder on the ballot in Texas. IIRC Texas was part of Super Tuesday – which is where Dole was put away. The ’88 TX primary was VERY comptitive.
In any event ’08 was the most hotly contested primary fight of my adult lifetime.
I linked to the history of TX presidential primaries in my prior comment.
Note: TX is an open primary and Clinton won that one.
Unlike 2008, Clinton won’t run out of money. Her Super PAC will pick of the lion’s share of TV adverts and mailers if she runs a bit short on actual campaign funds and she retains the ability to personally dump in some big bucks if needed.
The major difference that I’ve detected is that she doesn’t have the same energy level that she had eight years ago. She’s being protected and given plenty of down time to physically recover. She also either has a bit of a balance problem or fears that she does. Falling down, or worse fainting, at a campaign event or debate pretty much finishes a candidate. While she took the ’08 primary campaign to the bitter end, she came up short on keeping pace with Obama.
As no younger and charismatic Democrat risen to high profile in the past eight years, not having as much energy as the last time wasn’t viewed as a problem. And her team probably giggled when the virtually unknown really old guy from VT jumped into the race. So far she’s no match for Sanders’ pace at the retail campaign level. And instead of beginning to flag, he appears to be getting more energized. Going negative this early suggests to me that they are beginning to panic, but we shall see.
A lot of professional pundits were giggling too, not just those inside H’s camp. Maybe even more than a few Bernie backers. I doubt if many expected him to be such a serious challenger at this stage back when he announced.
Four months from IA voting, and by some important indicia, he should now be considered the frontrunner. That’s impressive.
As for energy level, I noticed Bernie has been showing a hoarse voice lately. His camp probably needs to cut down on his daily appearances and make his speeches shorter and crisper.
Re the H camp panicking, they’ve been shockingly slow to react so far, both on the emails nonsense and on the Bern. I’m not sure what’s to be done for her, except to try to rouse voters into rallying around her historic first-woman attempt. Dem primary voters outside the South, especially in this cycle, are unlikely to be moved by appeals to moderation and centrism. That’s something that could be said during the general, but once again, like 2008, she seems to be running a general election campaign before she gets the nom.
If current trends hold, she’s likely not to get that nomination.
Roosevelt did it, and Bernie could do it. Not only because he represents the position about as well as anyone, but because there are a lot of voters all over the country whom it wouldn’t take much to convince they are being screwed by the billionaires.
Let’s back up just a bit to Ted Cruz’ announcement speech at LU. He wasn’t exactly warmly embraced by the students. Yik Yak was apparently hot that morning.
A funny:
Apparently there were a noticeable number of “Stand with Rand” t-shirts at that convo.
What are the substantive differences between Cruz and Paul that would attract different supports among LU students? Is there even one?
Sanders didn’t go to LU to woo any the couple dozen Paul supporters or any of the other students to his campaign. He went there because it’s one of the few places that a liberal politician can appear in a calm setting to present who he is and what he stands for. Otherwise, for that audience, he would be completely defined by the religious rightwing, Rush, etc. Reject Sen Sanders for who he is and not some false character created by manipulative blowhards. IOW, be informed and adult citizen voters. IMHO he succeeded at that with a more than could be expected percentage of those students.
If the media is your enemy, you’ve got to become as retail as possible and build your organization as swiftly, widely, and strongly as you can.
Generally the mass media likes to pump up and then dump candidates with no operational campaign. On a dime, it can shift the coverage from one of admiration and/or lots of air time to one of disgust and/or very little to no air time.
While we’ve so far only seen a limited impact from alternative media on elections, it has been growing slowly over the past dozen years. By 2016-2020 it should be fully integrated, if Peter Drucker’s twenty year timeframe for new tech from introduction to widespread use still holds.
So far in this election cycle, the media honeymoon phase for Trump and Carson has been longer than that for Cruz, Paul, and Walker. In part because they’re seeing $$$ signs for the upcoming debates. Thus, they don’t want to kill off the golden goose as long as it’s laying eggs.
Expect to see more coverage, both positive and negative, for Sanders over the next few weeks for the same reason. Seriously, if the Sanders’ campaign is dismissed as if he were Kucinich II, who would watch Clinton debate herself?
I expect a couple of cycles of pump and dump with the media and Sanders. Jeremy Corbyn’s win presents and upcoming possibility of a third cycle or an introductory dump. But there will be a pump before Iowa and New Hampshire and a dump afterwards, expecting Hillary to take South Carolina. And then silence until the media sees SuperTuesday’s results. From there out, on the Democratic side the pump-and-dump will be geared to extract the most money from the respective campaigns. After the nomination and after the conventions, it will be all dump. Unless there is a lot of media money sitting on the table in the closing weeks. Election season is the media’s equivalent of Christmas shopping season.
The problem with putting together a coalition of progressives on the right AND left in the modern political climate is that all politics is tribal. While I’m sympathetic to pretty much all of Bernie’s platform, I was turned off by the mere fact that he gave a speech at Liberty University. It was a gut reaction. It’s that kind of repulsion that each side has for the other that that would make it almost impossible to carry on a campaign appealing to both Paul/Huckabee supporters and people who are “Social Democrats.”
I was turned off by the mere fact that he gave a speech at Liberty University.
Why? Don’t we want a President that exhibits statesmanship skills that include not shying away from talking to those we don’t agree with? The GOP and rightwing are currently apoplectic that Obama/Kerry talked to are arch enemies in Iran and found areas on which to agree. Why would we on the left want to emulate the closed minded and bigoted anti-diplomatic thinking of those on the right?
Those on the left who have watched Sanders’ LU speech and Q&A were impressed and think the decision to accept the invitation was a good one.
Here is a starting point
No acknowledgement that anti-Semitism has long been tied to anti-AA in the US. The LU crowd today may love Israel, but that doesn’t really include people like Sanders.
Fine — let the writer support and work for Hillary who has demonstrated no hesitation in throwing AAs under the bus when it’s politically expedient for her and diss a man that has never thrown anyone under the bus. She really does exhibit another form of bigotry.
Well you asked why, and I answered why. I happen to agree with the author, even though if I were to support anyone in the primary it would be Sanders.
Honestly, I think all the “OMG he spoke at LU — how could anyone not affiliated with the US right wing do that” is nothing but Clinton supporters looking for ways to denigrate Sanders. Do these same people denigrate Clinton for the long time affiliation with “The Family?” Which I consider that far more serious because it wasn’t a one time, speaking engagement that was public, but is a secretive and very conservative religious operation. But hey, it’s okay for Hillary to consort (sharing in their faith and praying together) with the enemy in private for years, but how dare Sanders publicly speak of liberal morality to those people. Sanders hides nothing. Clinton hides everything about her private associations with behind the scenes powerful people.
Fuck “that’s so much worse”. I don’t care. I’m not voting for Clinton in the primary no matter what happens. But I do have problems with speaking at LU. Put it this way: I also don’t want him going to Klan rallies to talk about working together on income inequality because fuck that.
Oops — responded but somehow messed up attaching it to your comment — see below.
Speaking of antisemitism, a great big L’shona toyve tikoseyvu to all the pro-semites in our audience.
Emoprogs.
The assumption that all politics is tribal is an invention of the modern conservatives to reduce ticket-splitting. It might be for a small group of partisans at any given time, but tribal affiliations are more salient at some times and less salient at others.
What we are seeing at the moment is internal tribalism within both parties that is fragmenting them. That typically is a sign of a coming realignment. The last was signalled by the Dixiecrat rebellion in 1948 that cracked open the Democratic Party twenty years later.
Klan rallies aren’t public nor is there any livestream of the proceedings, and there is no moral common ground between KKK members and Sanders; so, not going to hear of Sanders at one of those rallies.
Doesn’t the NAACP extend invitations to racist Republicans to speak at their gatherings?
Consider the funeral of Coretta Scott King. The Bushes were welcomed and attended, but did racist Republicans make a big stink about that? Well of course not — they never publicly own their racism. Plus, it was a good opportunity to highlight that the King children had chosen an anti-gay mega-church for the service. Were Clinton and Carter denounced for attending? (Carter spoke.) Denounced by any of those currently criticizing Sanders? As far as I know only one high profile AA who had a decades long relationship with Mrs. King refused to attend a hateful church. That was Julian Bond. Did any of the other big names even note that the very good friend of Mr. and Mrs. King, Harry Belafonte was uninvited as a speaker in deference to GW Bush? That would be a big no. None of those fine Democrats and liberals, other than Bond, exhibited morality in this instance. Or even the decency to stand up for or with Belafonte. Bumped to make George fucking Bush comfortable.
Now, consider where those LU students will go after they graduate. Unlike known Klan members, many of them will get government jobs. So, like it or not they will live among us. Isn’t it better for us that on one occasion, without interruption, they were exposed to a liberal that calmly spoke for forty minutes about his morality and worldviews? He made no concessions on bigotry, contraception/abortion, and social welfare programs. And was quite direct in criticizing hate groups and officially, LU is silent on same sex marriage.
How bizarre that high profile politicians could attend an LGBT hate mega-church service without a murmur of criticism, but Sanders speaking at LU is beyond the pale.
This is a response to seabe above.
Also, Democrats don’t boycott Faux Noise, right?
Darn — why didn’t I think of that? Could have saved myself a lot of time providing examples of appearances at other venues. (Although I’m glad that I took a closer look at King’s funeral. Something that I’d been meaning to do since covering the death of Julian Bond.)
“How bizarre that high profile politicians could attend an LGBT hate mega-church service without a murmur of criticism, but Sanders speaking at LU is beyond the pale.”
We all have our lines. That was Julian Bond’s; I would have attended for Coretta, if it were me, but his response is admirable and respectable. I don’t see the situations as comparable because they couldn’t choose the setting for the funeral.
Which brings us to “we all have our lines”. Many Quakers are so anti-war that they refuse to work jobs which generate income to be taxed by the federal income tax. Now I’m anti-war, but I won’t be as committed as they are. If one opposes US imperialism is it “hypocritical” to be a public servant of any kind even if your department has nothing to do with the economic and military warfare engaged abroad? Some would say yes. I would not.
I grew up with the people who would be attending Liberty. Perhaps that’s why I have such a visceral gut reaction to Sanders’ appearance. For me, it’s no different than attending a Klan rally that’s being live streamed with a Q/A afterwards. I’m not a pol for a reason. I do not “respect” other points of view on some issues, chief among them: everything LU represents and stands for.
And no, no Dem should be on Fox News either. There’s a reason why the only Dems who go there are the ones who can say “I’m a liberal and even I agree with Hannity.”
Anyway, you asked why that people like Reston and I have a “gut” response to this attendance, and I’m telling you why. That’s all.
Amendum: as a private citizen, perhaps I wouldn’t have; Bond knew her, I did not, so perhaps the better decision was to not attend (and that would equally be “for Coretta”). I also didn’t know about Belafonte. I meant if I were a sitting or ex-US president. The costs for not attending in that context are extremely high, the downsides low. And that’s why they’re pols and I am not.