If you want to know what’s ailing the campaign of Bernie Sanders you need not look much further than this article in The Hill. First, there is the candidate himself, he hasn’t changed his message much since he first ran to be the mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980’s.
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” NBC anchor Chuck Todd confronted Sanders with criticism that his 2020 campaign sounds exactly like his 2016 campaign.
Sanders responded that he will change what he’s saying, “when the poor get richer and the rich get poorer, when all of our people have health care as a right, when we are leading the world in the fight against climate change.”
He’s obviously had success in bringing the party and, to a degree, the nation closer to his views on the issues, but if being coopted is a great thing for a message candidate it’s a terrible thing for a candidate who wants to stand out and win.
His refusal to add any new material to his repertoire is killing him and folks are beginning to prefer his tribute bands.
The second big problem with his campaign is that his operatives are acting like crybabies, which is never a good look.
Ari Rabin-Havt, the chief of staff for the Sanders campaign, said “there’s an institutional bias in the media for something new” and the press is no longer interested in covering the proposals Sanders brought to the forefront in the 2016 campaign that have since become mainstream in the Democratic Party.
Rabin-Havt highlighted the “insidious” instances in which the media wrote up polls that showed Sanders firmly in second place but the headlines and leads of the stories focused instead on Harris and Warren rising into third or fourth place.
And he suggested that the top levels of the political press don’t understand Sanders’s appeal because they’re disconnected from ordinary Americans.
“The elite media, the media that’s at the top, the cable nets, the lead editors, the reporters, they tend to live in Washington, D.C., or New York,” Rabin-Havt said. “They tend to be upper-middle class or wealthy. They work for companies worth billions of dollars. So on TV you have millionaires paid by billionaires to present information.”
Obviously, whenever a new poll comes out, the most interesting information is in how it differs from the last poll. Expecting the press to focus on the things that have not changed is ridiculous, and charging them with being too privileged to give Sanders (who is also a millionaire) a fair shake is downright dishonest.
An anonymous Sanders operative had a healthier take on things.
“We’ll never be the favorites in the media. I get it. But when was the last time one of these pundits visited a field office or talked to a state director? The bottom line is we have 2 million [donors] who have bought stock in what we’re trying to do. That’s powerful. If the media doesn’t want to tell that story, that’s fine. It just means we have to out-hustle these other campaigns.”
This is actually a good response. Don’t tell the press what to cover. Instead, invite them to cover something and tell them why it would be newsworthy. Don’t be satisfied with bitching about your coverage. Work for it, and accept that you’ll probably have to make up for whatever media bias actually does exist against your campaign by working harder in the other key areas of running for office.
I don’t doubt that Sanders is building a formidable ground game, especially in Iowa, and he may surprise people on caucus day. But if he wants more news coverage, he needs to make news. He can do that by offering new policies, emphasizing different policies, offering more contrasts, making appearances in new venues or with different audiences, and by creating good viral-worthy content that doesn’t look like the same stuff he put out four year ago.
Bleating at the media because they won’t repackage your stale material is a loser’s game.
This time Warren has really stepped up her campaign, and is packaging many of the same proposals with a sunnier face. And an overall sense of *gasp* competence. I never got the sense that Bernie would quite know how to turn his proposals into policy or legislation. Warren seems to have a very firm grasp of how to enact things. Harris also exudes competence, but is definitely operating in Warren’s shadow.
Bernie definitely changed the conversation, and got progressives fired up since 2015. His efforts managed to get a lot of other candidates to move further left sooner than otherwise. And, opened the door to having someone to the left of Hillary as our eventual nominee.
I’m excited about Team Pete in Iowa. He hired Helen Gym’s campaign manager to run the ground game in IA and he’s made good hiring decision after another. I don’t think he’ll be able to shine in the 21-person debates, but the in-person events are working — rocking the house in Kansas and Tennessee. If he’s the nominee, I think we’ll clean Trump’s clock.
I don’t read the HIll so I don’t pay much attention to what they say. All I know is Bernie is getting about the same treatment he received during the Democratic primary in 2015-2016. I remember all the negative stories about Bernie and the funny thing is that he would have beat Trump because Bernie would have carried Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. I’m glad Bernie wrote some best selling books which increased his finances. He deserved it. Bernie was always one of the least wealthy senators and still is, in spite of his best selling books. IMO, Bernie is the most honest and consistent of all the Democratic candidates running in 2020. If people don’t value those characteristics, then so be it. As the saying goes: “Every nation gets the government it deserves.”
I’m visiting my 83 yo mother and seeing her and her friends is reminding me why I really, really, really don’t want an octogenarian president.
This. If I recall correctly, Sanders didn’t get into the 2016 race to win; he got in it to advance the issues he cares about. Then, he performed better than expected and tried to run a winning campaign, but 1) it was too late, or 2) he couldn’t figure out how to make the switch, or 3) there wasn’t a majority of Democratic voters that year who would coalesce around those issues.
Now Sanders has to deal with a field in which there are other candidates who 1) are running on the same issues he is, 2) have stronger credentials within the party, and 3) appeal to constituencies that he’s never shown much interest in representing.
Given all that, he’s doing better than might be expected. (For how long is another question.)
I think it’s more obvious than this. The truth is that to be elected president, you have to win the first time you mount a serious candidacy. Sanders rose too high in 2016 to maintain any freshness for 2020. It’s that simple.
Marketing is everything, and a stale brand will never sell.
This is also why Biden is a stupefyingly bad choice to be the Dem nominee.