It Ain’t Over ‘Till It’s Over for Bernie Sanders on Not So Super Tuesday
As I read the political tea leaves of the country, voters are seriously leaning in the direction of a “safe” choice. Six states are voting today: Michigan (125 delegates), Washington (89 delegates), Missouri (68), Mississippi (36), Idaho (20), and North Dakota (14).
Polling has been wrong before and it will be wrong again, particularly when it comes to specific elections. But what it does reliably show are trends, and the trends are not looking hopeful for the Senator from Vermont as we head into the next sets of primaries.
Laura Clawson points out this morning that “Data for Progress shows Biden ahead in Missouri, Mississippi, Michigan, Idaho, and Washington—and while there are few polls of North Dakota, at least one shows Biden favored there, too.”
The Sanders campaign knows Michigan is the key state out of this bunch, and hastily re-arranged the candidate's schedule to include three more appearances this week.
From Huffington Post:
Sanders over the weekend made the case for why he’s actually the most electable ― because, he said, he has the ideas and the movement to increase turnout.
“I understand that Joe Biden has the support of the political establishment,” Sanders said in Ann Arbor. “But we have the support of some of the strongest grassroots movements in this country. … and I would, 100 times over, prefer to have grassroots support over establishment support.”
His supporters echo those arguments, just as they echo Sanders’s arguments that policies like “Medicare for All” and free college are more popular than critics allow. They also talk about him as somebody who speaks his mind and comes off as genuine ― and how that credibility can go a long way in an election.
“I’ve been following Bernie for at least a decade,” Jeremy Manning, a network administrator from a Detroit suburb, said on Friday night. “He’s honest and consistent, and I think people get that.”
While the official campaign has mostly taken the high road when it comes to Biden’s momentum, that hasn’t stopped their internet supporters from trash talking.
The two lines of thought I’ve seen are that Biden is suffering from dementia and anxiety over the fate of various programs like medicare for all that are the backbone of the Sanders platform.
The dementia meme stems from a rather cruel interpretation of the former Vice President’s mental workarounds for stuttering. People facing this challenge often replace phrases they are having difficulty articulating with hastily recalled language similar in rhythm when under stress.
I can speak to this because I have to do the same thing when facing challenges voicing through the prosthetic installed after my bout with cancer. It has nothing to do with my thought processes and everything to do with the overwhelming desire to gain social approval.
There are, of course, doctored videos, gleefully pushed by nihilists, puppets, and Republicans.
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1237371644294856705?s=20
https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/1237360050332721155?s=20
From Vanity Fair’s Hive newsletter:
On the heels of Super Tuesday, Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity suggested Biden’s cognition had diminished. “Biden is struggling,” Hannity said. “If he had a fastball, it’s gone. If he had a slow pitch, that’s gone too, and his confusing and bumbling speeches, increasing numbers of gaffes and public outbursts are beyond troublesome.” The pro-Trump hosts’ line of attack has echoed the president at rallies and on Twitter.
Campaigns often dredge up past positions taken by the opposition to contrast with their own advocated positions, and I suppose that’s fair game.
But this video making the rounds of the internet, along with the alarmist warnings about Biden killing off Medicare for all, distorts a nuanced position.
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1237228740524085249?s=20
If you look at polling, it’s clear that a majority of Democrats and Independents favor the positions forming the basis of the Sanders campaign.
It depends, of course, on how the questions are phrased, but the fact is most folks would like for things to be fairer and have the opportunity to better their lives sans the inverted socialism sapping the standard of living for the past forty years.
The problem for Sanders at this point is the tendency for voters to take the “safer” route to dumping Trump, and Joe Biden has successfully captured that persona. It’s a kinder, gentler version of the fear motif Republicans have been using for decades.
Not-very-closeted “third way” politicians and pundits have done a good job of selling the concept, mostly because they see a Biden presidency as the least disruptive path to restoration of how things were before the Dear Leader descended on the escalator.
Fears about the CoronaVirus have amplified the desire for a more guarded approach, especially as the president has offered up little more than anger and “take two tax cuts and call me in the morning.”
Here’s Jason Linkins at The New Republic with the diagnosis:
According to extant polling from the Super Tuesday states, Biden has been the overwhelming choice of voters who are worried about the epidemic. As NPR’s Domenico Montenaro reported on Monday, voters in four Super Tuesday states were asked about whether the coronavirus outbreak was an important factor in their voting decisions.
“On average,” Montenaro tweeted, “55 percent said it was an important factor, and those voters broke 50-24 percent for Biden over Sanders.” Biden’s advantage was impressively wide, 60-19 percent, in Virginia, a state in which the former vice president barely campaigned. Double-digit gaps in this voter trait in California and Texas likely played a role in minimizing Sanders’s delegate haul from two states in which he was heavily favored.
And the cure for Sanders:
Sanders has at least one baked-in advantage over Biden: He is not trapped into defending a health care status quo that is already proving to be insufficient to the task of a nationwide epidemic. Patients seeking care for coronavirus-related symptoms have been hit with surprise medical bills, which may make others reluctant to follow the government’s guidelines to limit the spread of the virus. Sanders might also be more comfortable making the case for better workplace protections and labor rights, such as guaranteeing paid sick leave, a policy which numerous studies contend would dramatically limit the scale of flu-like outbreaks. As Emma Roller points out in her endorsement of Sanders in The Outline, the Vermont senator’s coalition includes workers on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis and inequalities in the health care and labor status quo: teachers, food industry workers, home health care providers, and nurses.
But Sanders cannot simply fall back on his stump speech and its paeans to Medicare for All; his big political ideas cannot be implemented in time to address the brewing crisis. Instead, he must direct his revolutionary zeal in a more pragmatic direction, and promote the implementation of policies that are within reach today. The coronavirus is Sanders’s opportunity to do what my colleague Osita Nwanevu recommended last week: set aside his insurgent image and show some flair for “normie” politics, by working within legislative limits and plying for compromise. Sanders must, as Nwanevu put it, get “the Democratic rank and file to think differently about [him] as a political figure.” This isn’t Sanders’s brand, but desperate times—for his campaign as well as the nation—perhaps call for desperate politics.
The Sanders campaign’s concept of building a movement encompassing a very dedicated third of the electorate (some of whom are unaware of the levers of power among traditional constituencies wielded by the Democratic establishment) has turned out to be a strategic mistake.
And that’s why (I think) today’s the day the Sanders campaign will begin to peter out.
I don’t expect him to quit. And that’s his prerogative. But don't expect me to pay attention to trashing (whoever is) the voter's choice in the primaries.
My candidate--Warren--is out. And it's not the end of the world for me.
And that brings me to (repeat) my final points.
I intend to support the winner of the Democratic primary. I ask anybody who thinks otherwise to consider the children in cages along the border, the increasing terror being directed at those considered part of the “other,” and saving what we have left of democracy. If we have to take baby steps, so be it.
Regardless of who wins the nomination or election, the rest of the people on the ballot are important for moving away from where we stand today. We need a diverse field of bold progressives who are willing to try new solutions to our problems. Putting all your eggs in the “presidential” basket is a fool's errand.
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https://twitter.com/ZenPopArt/status/1237410236610183168?s=20
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