I was rather amazed to read that Bernie Sanders, the all-but-vanquished challenger and former favorite to win the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination committed what I see as the same error as did Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, according to The Daily Kos:
But beside that, it’s clear as always that this was never a campaign built to expand beyond its core base. You can see it in their excuse for losing.
To recap, the campaign decided early on that it wasn’t going to try and expand its support beyond its core base. “Sanders aides believe, he’ll easily win enough delegates to put him into contention at the convention. They say they don’t need him to get more than 30 percent to make that happen.” The assumption was that the field would remain fragmented.
It was a stupid assumption for lots of reasons. But it was their bet, and they were shocked (SHOCKED!) when it didn’t pay out. “In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events—most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign,” the Times wrote. “Mr. Sanders had been ‘on the brink of winning,’ Mr. Tulchin argued, ‘until the most unprecedented event in the history of presidential primaries occurred.’” …
But fact is, Sanders was running at about half the votes he received in 2016. He wasn’t on the brink of winning. He was just leading a multi-candidate field with a fraction of his previous support. As I wrote previously, “He even managed to lose ground in Mississippi, where he’d only gotten 16.6% of the vote in 2016.”
Much like the Hillary Clinton strategy of ignoring those votes thought to be out of reach – or safe – Sanders, for perhaps different reasons, pursued the same strategy.
And so what happened? Sander’s total popular vote count was at around 30% when there were dozens of candidates in the race, and when the field compacted, it was still 30%. Let’s call that unprecedented—how a candidate so alienated the entire Democratic electorate that he picked up no one when everyone else dropped out.
If the left hopes to achieve power in the future, it’ll have to do a better job vetting candidates. Because we are doomed to eternal failure if people keep baking candidates who proudly refuse to build a majority coalition.
And that’s not a message which will go down well in certain quarters of the left. Much like the fringe-right that has been taking over the Republicans since the days Gingrich was Speaker, compromise is galling to some on the left because they are certain they are absolutely right; all they lack of the right’s mindset is the certainty that God stands behind them.
The fringe-right has gotten around the usual roadblock to power by using a crowbar made of the abortion issue: Democrats are pure evil because they believe in abortion-rights, aka “killing unborn babies!”, and therefore you’d better fall into line. Yeah, my old hobby horse of toxic team politics.
I don’t know that the left will ever find a way over the roadblock of purity, though. If they can’t compromise, then they’re doomed to being idea originators, waiting for years or decades for their ideas to be subjected to robust debate, and only maybe followed by adoption.
