After Bernie Sanders’ resounding
victory in the Nevada caucuses, once more the political pundits who were so wrong
in 2016 were at it again, bedwetting over a potential Sanders nomination. Some
are claiming that Michael Bloomberg needs to spend all his hundreds of millions
of dollars on attack ads against Sanders instead of Donald Trump. You have
South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn—a long-time Clinton ally—claiming that black
voters are “afraid” of the word “socialist.” You have the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle calling Sanders the Democrats real “enemy”
because he’s an “iconoclastic socialist radical.” Julie Pace in the Associated Press whines that Democratic
are “running out of time” to stop Sanders. Accusations that the Russians are
supposedly interfering on behalf of Sanders are obviously meant to taint him,
with the belief that the Russians would expect him to lose—which for me is just
another reason to vote for Sanders. And of course there is Chris Matthews, who I am increasingly convinced is a Trump troll, spewing nonsense; I used to think MSNBC was the "progressive" news network. I don't believe that anymore.
And it goes on and on; no one
outside the Sanders camp thinks he has a chance. A CBS News poll claims that
most Americans “expect” Trump to be reelected. Well of course they would “expect”
that given all that the negativity they have been hearing from Democratic
pundits. These pundits keep pushing candidates that voters don’t really want
and who are even less likely to beat Trump, and keep attacking the actual frontrunner
who does, unlike all the rest, appeal across a broad spectrum of the Democratic and
“independent” electorate, as Sanders demonstrated in Nevada. I don’t take
seriously at all the “excitement” around Elizabeth Warren’s appearance in
Seattle this weekend, because as I have noted before, mostly white Seattle is
as self-serving and self-deceiving as Warren is.
But this loser mentality is just
what Trump ordered. Is the Democratic leadership and “liberal” pundits being
fools again bashing Sanders supporters? What these people ignore is that not
all Sanders supporters are Democrats or even those who lean left—let alone “socialist.”
Most voters don’t even really know what a “socialist” is; for many, if it means
the opposite of what Trump is, then they are all for it. Hillary Clinton lost
Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2016 because of a deep misunderstanding
of the electorate by so-called Democratic “strategists.” Barack Obama won
against John McCain and Mitt Romney because he at least provided the appearance
of being on the side of white working class voters who could vote either way.
If Clinton had faced an opponent of that stripe, she would have won easily. But
unfortunately for her, she faced a candidate who wasn’t a “traditional”
candidate playing by the “traditional” rules.
White working class people in
particular—many of them nursing “grievances” that had no basis in reality but
made them susceptible to demagoguery that appeared to put their “interests”
above that of all others—were not necessarily Republican voters, but many did
not like what they were hearing from Clinton, who seemed to be taking their
votes for granted. Many of those voters who opted from Trump would have
preferred to vote for Sanders, since he was actively playing for their support,
and he was the more morally and ethically acceptable choice, and Clinton
clearly was lacking in all those details.
Claims that a potential Sanders
nomination will be a “certain loser” ignores the fact that for now there are so
many people remaining in the field that voters are either “confused” or being
influenced by the all the handwringing going by the media that regardless of
who is the nominee a majority believe that Trump will be reelected. I mean
really: I am certain a majority of people would prefer someone other than Trump
as president, but all the virulent attacks on Sanders and his so-called “Bernie
Bros” are not just hurting his chances, but all the other potential Democratic
nominees as well. I supported Sanders in 2016; I didn’t vote for either Clinton
or Trump in the general election, and although it didn’t matter in a solidly blue
state like Washington, such a vote (or non-vote) probably would have made a
difference in states like Wisconsin and Michigan.
According to conservative pundit Ryan James Girdusky, Democrats are once again taking
Sanders supporters like me for granted. I wasn’t one of the 12 percent who
supposedly voted for Trump in 2016, although I could understand why they did. I
wasn’t one of those who thought that the Democratic Party was (ironically)
moving too far left on cultural issues, but I can understand how Clinton’s “woke”
hypocrisy could turn off some working class voters. And I could see how Clinton
and her allies’ corruption and pathological lying was just too much to stomach,
because that was my principle “beef” against her. Instead of taking Sanders
supporters seriously, “Democrats have doubled down on their rhetoric and
their unwillingness to cede ground to Sanders and his base,” wrote Girdusky.
It’s the wrong move, yet
Democratic “strategists” and pundits continue to do their own best to make
certain that Trump is reelected. It seems that only Sanders supporters think
that the Democrats can win in 2020. And why not? All the pundits and “experts”
have to do is to stop saying he can’t win.
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