Bernie Sanders isn’t Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare. He probably doesn’t even crack the top five on Hillary’s watch list. (I’m pretty sure it’s Elizabeth Warren who keeps people awake at night Clintonland. Though, just for kicks, imagine what would happen if Michelle Obama decided to run. Do you think there’s any chance Hillary could beat Michelle? Me neither.)
Nonetheless, as my friend Ben Domenech puts it, ‘Bernie Sanders is a thing that is happening.” Two polls have him within 12 points of Clinton in New Hampshire, and new one has him within 8 points. He’s starting to inch upward in Iowa. And if Martin O’Malley doesn’t catch on and nobody else enters the race this summer, then there’s no reason the anti-Clinton vote–which seems to be at least 35 percent of the Democratic electorate–couldn’t coalesce around Sanders. At which point we’ll have a 16-week sprint to the Iowa caucuses with Clinton nursing a small double-digit lead. And all of a sudden it will be like that scene in The Hangover 2 with everyone asking, dear Lord, could this happen again?
The answer is: probably not. As Domenech argues, “It can’t happen. The Clintons won’t let it. Sanders can’t actually win because the Clinton machine would nuke him from orbit if he got to close, which they can do because he’s an old white socialist.”
This strikes me as pretty much right. Sanders keeps telling people that “this is not a protest campaign,” but that’s simply false. Would Sanders be running if Elizabeth Warren and Deval Patrick and Joe Biden had all declared candidacies? I very much doubt it. To the extent that his campaign has any life it’s precisely because it is being waged as a protest against a dynastic candidate, who is untrusted by the Democratic base, and who is running more or less unopposed and with the blessing of the party establishment.
And a protest campaign presents the Clinton machine with a whole different set of problems than it was anticipating. It’s asymmetric warfare: Clinton can’t engage with Sanders without elevating him. She can’t keep running to his left without mortgaging her general election prospects. And she really doesn’t want to nuke him from orbit if she can possibly avoid it, because she’s going to need his lefty-activist supporters to show up for her next November because she has clearly decided to wage a base-turnout election, rather than making a play for independent voters.
A Sanders surge creates the possibility-however small-that Clinton could lose either Iowa or New Hampshire (or even both) and have to sit there and take her lumps while waiting for the weight of her organization to crush the old socialist in February as the campaign moves south. At which point she runs the risk of becoming Hubert Humphrey, so damaged by Eugene McCarthy that her weakness is fatally exposed for the general.
Which raises, for Republicans, the best possible prospect: Zombie Hillary!
So imagine a world in which Bernie Sanders wounds Hillary Clinton. It’s mid-January 2016, Sanders comes very close in Iowa and then wins New Hampshire. (Or vice versa.) Clinton looks good in North Carolina and South Carolina, but Nevada is nip and tuck. And-most worrisome: the prospective match-up polls begin to show Clinton losing to a host of Republicans, including Jeb, Rubio, and Walker. There would be, as Fred Barnes pointed out a few weeks back, a Democratic panic.
But what could Democrats do? They could try to convince Joe Biden to jump in as a white knight. (Trigger warning?) But by February 2016, getting Democrats out of the Hillary Clinton business would probably require consent on Clinton’s part. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Hillary Clinton over the years, it’s that she never backs down.
Not when the press went after her for Travelgate. Not when the House of Representatives was drafting articles of impeachment against her husband. Not when she was clearly losing the 2008 nomination. Not when she was being investigated for Whitewater, or Benghazi, or State Department emails, or … well, you get the idea.
Like a zombie, Hillary keeps coming. Relentlessly. Remorselessly. It doesn’t matter how damaged she is or how ridiculous she looks in whatever position she’s taken.
So no, Bernie Sanders probably can’t win enough delegates to deny Clinton the nomination. But by driving her to the left, alienating her from the Democrats’ activist base, and showing that she can be beaten, he could turn her into a zombie candidate who takes for granted the 46 percent (or so) of the vote she has as a floor, but is never able to add to it.
That’s pretty attractive scenario for Republicans. Except, of course, that it might not come to pass. And that even if it does, sometimes the zombies win.
This is an excerpt from Jonathan V. Last’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up for it here.
