Democratic insiders underestimated Bernie Sanders in 2016, and they’re not willing to make that same mistake twice.
Many of the same establishment types who wrote Sanders off when he launched his second presidential bid last year are now coming around to the idea that he might just have a shot at the Democratic nomination. Whereas front-runner Joe Biden represents the Democratic status quo, Sanders advocates for something else: the new, the radical, the progressive. It’s a different kind of appeal and one that isn’t going away.
“It may have been inevitable that eventually, you would have two candidates representing each side of the ideological divide in the party. A lot of smart people I’ve talked to lately think there’s a very good chance those two end up being Biden and Sanders,” David Brock, a longtime Hillary Clinton ally, told Politico.
At first, it seemed Elizabeth Warren would have a shot among the Sanders crowd. But her recent drops in the national and primary state polls prove that Sanders’s supporters are unique to Sanders, and no matter how similar Warren’s policies may be, she’s not him.
It helps that Sanders’s message has been the same for the past 50 years, while Warren’s, though philosophically consistent, has been willing to bend in practice for the sake of political convenience. Sanders, however, abandoned pretense long ago and has made it clear that the traditional party apparatus holds nothing for him, his supporters, or his campaign. And for the most part, he’s delivered.
Sanders’s appeal also has more of a grassroots foundation than Warren’s or Biden’s. Sanders’s campaign is completely focused on the individual — the working man who’s lost his health benefits, the young college student who’s saddled with student loan debt, and those who want to work toward change but don’t know how.
And in this respect, Sanders’s candidacy is a lot like President Trump’s. Both campaigns are rooted in the populist sentiment that has been swelling up in the middle and working classes for decades, and both candidates are fiery outsiders who tapped into the public discontentment and lent it credibility.
The two men might be addressing interchangeable problems, but they’re offering wildly different solutions, especially when it comes to economics. And unfortunately for Sanders, Trump’s economic plan is much more popular and much more realistic.
Democrats are right to take Sanders seriously. He might be the only Democratic candidate who understands what happened in 2016 and why it could happen again. And until the Democratic Party figures out what makes Sanders so popular and why a man like Trump won the White House, it will not be able to move forward.
