Despite signs of growing support for socialism among young Democratic primary voters, America’s most famous socialist doesn’t want to dwell on the ideology.
Instead, Bernie Sanders prefers to focus on the individual populist measures that make up his platform.
“It’s a long discussion, but all I would say is virtually all of the initiatives we are supporting are supported by a majority of the American people,” said Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who has long styled himself a “democratic socialist.” “So you can call them whatever you want, and of course programs like Social Security, and Medicare, and the Veterans Administration have been attacked as being quote-unquote socialist.”
In part, the senator is avoiding the capitalism versus socialism debate that President Trump and Republicans are trying to establish as the framing for the 2020 elections, if other competitors for the Democratic nomination don’t exhaust the debate beforehand.
“My God, of course, this is the most convenient way to draw a red line, literally, between him and everybody else,” said Stephanie Kelton, a former economic adviser to Sanders who now teaches at Stony Brook University. “He used the term ‘democratic socialist,’ but people lop off the word democratic, conveniently,” continued Skelton.
[Related: 2020 poll: 77 percent of Democrats back socialism, but most voters don’t]
Recent polls by both partisan and nonpartisan pollsters have shown increased support for socialism within the Democratic Party, fueled in part by the 2016 Sanders campaign and by the elections of other self-identified democratic socialists, such as high-profile freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Nevertheless, the country as a whole is still skeptical of socialism. A Gallup poll released on May 9 found that fewer than half of Americans, 47%, would vote for a socialist presidential candidate. That figure remains unchanged from a similar 2015 finding from Gallup, and is the lowest support for any of the candidate characteristics Gallup polled, including race, age, gender, sexuality, and religious beliefs. That presents a challenge for Sanders, whose political brand has long been synonymous with socialism.
[Read more: 2020 Democrat Seth Moulton: ‘America is not a socialist country’]
“Emphasizing that fault line is just politically not a smart thing to do,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Examiner. “I didn’t either, because it’s not what defines us. I don’t think that word is what defines us, it’s our policies that define us.”
Sanders has long advocated major policies that would substantially increase the influence of government in Americans’ lives and redistribute wealth, such as free public college and “Medicare for all,” as well as a significantly higher minimum wage and higher taxes. In recent years, he’s seen the mainstream of the Democratic Party embrace many of the populist measures that he’s championed, and he’s now competing for many of the same progressive voters as the other candidates running on platforms of wealth redistribution, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Warren, though, who entered the Senate as a firebrand progressive, has pushed back strongly when asked whether her wealth tax and other restributive policies mean she’s a socialist.
“I believe in markets and I want to see markets work,” Warren told MSNBC in an April interview. “But understand this, markets without rules are theft.”
Though the two identify themselves differently, Kelton downplayed the differences between Warren and her former boss.
“I’m sure she doesn’t want to endure the same kind of treatment that he endures from the media and press for using the ‘s’ word,” said Kelton, who said she sees both Sanders and Warren as New Deal Democrats at heart. “If they’re both championing FDR’s second bill of rights, it looks pretty much the same to me.”
While some of their rhetoric and goals may overlap, Warren and Sanders arrived at the center of progressive populist politics from wildly different paths. Warren was a Republican for much of her life. Sanders, on the other hand, spent decades on the left edge of U.S. politics and has a history of praising undemocratic socialists and leftists such as Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega.
When asked whether he viewed other candidates, like Warren, explicitly distancing themselves from socialism as an implicit criticism, Sanders responded simply: “Ask them.”
Both Warren and Sanders compete for a similar universe of voters. In a recent Morning Consult snapshot poll of the current Democratic presidential field, more Warren voters said their second choice would be Sanders should the Massachusetts Democrat drop out; Warren received the second-most votes as a second choice for Sanders supporters in the same poll.
On Thursday, Sanders unveiled a proposal to cap all consumer loan interest rates, primarily for credit cards, at 15%. In his introduction of the legislation Sanders explicitly took aim at Wall Street, a target Warren made her reputation off of bashing. While the bill has little chance of passage — unlike Warren, Sanders does not sit on the Senate committee with jurisdiction over banking issues and Republicans still hold a majority in the chamber — Sanders appeared to be attempting to match Warren’s own array of populist policy announcements during the course of the campaign.
Ocasio-Cortez, who is introducing a companion to the Sanders bill in the House and did a joint social media appearance with him on Thursday to promote the legislation, downplayed whether that tipped her hand for an endorsement in the campaign, though she praises both Warren and Sanders.
Looming over the primary is Trump, who looks ready to tout his deregulatory policies and an economy featuring a 50-year low in unemployment and strong GDP growth figures in 2018 and the beginning of 2019. For months congressional Republicans have embraced debate between capitalism and socialism to argue that Democrats are out of touch with most of the country.
“The debate that’s going to play out in suburbs across the country is a choice between capitalism versus socialism,” Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said last month. Republicans feel they can win a fight by focusing on the higher taxes and limited healthcare choice that they argue would accompany wholly government-financed healthcare.
For her part, Ocasio-Cortez thought that a general election comparison between socialism and capitalism would backfire for Republicans.
“All these people that are calling themselves capitalist, I don’t think that there’s a single capitalist in the Republican Party to be honest with you, because they constantly vote for oil subsidies, they constantly vote for giveaways, they constantly vote for crony, nepotistic deals that give money to their donors,” she said. “That’s why I think this debate about capitalism and socialism and all this stuff, that’s why I don’t think it’s going to go very far. It’s actually good that this is happening early, because people are going to be sick of it by the end of next year and they’re going to want to hear about actual ideas.”
