With no serious primary challenge to President Trump having emerged, Republicans are naturally looking with curiosity upon the opposition. One week away from the Iowa caucuses, there is a lot of speculation on the Right about who to pull for as the Democratic nominee. Conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt has gone as far as announcing he would be voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Virginia Democratic primary, arguing it would be better to run against the more “authentic” socialist.
While there is a long tradition of tactical voting in politics (or at least tactical rooting), Republicans should be careful about what they wish for. They should constantly keep in mind that in a two-party system, any major party nominee starts with a decent shot of actually becoming president.
The argument that conservatives should be rooting for Sanders, finding him the most beatable general election candidate, has been percolating for a long time. Even when Republicans don’t mention him by name, they clearly want to run against his ideology. When the Washington Examiner interviewed Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, one of the most vulnerable Republicans in 2020, we asked about how she would thread the needle, running in a state where many independents have turned against Trump. She argued that once the general election came, the campaign would turn into a referendum on socialism or freedom. That argument is obviously easier to make with Sanders on top of the ticket.
There is, no doubt, a strong case that Sanders, a socialist who is pushing 80 and wants to kick 180 million people off of private health insurance, would be too radical to win the presidency. Yet, Trump’s approval ratings have been persistently underwater, even with a strong economy and relative peace. What would happen in the case of a foreign policy disaster or economic downturn between now and November? Given the intensity of the anti-Trump vote, any Democratic nominee is going to start off with well over 200 of the required 270 electoral votes, needing to flip just a few states to win. It’s possible that Sanders-style populism would bring out more voters in a general election than is obvious to political pundits. After all, we’ve seen this movie before.
A number of liberals spent the 2016 primary making the case for Donald Trump. In a now-notorious piece, “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait argued that above all, Trump “would almost certainly lose.” Few liberals would look back now and argue that they’re much better off with Trump as the Republican nominee than they would have been with, say, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
As we have written before, a Sanders presidency is no joke — it would be deeply dangerous. Were the United States, the beacon of freedom around the world, to elect an avowed socialist to serve as presidency, it would be a monumental event in history. Even if his legislative proposals were blocked by Congress, he would be able to wield the power of the vast regulatory state. Even more worrisome, the man who as a mayor showed such poor judgment as to support the authoritarian communist Sandinistas against the U.S., would be at the helm of foreign policy.
Instead of looking at the opposing party’s primary through the lens of “Who would be easiest to beat?,” conservative voters should consider the question of who in the other party they believe would be the least bad as president. At the very minimum, they should remember that anybody who becomes the Democratic nominee is one step closer to the White House.
