Bernie Sanders' - and Democrats' - Conundrum

Bernie Sanders has promised a political revolution and claimed that he will bring out massive numbers of new and younger voters.  Yesterday, the majority of Democrats said while they want change, especially in terms of health care - and to see Trump defeated - they do not want Sanders' revolution.  Likewise, while voter turn out was seemingly up, Sanders did not have the major turn out of new/young voters that his campaign has promised.  To be honest, I have qualms about both Sanders and Joe Biden and wish there was a strong moderate/progressive to be the Democrat standard bearer.  At this point, that person doesn't exist and alas as is too often the case in politics, one has to choose the better of two lack luster candidates.  Not voting is not an option as the 2016 stay-at-home vote showed by in effect electing Donald Trump. I do not see Biden engendering high levels of enthusiasm - he can only hope hatred of Trump (which is very real) will be enough to supercharge turnout in November.  If things continue as seemingly now headed, Sanders voters will have to decide whether they want to stay home and reelect Trump - whose agenda is the antithesis of what they claim to support - or hold their nose and vote for Biden if that is what the choice comes down to.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the situation.  A second in the New York Times looks at the failure of the new/youth vote to materialize at the level Sanders needed.  First, excerpts from the Post: 

On Super Tuesday, voters across 14 states collectively delivered an emphatic message on the single biggest day of the primary season. They don’t want a revolution. They just want to oust Donald Trump.

In all 12 states where exit polls were conducted, early results showed that majorities said finding a candidate who can beat Trump is more important than having one who agrees with them on major issues. And overwhelmingly they said that man is Biden — by 2 to 1 in some cases.

This hunger to beat Trump led to a remarkable night for Biden and for what Sanders derides as the Democratic “establishment” — and an unexpected reality check for the Sanders revolution.

Democrats on Tuesday rescued themselves from a repeat of what happened to Republicans in 2016, when a populist outsider vanquished a cluttered field and no “establishment” candidate had a clean shot at Trump.

But now they have a different predicament. Democrats find themselves in a bit of a rerun of the Sanders-Clinton race of 2016. Whatever happens in the rest of the primary season, Sanders will have substantial support — and a large number of delegates. If he loses to Biden and doesn’t embrace the Democratic ticket, his supporters might stay home in November, handing victory to Trump.

But while Sanders retains enough power to bring down the party, it’s a lot less clear after Tuesday that he has enough power to lead it. Far from bringing new blood into the Democratic primaries, it appeared that in some places turnout was particularly high in places where he did poorly. As usual, Sanders did well among the very liberal, Biden among moderates. The young voted by a lopsided margin for Sanders, while older voters turned out for Biden.

Those divisions won’t disappear anytime soon, which is all the more reason for Democrats to focus on the one thing they all agree on: beating Trump. The voters just made clear they believe Biden is the one to do that.

As for the younger vote surge that seemingly did not happen, here are highlights from a column in the Times:

[T]he demographics of people who actually vote are almost always different from the demographics of people who can vote. That’s where their analysis raises concerns about Sanders’s chances. According to Broockman and Kalla’s figures, Sanders loses a significant number of swing votes to Trump, but he makes up for them in support from young people who say they won’t vote, or will vote third party, unless Sanders is the nominee. On the surface, these Bernie-or-bust voters might seem like an argument for Sanders. After all, Sanders partisans sometimes insist that Democrats have no choice but to nominate their candidate because they’ll stay home otherwise, a sneering imitation of traditional centrist demands for progressive compromise. But if Broockman and Kalla are right, by nominating Sanders, Democrats would be trading some of the electorate’s most reliable voters for some of its least. To prevail, Democrats would need unheard-of rates of youth turnout. That doesn’t necessarily mean Sanders would be a worse candidate than Joe Biden, given all of Biden’s baggage. It does mean polls might be underestimating how hard it will be for Sanders to beat Trump. About 37 percent of Democrats and independents under 35 voted in 2016. According to Broockman and Kalla’s figures, Sanders would need to get that figure up to 48 percent. By comparison, Broockman told me, in 2008, Barack Obama raised black turnout by about five percentage points. Broockman said that if either Warren or Sanders is on the ballot, more Republicans will likely be motivated to go to the polls in response. “When parties nominate candidates further from the center, it actually inspires the other party to turn out,” he told me.

[T]he 2018 elections saw the highest midterm turnout in over a century, yet most of Democrats’ improved performance “came not from fresh turnout of left-of-center voters, who typically skip midterms, but rather from people who cast votes” in the last two national elections and “switched from Republican in 2016 to Democratic in 2018.”

The primaries have yet to demonstrate that Sanders can generate the hugely expanded turnout his campaign is promising.

Dave Wasserman, an editor at The Cook Political Report, tweeted that most of the Democrats’ turnout bump was attributable to moderate Republicans “crossing over from ’16 G.O.P. primary — not heightened progressive/Sanders base enthusiasm.” South Carolina saw record turnout, but it benefited Biden, not Sanders. College-educated white women, for example, helped flip the House in 2018. They favor Biden over Trump by double digits, but Sanders by only two points. Sanders, however, seems to see little need to reach out to them. Speaking to The Los Angeles Times editorial board in December, Sanders said he didn’t believe the way to win against Trump “is to just speak to Republican women in the suburbs.” Instead, he said, “The key to this election is, can we get millions of young people who have never voted before into the political process, many working people who understand that Trump is a fraud, can we get them voting?” Even if the answer is yes, it probably won’t be enough. If he’s going to be the nominee, the rest of us can only hope his campaign has a Plan B.

Younger voters have the most to gain or lose based on who is elected - Trump is a nightmare for improvement on the issues they care about most - yet the reality is that for reasons I do not comprehend, they continue to fail to vote in the strength needed if they want to further the policies they claim to support. So far, Sanders seems to not have found the magic needed to change their habit of voting in tepid numbers. 

Obama Tells Democrats to Relax and Embrace Political Reality

As an earlier post noted today, Barrack Obama cautioned Democrats to not lose touch with political reality of what the American public opinion supports.  He also reminded Democrats that the lead up to his 2008 nomination had been "robust" and bruising.  While not naming them, Obama appeared to be taking shots at Bernie Sanders and their followers who live in a bubble and are out of touch with main stream Americans who want improvements and change, but not a revolution and turning health care upside down.  This comes on the election of moderate Democrats win in Louisiana and Kentucky.  The message - which Nancy Pelosi has echoed - is that a centrist candidate is more likely to see electoral success in 2020.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Obama's comments.  Here are highlights:

[O]n Friday evening, he [Obama] climbed onto a stage in a basement ballroom in Washington’s Mandarin Oriental hotel and asked his party’s liberal elite to chill out a bit.

“We have a field of very accomplished, very serious, and passionate, and smart people who have a history of public service, and whoever emerges from the primary process, I will work my tail off to make sure they are the next president,” he told the room of a few hundred of the party’s biggest donors and top strategists, gathered for a conference of the Democracy Alliance group.

Obama signaled for the first time a willingness to try and modulate his party’s debate — in this case to a less frantic tenor. “To those who get stressed about robust primaries,” he added, fully embodying this new slightly exasperated adult-in-the-room role, “I just have to remind you: I had a very robust primary.”

Yet Obama’s remarks were not only aimed at the donors and chatterers. He had a sterner-than-usual warning for the campaigns, too. While over the last year-plus he has been sparing in weighing in on individual primary flash points, here he cast himself as understanding but concerned emissary to what he perceives as political reality. “This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement,” he said. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.” In Obama’s telling, Americans are conservative, not in ideology, but in temperament.

Voters, including Democrats, are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain left-leaning Twitter feeds, or the activist wing of our party,” he warned. “And that’s not a criticism to the activist wing — their job is to poke and prod and text and inspire and motivate. But the candidate’s job, whoever that ends up being, is to get elected.”

It’s a vision that clashes with some on his party’s left, most obviously including supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And while he dismissed the debate between persuading voters and energizing base Democrats as “a false division,” he explained that he’d been thinking about how the candidates have been talking about him on the trail. “I think it is important for candidates to push past what I was able to achieve as president.

“I think it is very important to all the candidates who are running, at every level, to pay some attention to where voters actually are, and how they think about their lives. And I don’t think we should be deluded into thinking that the resistance to certain approaches to things is simply because voters haven’t heard a bold enough proposal, and as soon as they hear a bold enough proposal that’s going to activate them. Because you know what? It turns out people are cautious, because they don’t have a margin for error.” Onstage, Obama stuck to most of his personal Trump-era rules: He didn’t mention the president, or the news of the day — in this case the impeachment hearings. He didn’t mention any of the presidential candidates by name, either. But his remarks, delivered onstage next to Stacey Abrams, painted the clearest picture yet of Obama’s view of the primary, and of the direction of his party in the Trump era. And his timing sent as much of a message to the operatives in the room, and the candidates in the race, as his words.