Bernie Sanders's Five-Year War: How He Lost and Where We Go From Here
By Matt Karp, Jacobin
28 August 20
One mild April afternoon in 2015, deep within the ideological dead zone of
the second Obama administration, Bernie Sanders took a break from his Senate
workday and stalked out to the lawn in front of the Capitol building.
Unfolding a crinkled sheet of notes, the Vermont senator took less than ten
minutes to tell reporters why he was running for president: Americans were
working longer hours for lower wages, while the rich feasted on profits and
billionaires ruled the political system. The country faced its greatest
crisis since the Great Depression, he said.
Five years later, on an April morning in 2020, Sanders stood inside his home
in Burlington, Vermont, and announced that he was suspending his second
campaign for president. This race, like the contest four years earlier, had
ended in defeat, and though Bernie gave an inspirational fifteen-minute
speech quoting Nelson Mandela and thanking supporters for their blood,
sweat, tears, and social media posts even a sympathetic viewer might
wonder what, exactly, all this passionate effort had yielded.
Income and wealth inequality have soared to new heights; a billionaire sits
in the White House, while the opposition party turns to its own billionaires
for leadership; and the COVID-19 pandemic has left the United States not
merely approaching its greatest crisis since the Great Depression but
thoroughly immersed in it.
Sanders lost. He waged a five-year war against the billionaire class and the
Democratic Partys leadership a war across six Aprils and in the end, he
was beaten on both fronts. Those of us who soldiered in Bernies beaten army
must reckon hard with the nature and significance of this defeat.
The Sanders project was among the most significant left political events of
the twenty-first century, linking for the first time minimal but
foundational socialist demands to a base of millions in the nerve center of
global capitalism. Its conclusive defeat this spring, amid an apocalyptic
atmosphere of disease, depression, and unrest, offers enormous temptation
for the Left to fall into despair.
Already, we have seen a range of broadsides against Sanders and the legacy
of his campaigns, whether inflected by the far left, pleased to move on from
a long detour into electoral politics; the liberal center, eager to submerge
all possibility outside the present field of vision; or the traditionalist
right, only too happy to proclaim a left-wing retreat from class to culture
war.
The corporate press, meanwhile, has jumped at the chance to throw Bernie
and his insistent call for massive material redistribution, funded by
corporate profits straight into the dustbin of history. Even the mass
protests over the police murder of George Floyd somehow became an occasion
for the New York Times to announce the end of the Sanders era. Bernie
Sanders Predicted Revolution, Just Not This One, blared the headline,
building off intersectionality theorist Kimberlé Crenshaws analysis that
every corporation worth its salt has now surpassed Sanders in the battle
against structural racism and anti-blackness. Goodbye Medicare for All,
hello Jeff Bezos clapping back against All Lives Matter.
These are all artifacts of defeat. Sanders lost, and both his fair-weather
friends and his permanent enemies are now eager to consign him to the grave.
But neither a defeat at the polls nor a shift in the discourse is reason to
abandon the essence of Bernies struggle. Mass protests against police
violence and racism can only begin to realize their aims if joined to a
broader, Sanders-style democratic movement large enough to shape national
politics and determined enough to challenge capital capable of winning the
material concessions necessary for a truly free and equal society.
An accurate balance sheet for the Sanders campaigns must have at least two
columns: first, an accounting of achievement, substantial on its own terms
and unprecedented in more than fifty years of US political history; and
second, a reckoning with limits, which now, in the aftermath of 2020, appear
both larger and more intractable than at almost any point since 2016.
To this accounting we can add a third column, on the prospects for future
struggle foreshortened in the present, blurry in the near future, but
possibly brighter in the decades ahead.
I. Bernies Achievement: Two Lessons
When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy in 2015, his press conference
appeared on page A21 of the New York Times, far behind articles about the
Obama presidential library, a testing scandal in Atlanta schools, and Martin
OMalleys record as Baltimore mayor. This was no more than what was due for
a candidate polling at 3 percent, in a newspaper that had not actually
printed the words Medicare for All in the calendar year before Sanders
entered the race.
From the perspective of 2020, it is difficult to remember the narrowness of
the policy girdle that fitted American left liberalism in the years just
before Bernies first campaign. As progressives like Keith Ellison, Michael
Moore, and Susan Sarandon urged Elizabeth Warren to run for president, the
Massachusetts senator appeared alongside Tom Perez at an AFL-CIO summit in
January 2015. There, Warren won headlines for a fiery speech in which she
denounced trickle-down economics and called for new financial regulations,
the enforcement of existing labor laws, protections for Medicare and Social
Security, and an unspecified increase in the minimum wage.
The striking thing about this progressive factional agenda, noted Voxs
Matthew Yglesias at the time, is theres really nothing on it that Barack
Obama or Hillary Clinton would disagree with.
Today, that 2015 reform package sounds a lot like the Joe Biden 2020
platform, and no one, outside of a tiny caste of professional propagandists,
affects to call it left-wing. Bernies five-year war, even in defeat,
taught the American left two fundamental lessons.
First, it demonstrated that bold social-democratic ideas, well beyond the
regulatory ambitions of Obama-era progressives, can win a mass base in
todays United States. An uncompromising demand for the federal government
to provide essential social goods for all Americans from health care and
college tuition to childcare and family leave stood at the heart of the
Sanders project from beginning to end. Starting at 3 percent in the polls
and conducting two presidential campaigns almost entirely on the strength of
this platform, Sanders built the most influential left-wing challenge in
modern history.
Yes, candidates from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich also supported
single-payer health insurance, but their campaigns did not end with polls
showing a newfound majority of Americans backing Medicare for All, let alone
massive supermajorities among Democrats and voters under sixty-five. Yes,
leftists from Michael Harrington to Ralph Nader had long declared that a
bipartisan corporate class rules America, but they did not turn that insight
into a political movement capable of winning primaries in New Hampshire,
Michigan, or California.
Nor is the partial success of the Sanders campaigns merely a hollow
discourse victory. It has presented concrete evidence for a proposition
that mainstream political observers scoffed at five years ago, and that the
American left itself had grandly announced rather than demonstrated: that
democratic socialism, driven by opposition to billionaire-class rule and
dedicated to universal public goods, can win the support of millions, not
just thousands. Across the last half century, any activist with a bullhorn
could proclaim this to be true, but Bernie Sanders actually fucking proved
it.
Of course, as Bernies defeat makes clear, there is a vast gulf between
winning exit polls and winning power. If the Sanders campaigns illuminated
American social democracys unknown political resources, they also revealed,
in a dramatic fashion, the determination of their opponents. This is the
second practical lesson of Bernies five-year war: the unanimity and
ferocity of elite Democratic resistance, not only to Sanders himself, but to
the essence of his platform.
In its general outlines, this has been visible since early in the 2016
campaign, when Democratic Party officials, TV pundits, and prestige print
writers across an ideological spectrum, from centrists like Claire
McCaskill and Chris Matthews to liberals like Barney Frank and Paul Krugman
universally scorned the Sanders campaign and its agenda.
Yet in other ways, the depth of Democratic opposition to Sanders was not
obvious until this year, either to Bernies friends or to his enemies.
Throughout February, as Sanders won New Hampshire and lapped the field in
Nevada, panicked centrist commentators called on the remaining Democrats in
the race to unite behind a single anti-Bernie candidate. But their palpable
angst betrayed a near-universal belief that this would not actually happen.
For a critical mass of Bernies rivals to withdraw at the last minute,
reported the New York Times on February 27, seems like the least likely
outcome.
We all know what happened next. Just three days later, on the evening before
Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar suddenly withdrew from the
race and endorsed Joe Biden, joined by Beto ORourke, Harry Reid, and dozens
more prominent Democrats and former Obama officials.
This great consolidation around Biden, following his victory in South
Carolina, produced perhaps $100 million in free laudatory media coverage
more than Sanders spent on advertising all campaign long compressed into a
single weekend before the most critical election of the primary. The result
was a Super Tuesday stampede for Biden, even in states where Sanders had led
the pack only a week before, from Maine to Texas. It gave Biden a commanding
lead that he never relinquished.
In retrospect, it may seem hopelessly naive for Sanders and his allies to
have counted on an indefinite division of the Democratic field. Yet there is
a reason that even Bernies most bitter enemies shared the same calculus,
with dozens of party operatives telling the Times in late February that it
might take a brokered convention to stop him.
After all, Buttigieg was proclaimed the winner in Iowa and finished a close
second in New Hampshire; never since the birth of the modern primary system
has a candidate with that profile quit the race nearly so early. Even as an
ideological move to throttle the Left, the Biden coalescence had no
precedent in its swiftness and near-perfect coordination. When Jesse Jackson
briefly threatened to take the Democratic Party by storm in 1988,
establishment rivals Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and Paul Simon
all remained in the running until the end of March, when more than
thirty-five primary contests were complete.
This time, the core establishment forces managed to clear the field after
just four primaries, leaving just a single centrist alternative to Biden,
the vain billionaire Michael Bloomberg. (Elizabeth Warrens persistence in
the race only helped the anti-Sanders effort, since she was somewhat more
likely to siphon votes from the left than the center.) And after Super
Tuesday, of course, Bloomberg promptly quit and endorsed Biden. Warren, when
she left the race, would do Sanders no such favor.
Though, in many ways, the Democratic Party of 2020 is much weaker than it
was thirty years ago it controls eleven fewer state legislatures, for
instance the current Democratic leadership, in its influence over party
politicians, is stronger than ever. Buttigieg, who had campaigned hard in
Super Tuesday states on February 29, he held the primarys single largest
rally in Tennessee did not drop out because of a predictably poor showing
in South Carolina. (Even there, he still finished ahead of Warren for the
fourth consecutive race.)
Buttigieg abruptly abandoned millions of dollars of advertising and perhaps
thirty thousand Super Tuesday volunteers because Barack Obama told him to
and because he knew that his own career prospects, in todays Democratic
Party, depend less on winning popular support in his own name than on gamely
joining the team effort to halt Sanders and save the party.
The speed and thoroughness of this elite consolidation which also made
Biden an instant donor-class favorite makes a mockery of the implausible
idea, floated by some reporters and pundits, that Sanders blew a golden
opportunity to win over the Democratic establishment through better manners.
Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their corporate allies never mind the
consultants, hedge fund managers, and tech CEOs who built Mayor Pete did
not capriciously decide to close ranks against Bernie because he did not
make enough polite, endorsement-seeking phone calls after Nevada. Their
profound ideological opposition to the Sanders project has been plain for a
long time; what we didnt know is just how rapidly and effectively that
private opposition could be translated into public fact.
This hard lesson is not only enough to prevent anyone in the Sanders camp
from looking for meaningful concessions from the Biden campaign; it
underlines the sharp limits of any institutional politics within the
existing Democratic Party. Whatever Democratic voters think and most of
them like Bernie Sanders and his platform the dominant bulk of Democratic
officials oppose them both with an organized vigor they seldom bring to
combat with Republicans.
In 2016, Sanders won more than 40 percent of the primary popular vote but
earned endorsements from just 3.7 percent of congressional Democrats (seven
of 187 representatives). Against a far more crowded field in 2020, Sanders
won the first three contests and around 35 percent of the vote, but got the
support of just 3.8 percent of congressional Democrats (nine of 232). That
is not a marker of institutional progress.
Even the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), whose cochairs gave Sanders
a splashy endorsement, furnished more support for Biden (twelve members)
than for Sanders (eight) before Super Tuesday. In the brief two-way contest
between March 3 and March 17, Biden racked up twenty further CPC
endorsements, compared to just one for Sanders.
In this critical respect, the institutional Democratic Party did not really
move left at all between 2015 and 2020. Yes, various elements of the
Sanders agenda have migrated onto party platforms and campaign websites, and
some left-leaning policies, like the $15 minimum wage, have even been
introduced at the state level. But in national politics, the line guarding
the partys left flank a steel barricade that separates Obama-style kludge
politics from Sanders-style demands for universal public health care,
education, and family support is now more heavily policed than ever.
This hard-won knowledge itself is a weapon against liberal elites who
usually prefer to obfuscate differences rather than fight over them. Bernie
Sanderss ideas are so popular that Hillary Clinton is running on them,
gushed Vox in April 2015. Of course, Democrats will peddle this message
again in 2020, but for the millions of Sanders voters who have just watched
the party establishment spend five years suffocating a platform of Medicare
for All and free public college, its a much tougher sell.
The major achievement of Bernies five-year war, then, is an invigorated and
a clarified movement for American democratic socialism newly optimistic
about the appeal of its platform, yet intimately aware of the power of its
enemies. Sanders has left the Left in a stronger position than he found it,
both larger and more self-aware, and far less tempted by either the sour
futility of third-party campaigns or the saccharine cheerleading of
party-approved progressives.
Yet this is where the real trouble begins. The Left, after Bernie, has
finally grown just strong enough to know how weak it really is.
The essential problem, after all, is not that the corporate establishment
commands Democratic politicians its that it still commands most
Democratic primary voters. Given a clear choice between Bernies demand for
another New Deal and Bidens call for a return to normalcy, about 60
percent of the Democrats who went to the polls apparently picked Warren G.
Harding over Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The harsh truth, proved harshly across these six Aprils, is that a
social-democratic majority does not yet exist within the Democratic
electorate, never mind the United States as a whole. Sanders has given the
Left new relevance in national politics, but to make the leap from relevance
to power, we need to build that majority and this is not the work of one
or two election cycles, but at least another decade, and maybe more.
II. A Closer Look at Defeat
In 2016, Bernie Sanders led the largest left-wing primary campaign in
Democratic Party history, winning far more votes and delegates than Jesse
Jackson, Ted Kennedy, or even the victorious George McGovern. He entered the
2020 race as a serious contender, not a long-shot underdog. In the end,
however, Joe Biden beat Sanders with a voting coalition that both resembled
and subtly differed from the coalition that propelled Hillary Clinton to the
nomination in 2016.
A look at local results from the two elections suggests that Sanders was
defeated by three key factors in 2020: First, despite a substantial effort,
the Bernie campaign struggled to make inroads with black voters, which
turned out to be a far more intractable problem than it seemed four years
ago. Second, and relatedly, despite considerable success in winning
working-class support compared to 2016 mostly with Latino voters the
campaign failed to generate higher participation among working-class voters
of all races. Finally, above all, Bernie was swamped by a massive turnout
surge from the Democratic Partys fastest-growing demographic: former
Republican voters in overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and well-educated
suburban neighborhoods.
Lets take each of these in turn.
Struggling to Win Black Voters
After the 2016 campaign, in which Sanderss struggles with black voters cost
him dearly, the 2020 campaign made a range of well-documented efforts to
court African Americans, in both substance and style. The goal, as Adolph
Reed Jr and Willie Legette have argued, was never to win a singular,
homogenous, and mythical black vote but in order to compete in a
Democratic primary, Sanders did need to convince a lot more black voters.
In 2019, the campaign released an ambitious plan to fund historically black
colleges and universities; supported by scholars like Darrick Hamilton and
leaders like Jackson, Mississippi, mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Sanders
railed against the racial wealth gap and delivered substantive plans to
close it. His campaign poured resources into South Carolina, which Sanders
visited more times than Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren; Bernie himself went
on The Breakfast Club and said his 2016 campaign had been too white.
None of it seemed to make an appreciable difference. In South Carolina,
where Sanders won 14 percent of black voters in 2016, exit polls showed him
winning 17 percent in 2020. In the states five counties with a black
population over 60 percent, Sanders increased his vote share from 11 percent
to 12 percent.
It was no better for him on Super Tuesday and beyond. In the rural South,
from eastern North Carolina to western Mississippi, Sanders struggled to
break the 15 percent threshold in majority-black counties. In some black
urban neighborhoods, like Northside Richmond and Houstons Third Ward, he
made small gains on his 2016 baseline, occasionally winning as much as a
third of the vote; but in others, like Southeast Durham and North St. Louis,
Sanders fared even worse. On the whole, Biden clobbered him just as
comprehensively as Clinton had four years earlier.
After 2016, it was still possible to argue, optimistically, that black voter
preferences reflected Clintons advantage in name recognition and resources,
along with Sanderss need to focus on the early contests in Iowa and New
Hampshire. All the best survey data showed reliable and enthusiastic black
support for the core items on Bernies social-democratic agenda. With
improved messaging and a more serious investment in voter outreach, surely
an insurgent left-wing candidate could breach the Democratic establishments
firewall and win a large chunk of black voters.
Bernie Sanders was not that candidate, either in 2016 or in 2020. But after
years of struggle, it is time to revisit the assumption that superior
policy, messaging, and tactics are enough for any insurgent to overcome
black voter support for establishment Democrats. After all, Sanders is far
from the only left-wing candidate who has struggled on this front.
In the 2015 Chicago mayoral election, Rahm Emanuel beat Chuy García with
huge margins among black voters; the same pattern was visible in
gubernatorial races in Virginia, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York, where
black voters overwhelmingly backed Ralph Northam, Phil Murphy, Gretchen
Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo against progressive outsiders. In last years race
for Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz barely edged past Tiffany Cabán
with the strong support of black voters in Southeast Queens.
Nor have anti-establishment black candidates necessarily fared much better
with black primary voters. Jamaal Bowmans recent victory over Eliot Engel
is a meaningful and inspiring win for the Left, but not many left-wing
candidates have had the advantage of facing a severely out-of-touch white
opponent in a plurality-black district. Far more often, under different
circumstances, the result has gone the other way. In the 2017 Atlanta
mayoral race, the business-friendly party favorite Keisha Lance Bottoms
creamed Vincent Fort, who had been endorsed by both Bernie Sanders and
Killer Mike. And in congressional contests from St. Louis and Chicago to
Columbus, Ohio and Prince Georges County, Maryland, black progressive
insurgent campaigns have failed to catch fire, with black voters ultimately
helping establishment-backed incumbents coast to victory at the polls.
Black voter support for mainline Democrats is a broader trend in American
politics a trend approaching the status of a fundamental fact and it
cannot be explained with reference to Bernie Sanders alone.
After 2016, some argued that a clearer focus on racial justice and a
concerted effort to woo activists might boost a left-wing campaign with
black voters. But the 2020 race offered slim evidence for that proposition,
either in Sanderss performance or in the frustrations of the Elizabeth
Warren campaign, whose platform included a prominent focus on black maternal
mortality, grants for black-owned businesses, and targeted reforms to help
farmers of color.
This rhetoric won black organizers in droves but hardly any black votes:
among African Americans, exit polls showed Warren trailing not only Biden
and Sanders but Bloomberg, too, in every single state, including her own. In
North Carolinas rural black-majority counties, farmers of color did not
turn out for Warren, who actually received fewer votes than no preference.
Another popular view is that black voters have the most to fear from Donald
Trump and the Republicans, and thus tend to favor moderate, conventionally
electable candidates. But while concerns about electability surely played
a key part in Bernies 2020 defeat, there is little evidence to suggest that
it mattered more to black Democrats than white Democrats (if anything,
polling suggests the opposite). Fear of general election defeat also cannot
explain why black voters favored Joe Crowley over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon, or establishment leaders in other deep-blue
areas where Republicans are banished from politics altogether.
Nor can the phenomenon be explained by actual ideological conservatism, or
any real hesitance to get behind a politics of material redistribution. In
fact, black voters support Medicare for All at higher rates than almost any
other demographic in the country.
The institutional conservatism of most black elected leaders, on the other
hand, continues to stack the deck against left-wing politics. Powerful black
politicians like Jim Clyburn and Hakeem Jeffries, as Perry Bacon Jr has
argued, support the establishment because they are part of the
establishment. The Congressional Black Caucus has not tried to disguise its
fierce hostility to left-wing primary challenges, even when the progressive
challengers are black, like Bowman and Mckayla Wilkes, and the centrist
incumbents are white, like Engel and Steny Hoyer.
Overcoming the near-unanimous opposition of black elected leaders is
difficult enough, but the problem for left-wing insurgents is even greater:
its hard to win black voters by running against a party establishment whose
preeminent figure is still, after all, Americas first black president. In
the age of Obama, as Joe Bidens primary campaign showed, black primary
voters may well be moved more by appeals to institutional continuity than
either personal identity (as Kamala Harris learned) or political ideology.
After fifty years of living in a system where profound material change seems
almost impossible and black politics, like many other zones of politics,
has become largely affective and transactional as a result that feeling is
understandable. Black voters, of course, must be a critical part of any
working-class majority. But as long as every black political figure with
significant institutional standing remains tied to Obamas party leadership,
and remains invested in using that tie to beat back left-wing challenges,
anti-establishment candidates will face tough odds.
If there is hope for the Left here, it is that black support for
establishment Democrats remains tenacious rather than enthusiastic strong
support from a relatively small group of primary voters. Campaign boasts and
press puffery aside, there was no black turnout surge for Joe Biden. Across
the March primaries, even as overall Democratic turnout soared in comparison
to 2016, it dropped absolutely in black neighborhoods across the country.
In Michigan, Democratic participation bloomed by more than 350,000 votes but
wilted in Flints first and second wards, where turnout declined from over
25 percent of registered voters to under 21 percent. Similar declines from
2016 were recorded in Ferguson, Missouri, in North St. Louis, in Houstons
Kashmere Gardens, Sunnyside, and Crestmont Park, and in Southeast Durham
even as statewide Democratic turnout soared in Missouri, Texas, and North
Carolina.
This follows a pattern already evident in the 2016 general election, in
which poor and working-class black voters like working-class voters
generally appear to comprise a smaller and smaller share of the active
Democratic voting coalition.
That is no consolation for Bernie Sanders, whose campaign was premised on
its ability to help generate working-class participation in politics. But it
does suggest that in some ways, the Lefts struggles with black voters are a
specific symptom of a more general disease. The Sanders campaign, in both
its remarkable strengths and its ultimately fatal weaknesses, illuminated
the larger problem that has plagued left politics across much of the
developed world: a failure to mobilize, much less organize, the majority of
workers.
Working-Class Complexities
This is perhaps the central fact of transatlantic politics in the last fifty
years. In his recent book, Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty offers an
efficient summary of the basic problem: since the 1960s, left-of-center
parties in Europe and North America have lost support from the traditional
working class, remaking themselves into a Brahmin left, crucially
dependent on the votes of professionals. (Conservative parties, though
winning more working-class votes, largely remain under the thrall of a
business-dominated merchant right.)
The causes behind this shift on the Left are disputed: Piketty, along with
Jacobin and other socialist critics, blames globalized capitalism, the
decline of organized labor, and the centrist policy turn of major party
leaderships; many liberals, meanwhile ironically joined by the populist
right tend to emphasize the sharpening cultural conservatism of ethnic
majorities within the working class.
To the extent that Bernie Sanders aimed to reverse this global trend in the
space of two presidential primary races, he failed. Yet the dynamics of that
failure are more complex than most analysis so far has acknowledged.
Compared to 2016, the Sanders campaign in 2020 struggled with what pundits
call the white working class: white voters without college degrees.
Against Hillary Clinton, Bernies strength with this share of the primary
electorate propelled him to victory in states like Indiana and West
Virginia. But this spring, as many analysts have highlighted, Joe Biden
turned the tables on Sanders and beat him outright in predominantly white
working-class counties across the South and Midwest.
In retrospect, it seems clear that some of Sanderss former strength in
these areas owed to the particular conjuncture of the 2016 campaign.
Low-turnout caucuses overstated Bernies actual rural support in states like
Maine, Minnesota, and Washington; a deep hostility to Clinton, as some
suspected at the time, seems to have boosted his vote total everywhere, and
particularly in conservative regions like Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the
Great Plains.
Bernies leading opponent in 2020 was much stronger on this terrain. Though
Bidens actual record in the Senate is that of an exemplary corporate
neoliberal apathetic if not hostile to working-class interests some
combination of age, guile, and good-natured imbecility have allowed him,
even and perhaps especially in his declining years, to produce an effective
impression of a vanished breed of New Deal Democrat, experienced enough to
know his way around Washington but always willing to throw a punch for the
little guy. In this respect, the Sanders campaign knew from the start that
Biden would be a formidable rival for working-class votes, white and black
alike.
But by far the most significant difference between 2016 and 2020 is the
incumbent presidency of Donald J. Trump. Since the creation of the modern
primary system, the presence of a rival in the White House has nearly always
led opposition parties to pick nominees perceived as moderate and safely
electable: Mitt Romney in 2012, John Kerry in 2004, Bob Dole in 1996, Bill
Clinton in 1992, and Walter Mondale in 1984 all fit that mold. (The only
partial exception is Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the incumbent president he
faced, Jimmy Carter, was so weak that he could not even avoid a serious
primary challenge of his own.) Apparently riskier candidates like Trump and
Barack Obama, with more ambivalent relations to their partys establishment,
have flourished only in open-year elections.
The incumbent effect has hampered primary challengers for forty years, but
never has it been stronger than in 2020, when a dominant majority of
Democrats believed that beating Donald Trump was more important than all
other issues put together. Even in 2004, much less than half of that
memorably nervous Democratic electorate said that beating George W. Bush was
so important.
Any attempt to explain Bernies defeat chiefly through the desertion of
white workers must founder on the larger fact that Sanders lost ground to
Biden with every group of white voters. (The richer the group, the more
ground he lost but more on this to come.) A general incumbent effect, as
Dustin Guastella has argued in Jacobin, was far more significant than any
specific question of campaign tactics or cultural signaling.
In fact, it is easy to overstate the scale of Bernies defeat among the
so-called white working class. In virtually every state, Sanders did
better with white voters without a college degree than with their
better-educated counterparts.
In Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, California, Texas, Colorado,
and Vermont, Sanders actually led or tied Biden among white voters without a
degree. Everywhere, too, Sanders fared even better with white, working-class
men, winning them outright in all of the above states, plus North Carolina,
Tennessee, Maine, and Washington. In both Michigan and Missouri, Sanders
trailed Biden among white men without degrees by less than 5 points but
Biden won women in this group by 17 and 30 points, respectively.
Bernies particular struggles with women much more concerned with beating
Trump than men, according to polls further suggest that the decline in his
white working-class support had less to do with culture or ideology than
with a perception of electability.
A serious class analysis of the evolving Sanders coalition must also take
note of the massive group Bernie brought into the fold this year Latino
voters, the fastest-growing portion of Americas working-class electorate.
All over the greater Southwest, from the Rio Grande in Texas to Californias
Central Valley, Sanders dominated the Latino districts that he had mostly
lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. In heavily Latino neighborhoods from East
Los Angeles to Northside Houston, Tío Bernie often won more votes than
Biden, Bloomberg, and Warren combined.
This was not a regional phenomenon, nor was it limited to Mexican-American
areas. Sanders also won big with working-class Puerto Rican and
Dominican-American voters in Holyoke and Lawrence, Massachusetts, as well as
in Central American immigrant neighborhoods in central LA and Southwest
Houston.
In nearly all these places, Sanders had to overcome the opposition of the
Latino political class, which was scarcely more favorable to him than the
black political establishment. By early March, Sanders had received just two
endorsements from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; Biden had fourteen. Yet
there is no such thing as a Latino Obama, and the institutional ties linking
Latino voters to the Democratic establishment, we learned this year, may be
relatively weak.
In the end, few elected Latino leaders delivered their constituents to
Biden. Across four Southern California congressional districts represented
by Lucille Roybal-Allard, Lou Correa, Tony Cárdenas, and Juan Vargas Biden
endorsers all Sanders beat his multiple rivals with an outright majority
of votes.
In numerical terms, Bernies huge gains with Latinos may well have offset
the decline in his white working-class support. And given that Sanders won
over these voters, in large part, by doubling down on the redistributive
bread-and-butter issues that Latino voters prize most, it may well be that
the 2020 Sanders coalition, though smaller than the 2016 version, was in
fact even more fully grounded in the US working class. Certainly, given this
significant shift, it is too soon to pen epitaphs to the possibility of
class-driven politics within the Democratic Party.
Yet even this silver lining carries with it an inevitable touch of gray.
Sanders won Latino-majority areas overwhelmingly, but mostly without
increasing voter turnout. In Roybal-Allards working-class South LA
district, which Bernie won with almost 57 percent of the vote his single
best congressional district in the country almost ten thousand fewer
voters came to the polls than in 2016. The same pattern held in many of
Bernies strongest areas in Southern California. And across Texass Rio
Grande Valley, and in Houstons Latino-majority neighborhoods, Sanders won
decisively, but overall Democratic turnout (as a share of registered voters)
was either flat or declined from 2016.
This suggests that his campaigns Latino outreach efforts were enormously
successful in convincing 2016 Clinton voters to jump on the Bernie bus an
impressive feat on its own terms but less successful in bringing new
working-class Latino voters into politics. The other possibility, no more
inspiring, is that the new Latino voters Sanders gained were offset by an
equally large number of voters who dropped out of the primary electorate in
2020.
It is just one more enumeration of the elemental problem that confronts any
effort to run left-wing candidates in the Democratic Party: the relative
decline of working-class political participation black, brown, and white
alike.
From Patagonia to Halliburton
In the mainstream press, Sanderss defeat in Michigan, the Waterloo of his
2020 campaign, was largely attributed to the desertion of the working-class
voters who had propelled him to victory four years ago. Yet among Michigan
voters making under $50,000 a year, he beat Joe Biden by 7 points a larger
margin than in 2016, when he beat Hillary Clinton by just 3 points with that
same group.
Sanders was not defeated by lower-income voters at all, who gave him solid
support in Michigan and elsewhere. Nor did the real hammer blow come from
working-class or lower-middle-class voters of any kind. It came, with
devastating force, from the rich suburbs.
In Detroits Wayne County, Sanders lost by almost the exact same margin as
he had in 2016. In middle-class Macomb County, ancestral headquarters of the
Reagan Democrat and the Obama-Trump voter, Sanders took a serious hit,
losing by twenty thousand more votes than in 2016. But in the wealthy,
well-educated suburbs of Oakland County the richest county in Michigan
Bernies deficit swelled by fifty thousand votes.
A closer look at precinct results from three smaller Michigan communities
illuminates this even more vividly. The two working-class wards of
northwestern Flint, including some of the neighborhoods where children were
notoriously exposed to lead in city water, are about 90 percent black. The
northern seven wards of Bay City, near Saginaw, are about 85 percent white,
but like Flint, the city has been punished by deindustrialization, and
particularly by the decline of General Motors. Meanwhile, the prosperous
Oakland County town of Birmingham original habitat of ur-suburban
homeowner Tim Allen boasts median property values ($488,000) and income
levels ($117,000) three to five times greater than Bay City or Flint.
All three districts are largely Democratic; all contain between 16,900 and
18,100 registered voters. In Flints northwestern wards, where turnout
sagged, Biden actually won 600 fewer votes than Clinton received in 2016. In
the northern bulk of Bay City including the working-class neighborhood
where Madonna Louise Ciccone was born to a GM employee Biden picked up 300
more votes than Clinton, just enough to beat Sanders citywide. But among the
tall backyard fences and expensive mega-garages of Birmingham, Biden picked
up nearly 2,300 votes more than enough to bury Bernie Sanders under a heap
of luxury home improvement products.
This same pattern played out in every state and metropolitan area where a
primary vote was held. From the beachfront retirement communities of coastal
South Carolina to the colonnaded ranch manors of Contra Costa, California,
wherever Democratic turnout climbed from 2016, it climbed highest in the
wealthiest and whitest suburbs, which threw their collective weight against
Bernie Sanders.
In North Carolina, where the total Democratic vote dipped from the eastern
swamps to the western mountains, the rich suburbs of Raleigh and Charlotte
saw 40 to 50 percent bumps from 2016. In Missouri, where the vote declined
in Ferguson and the Ozarks alike, it climbed by 50 percent in the country
club precincts of St. Louis County. And in wealthy Fairfax County, Virginia,
the archetype of the Democrats twenty-first-century suburban strategy, the
primary vote soared by 70 percent, with nearly a hundred thousand new voters
joining the party of Biden.
In many areas, the power of the suburban surge was so great that even very
small wealthy communities had a larger impact on the election than much
larger working-class areas. In Massachusetts, compared to 2016, Sanders lost
more votes to Biden and Bloomberg in just three fancy South Shore towns
Hingham, Duxbury, and Norwell (total population: 51,753) than in all of
Hampden County, home to the city of Springfield and its working-class
suburbs (population: 466,372).
Last fall, with Elizabeth Warren leading Democratic polls, debate swirled
over the role of so-called Patagonia Democrats: affluent liberals in
deep-blue districts who had flocked to Warrens planful policy agenda. Like
many Sanders supporters, I was skeptical of the claim that such
professional-class voters whatever they told pollsters could really
serve as the electoral base for a redistributive agenda.
But in retrospect, neither Jacobin nor Vox anticipated the real story of the
2020 primary, which did not involve Warren-style liberals, but a much more
conservative tribe of wealthy suburbanites disaffected Republicans who,
since the 2016 election, have thrown themselves whole into Democratic Party
politics. All across the Sun Belt, from the defense contractors of Northern
Virginia to the energy corporations of Texas and California, Joe Biden was
boosted not just by Patagonia Democrats but by newfound Chevron, Raytheon,
and Halliburton Democrats.
After 2016, the Never Trump Republican became a punch line on the Left
in a party where Trump enjoyed 90 percent approval, self-important critics
like Jennifer Rubin and David Frum appeared to form an editorial page whose
staff was larger than its readership. But in 2020, these neoconservative
Never Trumpers had the last laugh. Craftily rebranded as moderate pundits,
forgiven their cheerleading for the Iraq War, and handed outsize platforms
in the liberal corporate media, it turned out that their true audience was
not Republican at all, but affluent purple-state suburbanites, who shared
both their cultural distaste for Trump and their material opposition to
Sanders.
Though Democratic turnout rose everywhere in the wealthy suburbs, from
Silicon Valley to metro Boston, a clear pattern was visible: the richer and
more conservative the suburb, the more dramatic the increases. In Virginia,
Fairfax Countys stunning 70 percent increase was surpassed by neighboring
Loudon County the richest county in the United States where Democratic
turnout nearly doubled from 2016.
Once again, the picture is most vivid at the neighborhood level. In greater
Houston, Biden scored some of his most impressive gains in wealthy,
traditionally Republican suburbs like Bellaire and West University Place,
which flipped from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and helped elect
Lizzie Pannill Fletcher to Congress in 2018. Primary turnout in these areas
doubled from four years ago, reflecting the success of Democrats concerted
effort to retain Romney-Clinton voters.
And in relative terms, the most staggering turnout gains did not come in the
Houston precincts Democrats won in 2016 or 2018, but in those that they
lost. In the extremely rich and conservative oil-money districts of River
Oaks, Afton Oaks, and Tanglewood the neighborhood where Jeb and George W.
Bush grew up Democratic turnout often tripled, with nearly all of it going
to Biden or Bloomberg.
Some of these voters, to be sure, only cast their ballots in an open
Democratic primary because there was no competitive Republican contest on
offer. (In that sense, the incumbent effect took another massive toll on the
2020 Sanders campaign.) And if Trump is convincingly repudiated in November,
a fraction of these wealthy suburbanites may attempt to return to a
chastened Republican Party.
More of them, though, seem likely to stick around as Halliburton Democrats.
The suburban surge of 2020 fits into a larger pattern: in the Bush familys
historic Tanglewood precinct, Democrats won under 18 percent of the general
election vote in 2012, but nearly 30 percent in 2016 and over 34 percent in
2018, with a higher share likely to follow in 2020.
In recent weeks, even as Democrats have sought to present themselves as the
party of George Floyd, it is worth knowing that Houstons River Oaks home
to Joel Osteen and former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling now boasts higher
Democratic primary participation than the Third Ward, where Floyd was born
and raised.
In the United States, at least, the margin between Pikettys Brahmin left
and merchant right is rather blurry at the top of the wealth pyramid, and
its getting blurrier. Not only do many merchant princes of the billionaire
class perhaps a majority, outside a handful of extractive industries
already lean Democratic; their corporate vassals, in prosperous metropolitan
areas from Houston to Charlotte to Grand Rapids, are now trending
Democratic, too.
This year, Halliburton Democrats may well have swung the election against
Bernie Sanders. With their voices amplified by prestige media, and their
votes eagerly courted by leading candidates, they helped make sure Democrats
would emerge from the primary season as something closer to the party of
Bill Kristol than the party of Krystal Ball. It is not likely that they will
be going anywhere soon.
III. A Majority in Embryo
No doubt, there are tactical lessons to be drawn from the Bernie 2020
campaign, both in its achievements and in its possible missteps. Yet the
major electoral forces that defeated Sanders at the polls the
establishment preference of black primary voters, the declining
participation of working-class Democrats, and the mass arrival of rich
suburbanites into the party all predate Sanders and will likely live on
beyond him, too.
What we learned over the course of Bernies five-year struggle is that a
national presidential campaign, however successful in other ways, could not
reverse or even arrest these trends on its own.
Sanders-style democratic socialism has not yet won a majority in the United
States, either inside the Democratic Party or outside it. But not having a
majority is no excuse for not building one. And while the Sanders coalition
was not ready for victory in 2020, there are reasons to believe that his
five-year war has put social-democratic reform on the path to a national
majority in the next decade.
In both of his campaigns, Sanders won younger voters by historic margins,
and he won them not with style or charisma but with perhaps the most
brusquely ideological platform in Democratic primary history. His five-year
struggle simultaneously reflected, galvanized, and shaped the worldview of
an entire generation of voters forging a new and serious bond between the
material conditions of Americans under forty-five and the Sanders brand of
class-struggle social democracy.
As Jacobins Connor Kilpatrick has argued, Bernies dominance with young
voters is significant for at least two reasons that should shape left
strategy in the 2020s. First, despite the understandable skepticism about
generational politics, there is simply no precedent in US history for an
ideological candidate winning younger voters on a scale like Sanders did
not George McGovern and certainly not Barack Obama, whose youthful support
was much thinner and less evenly distributed. In the 2008 race against
Hillary Clinton, Obama won voters under thirty in California by 5 points,
and in Texas by 20 points. This year, against a larger primary field, Bernie
won that group in both those states by at least 50 points.
In both his campaigns, Sanders won young white voters, he won young black
voters, and he won young Latino voters the latter group by outrageous
margins (84 percent!) in states like California. Very probably, he won young
Asian voters, young Muslim voters, and young Native voters with similar
levels of enthusiasm.
Second, Sanders did not just win big with kids fresh out of school: across
five years of campaigning, he showed persistent strength with middle-aged
voters in their forties. Of the twenty states that conducted exit polls,
more voters under forty-five chose Sanders than all the moderate Democrats
combined (Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar) in sixteen of them.
In Missouri and in Michigan, he won voters between forty and forty-five
outright. And in key states like Texas, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, where
Bernie lost overall, he still managed to win voters under fifty by double
digits.
Notoriously, these younger voters did not turn out in large enough numbers
to help Sanders on Super Tuesday and beyond. But the medias glib conclusion
on this subject that youth voting actually declined in 2020 was based on
flawed 2016 exit polls, whose methodology changed significantly this year,
rendering crude comparisons about the shape of the electorate practically
worthless.
In the context of rising overall turnout, it is almost certain that the
absolute number of younger primary voters actually rose in 2020. (In South
Carolina, where official state numbers have been released, more than forty
thousand new voters under forty-five cast a Democratic ballot, and their
turnout rate increased, too.) Though outnumbered by the surge of older,
richer Halliburton Democrats, these new, younger voters flocked to Bernies
standard to an extent that helped change the geography of his coalition.
Though Sanders struggled to win many of the rural areas he had carried four
years ago, his strength in cities and especially in younger, racially
diverse, lower-income urban neighborhoods actually grew from 2016 to 2020.
With younger Latino voters now firmly in his coalition, Bernie not only
swept the barrios of East LA, he won overwhelming victories in the mixed,
immigrant-heavy precincts of San Diego, Denver, Seattle, and Las Vegas.
Sanders showed similar strength in younger, lower-income urban areas all
over the country. In the majority-nonwhite ninth ward of Minneapolis, where
George Floyd was killed, Bernie won an absolute majority. In smaller cities
across the Northeast and the Midwest, his support was undiminished, if not
enhanced from 2016 with younger urban voters helping Sanders in the early
states and beyond, from Portland, Maine, to Duluth, Minnesota.
Although easily dismissed by critics as a phenomenon of the gentrifier
left, latte-swilling graduate students did not power Sanders to victory in
working-class cities like Manchester, New Hampshire, or Brownsville, Texas.
A much broader group of younger and disproportionately urban voters, who
make far less money and own far less property than the Democratic electorate
as a whole, formed the core of the Sanders coalition.
Working-Class Politics Can Still Be the Future
Across the world, from Norway to New Zealand, as working-class parties of
the Left have given way to their Brahminized descendants, the scope and the
horizon of left-wing politics have changed. Less interested in
transformative economic redistribution and far less capable of delivering
it, anyway contemporary progressives have put their faith and their energy
in a range of other projects, from environmentalism to questions of cultural
representation.
Yet socialists like Bernie Sanders understand that few of these struggles
for justice can be won, in any meaningful or lasting way, if they are not
accompanied by a large-scale transfer of power and resources, won by a
determined working class.
All by itself, Bernies five-year war did not succeed in reanimating
twentieth-century class politics. But if there is any hope for a return to
the electoral alignment that produced every major social-democratic reform
in history uniting a diverse working class around pressing demands for
redistribution it lies with the cohort of Sanders voters under age
forty-five.
Not only do two-thirds or more of these younger, poorer Americans support
Medicare for All, wealth taxes, and other significant reforms they have
shown, in two different primary campaigns, that those fundamental
redistributive commitments are strong enough to guide their voting choices.
This is not yet a socialist majority, but it is, perhaps, a socialist
majority in embryo.
And even as the US population ages, this embryonic majority grows every
year, and within every demographic. Despite the folklore about voters
growing more conservative as they age, the academic consensus is that
ideological preferences are, in fact, quite stable over time. Older
millennials, locked out of an increasingly unequal economy, do not appear to
be moving to the right. The supermajority that demands national health
insurance today, we can bet, will demand national health insurance tomorrow,
too.
If Bernie Sanders was not fated to be the Abraham Lincoln of the
twenty-first-century left, winning a political revolution under his own
banner, he may well be something like our John Quincy Adams the Old Man
Eloquent whose passionate broadsides against the Slave Power in the 1830s
and 1840s inspired the radicals who toppled it a generation later.
Over the next decade, this embryonic majority faces at least two
considerable challenges. First and most pressing, it must face off against
its principal antagonist within the primary electorate: the older, wealthy,
and ever-growing coalition of Fairfax and Halliburton Democrats, whose votes
party leaders continue to court with gauzy patriotic rhetoric and concrete
promises of tax relief.
In the short term, the most promising avenue for attack is in the scores of
mostly urban legislative districts, from Los Angeles to Denver to San
Antonio, where younger voters predominate, and where Sanders outpolled all
of his centrist rivals combined. Recent left-wing insurgent victories in
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and New York suggest that there is
more room for democratic-socialist politics to grow in cities across the
Northeast, too.
Even in the short term, though, younger urban districts alone will not be
sufficient for Sanders-style left-wingers to outvote Fairfax Democrats
within the party caucus much less to wield meaningful fiscal power in
larger state governments or in Congress.
And in the longer run, a laser-like focus on extremely liberal urban
districts on the coasts an electoral map that follows Brahminized
progressives wherever they go risks accelerating the Lefts drift away
from the fundamental questions of class power and material redistribution.
For some Brahmin activists, this is precisely the point: a retrograde focus
on class has prevented progressives from understanding that their natural
base lies with white-collar suburbanites, who already share liberal cultural
politics. I can take someone who is deeply concerned about patriarchy and I
can make them understand how patriarchy intersects with capitalism, argues
Sean McElwee, much more than I can take someone whos mad because GM took
their job away and make them understand socialism. The broader decline of
working-class participation in politics may even be something to celebrate,
from this angle, if it turns more congressional districts from red to blue.
Sanders had a different theory, and his campaigns assembled a different
coalition, centered on younger, lower-income voters from Brownsville to
Duluth. In 2020, that working-class coalition was not enough to win the
Democratic nomination. And no, Sanders did not manage to turn history on its
head and bring the vast reservoir of alienated, apolitical workers back to
primary politics.
But by 2032, todays Bernie voters under fifty will likely represent a
majority, and certainly a plurality, within the party electorate. What sort
of left will be there to greet them? Will it be a thoroughly post-Sanders
progressive movement, whose priorities are defined by social media
discourse, billionaire-funded activist NGOs, and a friendly working
relationship with the corporate Democratic Party?
Imagine Sean McElwee giving a keynote address at the Walmart Center for
Racial Equity forever.
Or will it be a political left that continues the work, to borrow from
Lincoln at Gettysburg, that Sanders has thus far so nobly advanced? A left
grounded in class politics, and aimed fundamentally at majority-building
demands for material redistribution health care, education, jobs, and
family support for all, paid for by the rich? The future is still unwritten.