Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Why Bernie Sanders Is Starting to Attract Conservative Voters
________________________________________
Why Bernie Sanders Is Starting to Attract Conservative Voters
By Rick Perlstein [1] / The Washington Spectator [2]
October 19, 2015
Nate Silver has the Bernie Sanders campaign figured out. Ignore what happens
in Iowa and New Hampshire, the "data-driven" prognostication wizard wrote
back in July, when Sanders was polling a healthy 30 percent to Clinton's 46
percent in both contests. That's only, Silver says, because "Democratic
caucus-goers in Iowa and Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire are
liberal and white, and that's the core of Sanders' support."
Silver has a chart. It shows that when you multiply the number of liberals
and whites among state electorates, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa rank
first, second, and third. Texas is near the bottom-a place where Bernie
Sanders should feel about as welcome as a La Raza convention at the Alamo,
right?
I have a new friend who begs to differ.
It's July 20, and my airplane seatmate asks what brought me to Texas. He is
a construction company sales executive from Houston. He's watching Fox News
on his cell phone. He tells me he considers himself a conservative. I tell
him I'm a political reporter covering the Bernie Sanders campaign. He perks
up: "I like what I've heard from him. Kind of middle of the road."
Eleven days later, I'm at a Bernie Sanders house party in the depressed
steel town of Griffith, Indiana, in a state that places in the bottom
quartile on Silver's chart. I approach a young man in his twenties wearing a
thrift store T-shirt. I ask him what brings him here tonight.
"I'm just helping out my friends because they asked me to help out," he
tells me. He adds that he's a conservative: "But I approve of some of the
stuff that Bernie stands for. Like appealing to more than just the one
percent and just trying to give everybody a leg up who's needing it these
days." Data-driven analysis is only as good as the categories by which you
sift the information. If you've already decided that "liberals" are the
people who prefer locally sourced arugula to eating at McDonald's, or are
the people who don't watch Fox News, it is a reasonable conclusion that
there aren't enough "liberals" out there to elect Bernie Sanders. Yet
political categories shift. One of the things the best politicians do is
work to shift them.
Sanders has been extraordinarily clear about the kind of shift he'd like to
effect: Republicans "divide people on gay marriage. They divide people on
abortion. They divide people on immigration. And what my job is, and it's
not just in blue states. . . [is] to bring working people together around an
economic agenda that works. People are sick and tired of establishment
politics; they are sick and tired of a politics in which candidates continue
to represent the rich and the powerful."
The theory that economic populism unites voters is hardly new. Lyndon
Johnson, in New Orleans and about to lose the South to Barry Goldwater in
1964, expressed it in one of the most remarkable campaign speeches in
history. A Southern Democratic politician was on his deathbed, Johnson said.
"He was talking about the economy and what a great future we could have in
the South, if we could just meet our economic problems. . . 'I would like to
go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel
like I have one in me. The poor old state, they haven't heard a Democratic
speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is nigger! nigger!
nigger!'"
The theory suggests that when upwards of 60 percent of voters consistently
agree that rich people should have their taxes raised, a candidate who
promises to do so might be identified as what he actually is: middle of the
road. That if Democrats give Democratic speeches on economic issues, voters
suckered into Republicanism by refrains like Jihad! Jihad! Jihad! just might
try something else. And that new voters might be attracted into politics if
they could just hear a candidate cut to the radical quick of the actual
problems that are ruining their lives. My new Republican friends didn't know
they were not "supposed" to like a "liberal" like Bernie Sanders. Then they
heard what he was saying, and liked what they heard. How many are there like
them? That's what I've been trying to begin to find out.
A populist moment in Dallas Dallas is Dallas. At Love Field, a middle-aged
woman sports a "Mrs." T-shirt-1970s-style antifeminist trolling. I pass the
Dallas Country Club, which made news last year for admitting its first black
member after he spent 13 years on a waiting list. The Holocaust Museum
features a "Ground Zero 360: Never Forget" exhibit on 9/11. (Jihad! Jihad!
Jihad!)
Hillary Clinton had recently been to Texas. She did a fundraiser here in a
gated community where guests were told the address only after delivering
their $2,700 checks. For nationally prominent Democrats, one of the donors
complained, "All Texas is to anyone is a stop to pick up money."
Not all nationally prominent Democrats. When I talk with a bunch of old
hippies after an afternoon Sanders rally at a downtown convention center in
Dallas, their minds are blown. Long-haired Zen Biasco is a professional
"creativity teacher"; Morris Fried first picketed against apartheid in 1965.
The only non-Jew in the group, and the only native Southerner, explains
Texas politics: "The states that came up throughout the plantation economy
did not really believe" in democracy. "It was the elites running things, and
basically the GOP here in the South, especially in Texas, has inherited that
basis of understanding. In Texas we are not necessarily a red state. We are
a non-voting state."
These are the people you'd see at any lefty rally anywhere. But this lefty
rally was unlike any they've seen in their adopted hometown. "I'm shocked at
such a draw on a Sunday afternoon!" one offers. "I'm shocked at all the
young people in this crowd!"
Before Sanders began speaking, I had spoken to two of those young people, a
married couple, who represent a liberal holy grail: kids who had grown up
conservative-Mormons!-and reasoned their way to the left. "Thanks to people
like Bernie," as one put it. They try to spread the gospel to professional
circles saturated with Republicans and to their families back home.
The husband unspools a splendid version of the Sanders argument:
"I don't think the values of those communities are really represented in
their politics, family values, the ideology they profess to have. . .
doesn't match up with the words or things [the politicians they align
themselves with] actually represent. I don't think people realize that if
they actually were for family values, and were for the working family, that
Republican policies are not going to move you closer."
Sanders on the stump The speech begins. I've rarely heard one more electric.
Bernie gets to the part about how America could increase its competitiveness
and move toward full employment by spending a trillion dollars rebuilding
bridges and roads, and a fashionably dressed young woman next to me with a
swallow tattoo on her wrist cries out like a cheerleader.
"INNNNNNNFRASTRUCTURE!!!!"
The senator follows with a disquisition about the Sherman Act.
"ANTI-TRUSSSSTTT!" she shouts.
When he gets to reinstating the Glass-Steagell act, she lets out a
"WHOOOOOOOO!"
At the 21-minute mark comes something extraordinary. After a reverberating
ovation for a call for pay equity for women, a promise to fight for 12 weeks
of paid family leave, and an excoriation of the fact that "the American
people work more hours than any other major country on Earth." Then the
senator announces his marquee platform plank.
"To make every public college and university tuition-free."
The crowd's response is so ecstatic it overdrives my tape recorder. It
continues into a chant: "BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE!"
And when the show ends, a crowd in a nearly post-coital mood of sated
exhilaration doesn't want to leave, doesn't leave, until Bernie returns to
the podium for something I've never witnessed at a political event, an
encore, and announces that the crowd numbered 6,000.
I followed the campaign that evening to the University of Houston, where he
got the same thunderous reception before 5,200 college students. Both events
got prominent play in the local media, where hundreds of thousands of Texans
heard heretical ideas that they might not have read in their newspapers
before: like raising taxes on the rich isn't crazy, even if 62 percent of
Americans agree.
Some things polls have a hard time recording. They may miss kids like these,
who only carry cell phones, as pollsters rely mostly on landlines. Or the
intensity of support, how many people are willing to knock on doors for a
candidate. And, last but very much not least, novel issues and how
constituencies respond to them.
In 1965, for instance, when he began running for governor, Ronald Reagan
made the focal point of his speeches the student uprising at Berkeley. His
consultants told him to knock it off because it wasn't showing up in their
polls as a public concern. Reagan ignored them, reading the response of
crowds that didn't yet think that students tearing up their college campuses
was a "political issue" to bring up when pollsters called.
Similarly, in the late 1970s, when the Equal Rights Amendment began failing
in state after state though polls showed it had majority support, a
sociologist named Ruth Murray Brown polled anti-ERA women activists in North
Carolina and found that more than half of them had never participated in
politics before. The pundits didn't know how to count what they didn't know
was out there.
Rust belt populism That's what I thought of when I met Gypsy and David
Milenic, whose front lawn had hosted that house party on July 30. I had read
an interview with Sanders in which he said the campaign was hosting these
parties around the country, which he would address via a live video feed. I
chose one as far afield as possible from the places where "liberals" are
supposed to congregate. Ten miles past a creationist museum billboard on
I-90, there was no arugula, but there were crackers, pretzels, and
store-bought gingersnaps. Griffith, Indiana, population 16,619, has a per
capita income of $21,866.
"My history of political volunteering is that this is the first political
volunteering I have done," Gypsy tells me, taking a break from directing
traffic and packing her two small children off to grandma's. "But, to be
honest, Bernie is the first person who's gotten me out of my chair and out
doing things."
From her front porch, she casts her nervous eye over a lawn that keeps
filling, and filling, and filling. (In the interview Sanders said the
campaign was planning for 30,000 participants across the nation; the final
number turned out to be 100,000.)
"This home was paid for by union dues," Gypsy says. "That matters. Keeping
it in the family: that matters. Being able to have a small town like this
that was a mix of blue-collar and white-collar matters."
At 6:30 a political meeting unfolds unlike any I have ever seen. Bernie is
to speak on a live feed at 8:00. David, an accountant, welcomes us, and
invites people to stand up and introduce themselves.
A young man who has been busily setting up the AV system volunteers to go
first.
"Both my parents together made barely over the poverty line, and I can tell
you that life sucks," he begins.
"I have no financial support from my family. I get very little from the
government. I am on my own, trying to make it, trying to thrive, just like
everybody behind me. And it's hard. And I am currently about 50 grand in
debt between student loans, car loans. . . and I am trying so damned hard.
And working so damned hard."
The crowd responds with an ovation.
"I see all my friends, and all of my friends who suffer the same way I do,
and they can't make ends meet. They work three jobs. . . and they still
struggle! And it just burns me. Because it wasn't like this! Now, you go to
college for four years and you're in debt 20, 30 years. Sometimes for life.
. ."
He trails off. Applause encourages him on. "I want to see change. And I
believe Bernie Sanders is the one to do it."
And on it went. For an hour and a half, testimony after testimony after
testimony. The issue of student debt dominated. So did the consensus that
together they could do something about it.
In Griffith, I met a remarkable black retiree named Martha Harris. Her
grandparents were slaves, and she remembers going into hiding at the age of
three when her father was run off by the Klan for being "uppity." She had
been following the story of Sanders's public encounters with Black Life
Matters activists at the Netroots Nation gathering in Phoenix. She just
wondered why people were still going on about it. "I saw him flub. And like
any white man, his staff put him out there without his underwear on. So he
ran home and he got his long johns on. And I'm okay with that. He's
learning."
Harris was one of the Sanders supporters who, following that evening in
Griffith, set up a storefront Sanders office in Hammond, Indiana. She had
recently been a guest on a radio show in Gary, where the African-American
population is 85 percent and one third of the houses are abandoned. She was
scheduled for a half hour. The response was so enthusiastic the interview
went on for an hour and a half.
Among the political class, the discussion of the supposed reverberations
that followed Sanders's encounter with Black Lives Matter activists in
Phoenix was incessant. That kind of conflict is something the political
media knows how to talk about. So they talk about it. What happened on the
radio in Gary, not so much.
Responsive politics
The question is, what else is happening that they aren't talking about?
Maybe this. In 2005, MSNBC's Chris Hayes published some remarkable
journalism on his experience canvassing for John Kerry in Wisconsin, where
voters didn't seem to have any idea that their economic distress was
something for which voting could make a difference.
"When I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums,
they would respond in disbelief-not in disbelief that he had a plan, but
that the cost of health care was a political issue," Hayes reported. "It was
as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into
December."
Hayes wondered what a more responsive Democratic politics would look like.
"One thing that nearly all Americans share is debt." His idea? "Building a
movement around credit reform-through the formation of local 'debt clubs'
that would be part of a national campaign, for example-would be one way for
progressives to reach out to non-believers."
Now "debt clubs" are being formed. They're being formed around the Sanders
campaign. I wouldn't argue that this will add up to a presidential
nomination. But I've seen enough in places like Dallas, Houston, and on
David and Gypsy Milenic's front lawn in Griffith to know that something is
happening here, something that reminds us that our existing models for
predicting winners and losers in politics need always be subject to
revision.
Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator's national correspondent and the
author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus," winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for
history, and "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of
America" (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best
nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.
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nservative-voters
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rick-perlstein
[2] http://www.washingtonspectator.com/
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Why Bernie Sanders Is
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Why Bernie Sanders Is Starting to Attract Conservative Voters
Why Bernie Sanders Is Starting to Attract Conservative Voters
By Rick Perlstein [1] / The Washington Spectator [2]
October 19, 2015
Nate Silver has the Bernie Sanders campaign figured out. Ignore what happens
in Iowa and New Hampshire, the "data-driven" prognostication wizard wrote
back in July, when Sanders was polling a healthy 30 percent to Clinton's 46
percent in both contests. That's only, Silver says, because "Democratic
caucus-goers in Iowa and Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire are
liberal and white, and that's the core of Sanders' support."
Silver has a chart. It shows that when you multiply the number of liberals
and whites among state electorates, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa rank
first, second, and third. Texas is near the bottom-a place where Bernie
Sanders should feel about as welcome as a La Raza convention at the Alamo,
right?
I have a new friend who begs to differ.
It's July 20, and my airplane seatmate asks what brought me to Texas. He is
a construction company sales executive from Houston. He's watching Fox News
on his cell phone. He tells me he considers himself a conservative. I tell
him I'm a political reporter covering the Bernie Sanders campaign. He perks
up: "I like what I've heard from him. Kind of middle of the road."
Eleven days later, I'm at a Bernie Sanders house party in the depressed
steel town of Griffith, Indiana, in a state that places in the bottom
quartile on Silver's chart. I approach a young man in his twenties wearing a
thrift store T-shirt. I ask him what brings him here tonight.
"I'm just helping out my friends because they asked me to help out," he
tells me. He adds that he's a conservative: "But I approve of some of the
stuff that Bernie stands for. Like appealing to more than just the one
percent and just trying to give everybody a leg up who's needing it these
days." Data-driven analysis is only as good as the categories by which you
sift the information. If you've already decided that "liberals" are the
people who prefer locally sourced arugula to eating at McDonald's, or are
the people who don't watch Fox News, it is a reasonable conclusion that
there aren't enough "liberals" out there to elect Bernie Sanders. Yet
political categories shift. One of the things the best politicians do is
work to shift them.
Sanders has been extraordinarily clear about the kind of shift he'd like to
effect: Republicans "divide people on gay marriage. They divide people on
abortion. They divide people on immigration. And what my job is, and it's
not just in blue states. . . [is] to bring working people together around an
economic agenda that works. People are sick and tired of establishment
politics; they are sick and tired of a politics in which candidates continue
to represent the rich and the powerful."
The theory that economic populism unites voters is hardly new. Lyndon
Johnson, in New Orleans and about to lose the South to Barry Goldwater in
1964, expressed it in one of the most remarkable campaign speeches in
history. A Southern Democratic politician was on his deathbed, Johnson said.
"He was talking about the economy and what a great future we could have in
the South, if we could just meet our economic problems. . . 'I would like to
go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel
like I have one in me. The poor old state, they haven't heard a Democratic
speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is nigger! nigger!
nigger!'"
The theory suggests that when upwards of 60 percent of voters consistently
agree that rich people should have their taxes raised, a candidate who
promises to do so might be identified as what he actually is: middle of the
road. That if Democrats give Democratic speeches on economic issues, voters
suckered into Republicanism by refrains like Jihad! Jihad! Jihad! just might
try something else. And that new voters might be attracted into politics if
they could just hear a candidate cut to the radical quick of the actual
problems that are ruining their lives. My new Republican friends didn't know
they were not "supposed" to like a "liberal" like Bernie Sanders. Then they
heard what he was saying, and liked what they heard. How many are there like
them? That's what I've been trying to begin to find out.
A populist moment in Dallas Dallas is Dallas. At Love Field, a middle-aged
woman sports a "Mrs." T-shirt-1970s-style antifeminist trolling. I pass the
Dallas Country Club, which made news last year for admitting its first black
member after he spent 13 years on a waiting list. The Holocaust Museum
features a "Ground Zero 360: Never Forget" exhibit on 9/11. (Jihad! Jihad!
Jihad!)
Hillary Clinton had recently been to Texas. She did a fundraiser here in a
gated community where guests were told the address only after delivering
their $2,700 checks. For nationally prominent Democrats, one of the donors
complained, "All Texas is to anyone is a stop to pick up money."
Not all nationally prominent Democrats. When I talk with a bunch of old
hippies after an afternoon Sanders rally at a downtown convention center in
Dallas, their minds are blown. Long-haired Zen Biasco is a professional
"creativity teacher"; Morris Fried first picketed against apartheid in 1965.
The only non-Jew in the group, and the only native Southerner, explains
Texas politics: "The states that came up throughout the plantation economy
did not really believe" in democracy. "It was the elites running things, and
basically the GOP here in the South, especially in Texas, has inherited that
basis of understanding. In Texas we are not necessarily a red state. We are
a non-voting state."
These are the people you'd see at any lefty rally anywhere. But this lefty
rally was unlike any they've seen in their adopted hometown. "I'm shocked at
such a draw on a Sunday afternoon!" one offers. "I'm shocked at all the
young people in this crowd!"
Before Sanders began speaking, I had spoken to two of those young people, a
married couple, who represent a liberal holy grail: kids who had grown up
conservative-Mormons!-and reasoned their way to the left. "Thanks to people
like Bernie," as one put it. They try to spread the gospel to professional
circles saturated with Republicans and to their families back home.
The husband unspools a splendid version of the Sanders argument:
"I don't think the values of those communities are really represented in
their politics, family values, the ideology they profess to have. . .
doesn't match up with the words or things [the politicians they align
themselves with] actually represent. I don't think people realize that if
they actually were for family values, and were for the working family, that
Republican policies are not going to move you closer."
Sanders on the stump The speech begins. I've rarely heard one more electric.
Bernie gets to the part about how America could increase its competitiveness
and move toward full employment by spending a trillion dollars rebuilding
bridges and roads, and a fashionably dressed young woman next to me with a
swallow tattoo on her wrist cries out like a cheerleader.
"INNNNNNNFRASTRUCTURE!!!!"
The senator follows with a disquisition about the Sherman Act.
"ANTI-TRUSSSSTTT!" she shouts.
When he gets to reinstating the Glass-Steagell act, she lets out a
"WHOOOOOOOO!"
At the 21-minute mark comes something extraordinary. After a reverberating
ovation for a call for pay equity for women, a promise to fight for 12 weeks
of paid family leave, and an excoriation of the fact that "the American
people work more hours than any other major country on Earth." Then the
senator announces his marquee platform plank.
"To make every public college and university tuition-free."
The crowd's response is so ecstatic it overdrives my tape recorder. It
continues into a chant: "BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE!"
And when the show ends, a crowd in a nearly post-coital mood of sated
exhilaration doesn't want to leave, doesn't leave, until Bernie returns to
the podium for something I've never witnessed at a political event, an
encore, and announces that the crowd numbered 6,000.
I followed the campaign that evening to the University of Houston, where he
got the same thunderous reception before 5,200 college students. Both events
got prominent play in the local media, where hundreds of thousands of Texans
heard heretical ideas that they might not have read in their newspapers
before: like raising taxes on the rich isn't crazy, even if 62 percent of
Americans agree.
Some things polls have a hard time recording. They may miss kids like these,
who only carry cell phones, as pollsters rely mostly on landlines. Or the
intensity of support, how many people are willing to knock on doors for a
candidate. And, last but very much not least, novel issues and how
constituencies respond to them.
In 1965, for instance, when he began running for governor, Ronald Reagan
made the focal point of his speeches the student uprising at Berkeley. His
consultants told him to knock it off because it wasn't showing up in their
polls as a public concern. Reagan ignored them, reading the response of
crowds that didn't yet think that students tearing up their college campuses
was a "political issue" to bring up when pollsters called.
Similarly, in the late 1970s, when the Equal Rights Amendment began failing
in state after state though polls showed it had majority support, a
sociologist named Ruth Murray Brown polled anti-ERA women activists in North
Carolina and found that more than half of them had never participated in
politics before. The pundits didn't know how to count what they didn't know
was out there.
Rust belt populism That's what I thought of when I met Gypsy and David
Milenic, whose front lawn had hosted that house party on July 30. I had read
an interview with Sanders in which he said the campaign was hosting these
parties around the country, which he would address via a live video feed. I
chose one as far afield as possible from the places where "liberals" are
supposed to congregate. Ten miles past a creationist museum billboard on
I-90, there was no arugula, but there were crackers, pretzels, and
store-bought gingersnaps. Griffith, Indiana, population 16,619, has a per
capita income of $21,866.
"My history of political volunteering is that this is the first political
volunteering I have done," Gypsy tells me, taking a break from directing
traffic and packing her two small children off to grandma's. "But, to be
honest, Bernie is the first person who's gotten me out of my chair and out
doing things."
From her front porch, she casts her nervous eye over a lawn that keeps
filling, and filling, and filling. (In the interview Sanders said the
campaign was planning for 30,000 participants across the nation; the final
number turned out to be 100,000.)
"This home was paid for by union dues," Gypsy says. "That matters. Keeping
it in the family: that matters. Being able to have a small town like this
that was a mix of blue-collar and white-collar matters."
At 6:30 a political meeting unfolds unlike any I have ever seen. Bernie is
to speak on a live feed at 8:00. David, an accountant, welcomes us, and
invites people to stand up and introduce themselves.
A young man who has been busily setting up the AV system volunteers to go
first.
"Both my parents together made barely over the poverty line, and I can tell
you that life sucks," he begins.
"I have no financial support from my family. I get very little from the
government. I am on my own, trying to make it, trying to thrive, just like
everybody behind me. And it's hard. And I am currently about 50 grand in
debt between student loans, car loans. . . and I am trying so damned hard.
And working so damned hard."
The crowd responds with an ovation.
"I see all my friends, and all of my friends who suffer the same way I do,
and they can't make ends meet. They work three jobs. . . and they still
struggle! And it just burns me. Because it wasn't like this! Now, you go to
college for four years and you're in debt 20, 30 years. Sometimes for life.
. ."
He trails off. Applause encourages him on. "I want to see change. And I
believe Bernie Sanders is the one to do it."
And on it went. For an hour and a half, testimony after testimony after
testimony. The issue of student debt dominated. So did the consensus that
together they could do something about it.
In Griffith, I met a remarkable black retiree named Martha Harris. Her
grandparents were slaves, and she remembers going into hiding at the age of
three when her father was run off by the Klan for being "uppity." She had
been following the story of Sanders's public encounters with Black Life
Matters activists at the Netroots Nation gathering in Phoenix. She just
wondered why people were still going on about it. "I saw him flub. And like
any white man, his staff put him out there without his underwear on. So he
ran home and he got his long johns on. And I'm okay with that. He's
learning."
Harris was one of the Sanders supporters who, following that evening in
Griffith, set up a storefront Sanders office in Hammond, Indiana. She had
recently been a guest on a radio show in Gary, where the African-American
population is 85 percent and one third of the houses are abandoned. She was
scheduled for a half hour. The response was so enthusiastic the interview
went on for an hour and a half.
Among the political class, the discussion of the supposed reverberations
that followed Sanders's encounter with Black Lives Matter activists in
Phoenix was incessant. That kind of conflict is something the political
media knows how to talk about. So they talk about it. What happened on the
radio in Gary, not so much.
Responsive politics
The question is, what else is happening that they aren't talking about?
Maybe this. In 2005, MSNBC's Chris Hayes published some remarkable
journalism on his experience canvassing for John Kerry in Wisconsin, where
voters didn't seem to have any idea that their economic distress was
something for which voting could make a difference.
"When I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums,
they would respond in disbelief-not in disbelief that he had a plan, but
that the cost of health care was a political issue," Hayes reported. "It was
as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into
December."
Hayes wondered what a more responsive Democratic politics would look like.
"One thing that nearly all Americans share is debt." His idea? "Building a
movement around credit reform-through the formation of local 'debt clubs'
that would be part of a national campaign, for example-would be one way for
progressives to reach out to non-believers."
Now "debt clubs" are being formed. They're being formed around the Sanders
campaign. I wouldn't argue that this will add up to a presidential
nomination. But I've seen enough in places like Dallas, Houston, and on
David and Gypsy Milenic's front lawn in Griffith to know that something is
happening here, something that reminds us that our existing models for
predicting winners and losers in politics need always be subject to
revision.
Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator's national correspondent and the
author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus," winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for
history, and "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of
America" (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best
nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [3]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[4]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/why-bernie-sanders-starting-attract-co
nservative-voters
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rick-perlstein
[2] http://www.washingtonspectator.com/
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Why Bernie Sanders Is
Starting to Attract Conservative Voters
[4] http://www.alternet.org/
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B