He didn’t “play nice” with the millions of longtime dedicated Democratic voters who take their party identity seriously and do not cotton to being passively dismissed as deluded shills by the very people (and candidate) courting their vote. So they told Sanders what he could do with his revolution. That is fair.
I think it’s pretty clear that refusing to identify as a Democrat was one of the biggest (if not the biggest) unforced error that cost Bernie the nomination. It’s one thing to burst on the scene as an outsider as he did in 2016; it’s quite another to repeat the schtick when he was a) a known quantity, and b) regarded by many as the presumptive frontrunner. He could have joined the party, won over a lot of skeptics and brought a lot of his supporters along with him. I might have softened on him myself; I don’t know if I would have voted for him in the primary, but it would demonstrate a nice willingness to adapt and collaborate after decades as an iconoclast gasbag.
Well said, Nonsuch. He was openly contemptuous of party loyalists, and his teeming millions (heh) even more so. When I identified myself as a stalwart party guy on Twitter, I was savaged by Bernheads as a “cult follower” (ironic!) or worse.
He could have pivoted, especially right after he won Nevada, and played nice with the party. He might have only had to do it for a couple weeks. But he was too stubborn and proud, and it made him feel too good to declare (literally) “sorry, you lost, you can’t stop me” (or words very close to that). Oops.
I’m with Jonathan Chance. To see you claim that politics is not a team sport makes me want to cry, or tear my hair out.
And the DNC did change the rules, to institute a “loyalty oath” to the party after what Bernie did in 2016. Bernie signed the oath, right around the same time he filed for Senate reelection with the FEC as an independent. :smack: He basically threw it in their face, like “what are you going to do about it?” And they were too afraid of his following to enforce the rule.
What Bernie did was wrong, just as what Pat Buchanan did in 2000 to co-opt the Reform Party was wrong. But I’m glad to see he is turning it around a bit now, at long last.
You may, of course, reject it all you want. That doesn’t, somehow, make it untrue.
It IS - from a certain point of view - a sport as American defines sports. There’s teams, coaching, practice and so forth.
Here’s what the Democratic Party of Ohio put me through before I ran for local office. They knew I was interested and were interested in me.
Thorough evaluation. Background check (that was fun), coaching about issues, presentation practice and so forth.
Coaching for all levels of interaction, both with the public and the media.
How to fundraise.
Introduction to local leadership both in my county and in neighboring counties.
And we do that because it works. We coach and train and teach people to best enable them to win elections based on whether we think they’ll help us achieve mutual goals.
In what way isn’t that a ‘sport’? You may reject the label out of some misplaced idealism but it functions as a sport. There are contests, individual players, team units and it’s winner-take-all.
Bernie got his ass handed to him because he’s not a team player. He believed his own hype and thought a low-probability play would have good results. Had he learned that the party apparatus could be used for his and others benefit then the outcome might have been different. But he didn’t - or his ego wouldn’t let him - and now he’s on the outside looking in.
And this is terrible analysis. He built an amazing team. Team-building is one of his great political strengths. It just wasn’t a team of people who currently hold political power, and his team was unable to defeat the entrenched team of power-brokers. But it was an enormous and highly organized team.
He built a team involving people who currently hold power. That wasn’t an option for Sanders, because what he’s fighting for is to overturn the current structures of power.
In the sense that Biden won, sure, he built a better team. Again, the team he built couldn’t have been built by someone in Sanders’s position.
That’s the difference between politics (where your goals constrain your strategy) and sports.
Yes, and Sanders was in that lousy position because he’s both a bad politician and bad team player. His routine plays well enough in some off-in-the-corner state like Vermont but not really that well on the national field. His people are very passionate but there’s not that many of them.
You say he built a great team. Perhaps. But that great team’s solution to the problem they faced was to make a long-shot play and not even make an effort to win over the vast majority of the party whose nomination he was hoping to win.
That’s not a good team. That wishing makes is so thinking. And you know what we call those types of thinkers? Losers.
I think Bernie did make a mistake by not directly trying to appeal to “mainstream” Democrats (i.e. Democrats who are generally happy with the party). Many of them are gettable voters, IMO, and he didn’t really directly try to appeal to them. This is the main part of Matt Yglesias’s critique, AFAICT, and it makes sense to me.
The difference seems to be you think it’s a matter of tactics: he could easily have been buddies with elected Democrats and gotten his bills passed by more friendliness. I think that the difference between his ideas, and the ideas of other elected Democrats, was the real barrier. More back-pats around the water cooler wouldn’t have convinced fellow Democrats to support Medicare for all; and since he’s in it for changing real-world policies rather than achieving nonspecific victory, the long shot team-of-outsiders approach was the only approach with any hope at all.
According to this page, ten of the 17 candidates supported Medicare for All in some fashion. That’s a majority of the candidates. Bernie might have helped make that position palatable for more mainstream candidates so it is disingenuous to say that he was rejected for people being scared at “changing real-world policies.”
Most people would be happy to see that their issue was gaining traction even if it didn’t completely resonate with voters this time out. Of course that would possibly involve people other than Sanders himself leading the charge and also might not happen overnight, so those are obviously terrible outcomes.
If you prefer, I can just say that when you say “I think that the difference between his ideas, and the ideas of other elected Democrats, was the real barrier,” you are demonstratively wrong.
Which is why he lost. Shake a tree and ten idea guys will fall out. Winning elections is about planning and tactics.
This is really a spot where Bernie’s idealism - and that of his followers - runs smack into real world cynicism. The world is specifically NOT what you wish it would be. Nor is it what Bernie would wish it to be. Fine. Try to change it. We’re all doing that, everyday.
But wishing, again, don’t make it so. To win over elections you need a real plan and people to execute it. Bernie didn’t have a plan, he had a hope. Again, the goal coming out of his team was ‘win a plurality and take the convention that way’. But that hope assumes all of his opponents would push the stupid button the entire time. It required that the more moderate part of the Democratic Party not see they couldn’t win and stay in, thereby enabling Bernie to continue a minority victory path. Can’t you see how foolish that was as a hope?
As for ‘working within’? You say that he couldn’t work with other Democrats to enact his agenda. But he hasn’t really tried. If Bernie had been working with people for the last 15 years he’d be in a better position to be persuasive. Instead, when he entered the race in 2016 he was perceived as this wacky crank from Vermont. He never really got past that. Instead, he and his followers preferred to believe - against evidence - that a coalition party (one by definition is composed of sub-groups) could be hijacked by a particular sub-group and compel the other sub-groups to march to his tune. Also not a good play.
He also assumed that he could motivate new voters. That’s at least a worthwhile play. Unfortunately, it appears to not have been the case. He could get rallies and enthusiasm. What he couldn’t do it get those people to actually vote. Talking, yes, especially online (which is a small, SMALL part of the electorate), but not actually vote.
I’d say that the evidence was Trump’s takeover of the GOP and turning all the fiscal conservatives and government traditionalists into MAGA-heads (or else running them out of the party).
Sanders and his people thought they could replicate the same thing in 2020; use a split moderate field to gain a plurality of delegates and push everyone else out. Didn’t work, in part, because we saw that trick already and knew how it plays out.
Agreed. It assumes a crowded field would stay crowded. But the lesson was right there in front of them.
Would Trump have come out of the R primary as the candidate if the Republican party had decided to coalesce around Cruz early on? I doubt it. Too many split tickets led to Trump being able to get in.
Of course it’s better not to say that I’m being disingenuous. Now we’re talking ideas, not integrity. Thanks.
But you haven’t demonstrated that.
Sanders wants his ideas to win more than he wants to win. He’s agitated for his ideas for decades in the Senate, refusing to compromise. His ideas were demonstratively out of the mainstream in the Senate. He failed to get any traction there.
So he took his ideas to voters, and organized outside of the Senate. And lo and behold, his ideas were massively popular with voters. So much so that, as you correctly point out, the senators who refused to give his ideas the time of day for decades are suddenly coming around to seeing it his way.
Is the difference that he started playing nice with other politicians? Not hardly. The difference is that he was able to mobilize a huge base of voters, and for awhile it looked like he might actually win. Other politicians adopted his ideas as a way of taking the wind out of his sails.
But that’s his victory condition.
It’s foolish to call him a loser when he’s moved the conversation so far to the left. It fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of a campaign like his.
But I’m starting to see the analogy to team sports better. Just last year I watched a Baltimore Ravens game, where they were beaten 40-23. But in the postgame interview, they said, “A lot of out-of-towners spent money here in Baltimore, and we count that as a win.”
If that were even remotely how it worked, football would be like politics.
If his victory condition was binary–win or lose–then this is a reasonable analysis.
But I maintain that’s not how he, or leftists in general, define victory. That’s why the sports analogy is flawed. “Victory” is defined as “advancing policies that make the world better.”
Sanders spent decades trying to achieve that victory via the senate, with markedly little success. He’s spent the last five years trying to achieve that victory via presidential campaigns and has pushed the Democratic party very far to the left. As such, his presidential campaigns have succeeded where it matters more than his senatorial career has, even though he’s won his senate races and lost his presidential races.