The same way people were convinced that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or Hillary Clinton committed some felonies: a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign. Take a handful of facts out of context, add in several buckets of rumors, and spread it around through back channels.
Sanders left himself open to accusations by being tone-deaf on the subject of racial issues. It’s not too surprising; he’s from Vermont which is 97% white. Sanders never had to deal significantly with racial issues as a politician before 2016.
This didn’t become a big issue during the campaign because nobody needed it to be. Clinton had the black vote secured and the Republicans were targeting Clinton not Sanders.
But if Sanders had become the nominee, this story would have grown significantly. And gotten a lot uglier. After laying the groundwork of saying Sanders was indifferent on racial issues, the follow-up would have been rumors that he was racist. What he would have said and what the facts were wouldn’t have mattered; the suspicions would have been aroused. A lot of black voters would have decided to stay home on Election Day rather than take a chance on Sanders. Trump would have won the general election as well as the Electoral College. And we’d all be saying “Oh, why didn’t we nominate Hillary? She could have beaten Trump easily.”
The reality is Sanders was not an invincible candidate. He only looks like one because he only had to face a small fraction of the attacks Clinton faced.
Bernie’s campaign did drop the ball on getting the black community, especially the historically black colleges and universities, on board. Funny how a lot of Sanders’s most visible supporters were black, though.
As far as my support for Hillary Clinton is concerned, I will vote against her in the Primary if she runs again. ( I think she would make a fine President, and would support the proper ideas.) Her losing an election to Obama can be forgiven, that could happen to most anybody. But losing an election to Donald Friggin Trump?? Credit the 25 year Republican smear campaign or whatever, but people will elect Donald You’ve-Got-To-Be-Kidding-Me Trump before they elect her. Enough is enough, it’s over.
I don’t think it’s because Sanders deliberately ignored black voters; it’s probably more rooted in the fact that Sanders never really ran what would be called a conventional campaign. It was more like a political insurgency and an attempt to draw attention to issues. If he had had that kind of recognition in, say, 2013 or 2014, he probably would have gone much farther in developing relationships with constituencies. He may well have defeated Clinton in that scenario, and at minimum, he would have forced Clinton to campaign much closer to the left sideline.
I guess that’s what really turned me off about all of the talk from Sanders’ supporters about how Clinton “rigged” the campaign. There were far more rational and less nefarious explanations about why Clinton won and Bernie lost. She didn’t rig shit, ‘cause if she had she would have made the race a lot less interesting and nobody would have paid attention to Sanders past those first few CNN debates. If anything, though, Clinton severely over-estimated her own popularity and underestimated Sanders’ ability to actually compete with her using a mostly issues-driven campaign. Sanders’ ultimate downfall wasn’t that Clinton rigged the system against him; it’s that, entering the campaign season, he just had not built the kind of machine in terms of organization, funding, and outreach to compete with her and he had to know that from the beginning.
As I tell others on this board and elsewhere, voting and politics generally require pragmatism. I think Hillary got screwed by both conservatives and more disappointingly people to the left of the spectrum. But it is what it is. We have to move on. She’s not going to win the presidency, and any 2020 campaign on her part would be delusional. I’d probably vote against her in the primary for that reason as well.
And there would have been a mysterious social media campaign targeting black voters in close districts. They would have been directed to websites of newly-created news sites (hosted in Russia) that would have told them all manner of made-up bullshit stories about what a terrible, terrible racist Sanders was.
I’ll go further. I don’t think the senior staff of Bernie’s campaign thought he would ever win, anymore than the media did. They didn’t have a plan to capitalize on the hunger and expectation for reform that quickly attached to his candidacy.
And apparently the Democratic Party in general had no plan at all to get the “Anyone But Clinton” voters, unlike 2008 where Bill Richardson, Barack Obama, & even John Edwards offered facially credible alternatives. Jim Webb was seen as not a real progressive & too tied to coal, and Martin O’Malley too tied to police misconduct; neither could get through the primaries. I’m not sure what Lincoln Chafee’s problem was; maybe having been a party switcher. Bernie suddenly not only had a theoretical shot, but was the only opposition. The Clinton moderates saw this as an opportunity to win the nomination, but once they won that nomination, they were in a lot of trouble in the general. The ABC’s were too vital.
Can we face up to the fact that each and every Democratic candidate from now on will be subjected to a furious and fact-irrelevant right-wing media campaign against them?
Yeah, Clinton got hammered by the Right Wing Media Industrial Complex. So did Obama in 2012, Obama in 2008, Kerry in 2004, Gore in 2000, Clinton in 1996, and Clinton in 1992, just as modern movement conservatism was dawning.
If Bernie Sanders had somehow won the nomination, right wing media would be taken flatfooted for a few weeks, and then they’d begin to crank up the machine. He went to Cuba! Socialism! Burlington College! Socialism! Did we mention Socialism? Well, mention it again!
Sanders would have been fucking helpless against this. Clinton didn’t dare lay a glove on Sanders in the primaries because she needed his supporters for the general. You think Clinton and the Democratic establishment were unfair to Bernie? Jesus.
In any case, it’s all moot. If you want to run for President, try winning either the Republican or Democratic primaries first. If you can’t do that, fuck you. Go home and get your fucking shine box.
Hillary’s political career is over. If she really were somebody who just loved the hustle and bustle of political campaigning and pressing the flesh, like some old warhorses who can’t stop running for office, she could go back to the goddam Senate. Except she hates that shit. She’s done running for office.
Did you see Lincoln Chafee? The man was pretty much devoid of charisma, name recognition and any policies anyone cared about. His only achievement was that he still managed to get more press coverage in the primary than Larry “Who?” Lessig.
I agree with much of what you wrote. The only thing I’d add is that I think the Democrats were secretly hoping that Biden would enter the race - hopes which of course were dashed when Beau Biden died of cancer. I disagree that the Democrats decided in December of 2012 that Hillary was their gal. I think there were already nervous Democrats who were hoping Biden would join the race once the Bengazi investigations got into full swing and once the Syrian and Libyan crises, both of which had Clinton’s fingerprints on them, beget ISIS. I think the Democrats were, as they were with Obama in 2008, divided between two heavyweights. When one of those heavyweights pulled out of the fight, I think a lot of people were disappointed but felt that Hillary was the only credible candidate going forward. Polls still showed her competitive against most Republican contenders in 2015.
What nobody saw was just how disillusioned voters had become. GOP forecasters never saw Trump coming and Democratic bettors never saw Bernie Sanders coming either. And I agree with you: Bernie might not have even really believed he had a shot either but saw an opportunity to influence the campaign. If there had been more evidence that Bernie could compete in 2016, we might have seen more investment in the race in late 2014 and early 2015, though I’m wondering if it would have mattered. Part of what made Bernie a story is that he was David taking on Goliath, and for a while…winning. But that’s something that couldn’t have been apparent in 2014 or 2015. Hard to say. I remember listening to Bernie’s appearances on various talk radio shows on the West Coast, so I like a lot of other white hipsters knew who he was. But perhaps with more outreach to other communities, he could have posed a more serious challenge to Clinton. He was pretty serious enough as it was.
The surprise is that there were enough people ignorant, self-centered, and/or any-change-at-any-cost enough to put a sociopath into the White House. It’s no surprise whatsoever that Republicans are unethical in the extreme.
The surprise there is that people here keep pulling a bait-and-switch argument and then pretending this makes them clever:
Person A: Clinton lost because she wasn’t popular enough.
Person B: But Clinton got three million more votes than Trump, which indicates that she was more popular.
People A: HAHHAHA! ELECTORAL COLLEGE, BITCHES! YOU SO STUPID!
Yes, Clinton’s popularity wasn’t sufficiently geographically diverse enough to win the EC, but if people could maybe stop conflating an EC win with overall popularity that’d be great.
