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| Bernie Sanders at his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary (Drew Angerer/Getty Images via Axios) |
With that being said, I think it's become increasingly clear who the candidate best-equipped to defeat Trump is: Bernie Sanders. I'm biased, of course, but I do not think this is just me convincing myself that my favorite candidate is also the most "electable" one. I think there's a strong case to be made that, even if beating Donald Trump is your sole priority (which it shouldn't be), Bernie is the guy you want. But let's start out by taking a look at the alternatives, and the reasons I don' t think they would fare so well in a general election.
We'll begin with Joe Biden, the man who, up until recently, was consistently in the lead in national polling for the Democratic primary. His perceived electability has been a big advantage, though that advantage is now fading fast. I already wrote an entire blog post about why I don't think Biden is the most electable candidate, and the intervening months have only confirmed what I believed then. For one thing, there's Hunter Biden, Joe's son: after being kicked out of the military for drug use, he got a high-paying job on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, at the same time that his father was taking an active role in trying to shape the Ukrainian government's policies. It's plain that Hunter was only hired for his last name. Did Joe Biden have any role in his hiring? As far as I know, there's no evidence to suggest it. But Donald Trump will relentlessly claim that he did if Biden is the Democratic nominee, and there's a good chance that that could help Trump deflect accusations that he himself is corrupt and nepotistic. Trump has never done much to hide the fact that he's completely amoral, but has rather fought back against the accusation by indicating that his political opponents are no better in that respect—and the Hunter Biden situation gives him crucial ammunition for those attacks if Joe Biden is the nominee.
There's also the fact that Biden has often struggled with words and even been downright incoherent at many points during this campaign. None of his debate performances have been particularly dazzling, and his Democratic opponents were surely nicer to him that Trump would be. Even if Biden magically becomes completely eloquent and composed in the general election, Trump's campaign could simply choose from the many clips of him getting tripped up, lashing out or spewing out puzzling word salads, edit them all together and release it as an attack ad insinuating that Biden is losing his mind. Trump, of course, has his own moments of incoherence too, but he has an unshakeable (and totally undeserved) self-confidence that Biden lacks, and I don't think Biden's campaign would be cutthroat enough to go after Trump's mental state anyway.
Then there's Biden's long record of supporting "tough on crime" policies that have become increasingly controversial—a record he has continued to defend in recent years. The policies Biden supported undoubtedly helped lock up many people, especially black and brown people. Trump is sure to emphasize this point in a bid to drive down minority turnout, and point out that he, Trump, signed a criminal justice reform bill to help reduce the prison population. It's doubtful that Trump will win too much of the nonwhite vote in the general election, but he could inspire some voters of color to sit out the election or vote third party. Biden is also opposed to marijuana legalization even though two-thirds of Americans are in favor of it, and pro-Trump groups could exploit this by putting out ads that hammer Biden on this point and urge younger voters not to support him.
And then there's NAFTA. Biden was in Congress back when the trade deal was passed, and he voted for it. In the decades since it's been blamed by politicians of both parties for the deindustrialization that's displaced many workers throughout the country. Trump has renegotiated NAFTA, and Congress just passed his new overhaul of the agreement, the USMCA, which has received the backing of AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka (although it's gotten poor reviews from environmental groups, which is why Sanders rightly opposes it). This is the sort of issue that matters to the Rust Belt voters who gave Trump the presidency in 2016, and if Biden's the nominee, they might just decide to give Trump another term in the White House.
It's true that Biden has been performing well in head-to-head polling with Trump, but he also led national Democratic primary polling for months before starting out the primary season with a distant fourth-place finish in Iowa and an even more dismal fifth place in New Hampshire. He benefits from name recognition, his moderate image and his everyday workingman shtick, but he does not attract much enthusiastic support. It's dangerous to expect that his support in the general election polls is more solid than his support in the primary polls has so far turned out to be, especially given the many vulnerabilities he would have in a general election campaign.
With Biden aside, we come to the guy who actually had two pretty decent showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg. The vulnerabilities Buttigieg has are all too obvious: the highest office he's held is mayor of a relatively small college town in Indiana, for one thing. That might not have been much of a vulnerability if he were running against 2016 Donald Trump, who had no political experience, but now he would be running against an incumbent president. Furthermore, Buttigieg has failed to find much support from black voters, which doesn't bode well for either his primary campaign or a hypothetical general election matchup. At the New Hampshire debate earlier this month, when Buttigieg was specifically asked about the racial disparity in marijuana arrests during his tenure, he completely failed to give a convincing answer and ended up implying it was because black people were more likely to be involved in gang activity. Despite being a millennial himself, Buttigieg has also attracted little support from young voters, further weakening his odds.
Then there's the other major candidate in the "progressive" lane of the primary, Elizabeth Warren. Warren's performance in the primary campaign alone should be cause for concern. After nearly taking frontrunner status from Biden, she took a sharp dive in the polls. Her lack of clarity and ultimate waffling on Medicare for All succeeded in alienating both moderates and progressives, and she's started out the primary season with a third place finish in Iowa, a single-digit fourth place finish in New Hampshire. At this point, despite the praise for her last debate performance, it looks like her primary campaign is dead in the water: as of my writing this, returns have her in fourth place in Nevada and she's sure to do poorly in South Carolina given her lack of support from black voters. If she somehow got the nomination, it's hard to imagine that she would fare better against Trump than Sanders would, given the weakness she's shown in the face of attacks from her right (even when those attacks come from someone as frivolous as Meghan McCain).
While it feels largely superfluous to even mention Amy Klobuchar given her standing in national polls, I'll do so briefly because of her unexpectedly strong finish in New Hampshire. Klobuchar, too, has found very little support from voters of color (or any voters on a national level), and her moderate platform will do nothing to excite younger voters. Her message so far seems to have mostly been that progressives need to ask for less, which is hardly the sort of thing that will turn out voters in a general election. She has indicated that she intends to run another "have you no decency, sir" type campaign, which Hillary Clinton tried in 2016. Plus, her reputation as an abusive boss would likely come back to haunt her in a general election campaign; again, while we know that Trump is himself personally disgusting, the Democrats appear to forfeit the moral standing to criticize his character if they nominate someone who's also got an unfortunate history, and voters might choose to sit out the election rather than pick between two people they find repugnant.
And then we come to Michael Bloomberg. To be frank, in my view Bloomberg is so reprehensible that it would not be worth nominating him even if he were certain to defeat Trump. But his victory is far from assured. As mayor of New York City, Bloomberg presided over and defended systematic violations of the constitutional rights of people of color. Audio recently came out of him saying that minority neighborhoods deserve to be policed more heavily because that's where the crime is, and, in a separate clip, blaming the financial crisis on the end of redlining. On foreign policy, he is probably to the right of Donald Trump, having enthusiastically endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 and praised his global war on terror. He and/or his company have been sued by a total of 64 women for sexual harassment or discrimination. And his values are completely and utterly out of step with those of many younger voters: in the past, he has compared Elizabeth Warren's economic views to Soviet-style communism and opposed raising the minimum wage. Bloomberg has consistently stood for the polar opposite of what the Democratic Party claims to represent: he has been unabashedly pro-Wall Street, racist and militarist. It's hard to imagine that wouldn't have the effect of alienating many of the voters the party needs to win. On top of all of those pre-existing vulnerabilities, we can add another one that was just revealed: to put it bluntly, Bloomberg can't debate for shit. A poll taken after the first debate in which he took part showed that Bloomberg's net favorability among Democratic primary voters had plummeted 20 points from pre-debate levels, and his performance has been universally panned among commentators. If that's what happens after one debate on a stage full of Democrats, imagine how well he'd fare in three debates against Donald Trump, a man who publicly humiliated uncharismatic hacks like Bloomberg throughout the 2015-2016 GOP debates.
Now that we've covered Sanders' biggest opponents in the primary and their (considerable) weaknesses, let's address his. The main concern I hear seems to be that Sanders is a socialist, which will supposedly scare voters away. But Sanders has been a prominent national figure for years now, and the democratic socialism label has always been closely associated with him: he proudly wears it himself and his opponents of course make sure to bring it up as much as possible. Yet he's still one of the most popular politicians in the country, recent polling gives him the best ratings on values and empathy out of all the Democratic candidates, and head-to-head polls show him in a strong position against Donald Trump.
Critics point to decades-old comments from Sanders where he finds positive (though certainly not unconditionally supportive) things to say about Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and the USSR (which was at the time under the leadership of Ronald Reagan's friend Gorbachev, one might note). But Sanders' leftist history was highlighted in the last primary campaign, and given that Krysten Sinema—a figure with a more recent history of associating with far-left groups, despite her current stance as a conservative Democrat—recently won an election in a state as right-wing as Arizona, it's doubtful that comments from 30+ years ago necessarily doom Sanders' campaign. Plus, Donald Trump has praised authoritarians like Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping and, yes, Vladimir Putin in much more gushing terms; why would voters be less bothered more by this than by Sanders' qualified praise for Cuba (which was similar to later remarks made by noted communist Kofi Annan) and the Sandinistas (who, in the opinion of European observers, won a fair election in 1984)?
And then there's the essay from nearly 50 years ago that some Sanders critics still like to bring up, where Sanders ruminates on shifting gender roles in a sort of stream-of-consciousness fashion—starting out with a provocative lede that acknowledges how some people, both male and female, enjoy violent sexual fantasies up to and including rape fantasies. The point of the essay, it is clear upon reading, is that traditional gender roles are damaging for both men and women. Some critics, though, claim that it shows Sanders' sexism, or at least that it would be an effective weapon against him in a general election. But Sanders has acknowledged the article, despite the admirable point it was trying to make, was "very poorly written," and the thing is, it has gotten coverage in the media—repeatedly. Plus, the notion that Donald Trump, the man caught on tape talking about "grab[bing women] by the pussy," could successfully weaponize a half-century-old essay and make it seem like Sanders is as anti-woman as he is, is frankly ridiculous. It's the sort of smear that's as desperate as McCain's 2008 attempts to attack Obama for associating with Bill Ayers, and we know how well that tactic worked.
Sanders' health and age are more serious concerns. But still, let's remember who he'd be running against: a visibly out-of-shape and often incoherent 74-year-old, not any sort paragon of youthful vitality. Plus, several of Sanders' primary opponents are also reasonably advanced in age. Bloomberg is only a few months younger than Sanders (and had to have coronary stents put in all the way back in 2000) and Biden only about a year younger, with the latter's age fully and unflatteringly on display as he's struggled to finish his thoughts and gotten tripped up at debates and campaign stops. Even Elizabeth Warren will be turning 71 this year. Klobuchar and (especially) Buttigieg are considerably younger, but it's doubtful their advantage in this respect outweighs their other weaknesses. And late last year, Sanders released three doctors' letters attesting that he was not only healthy, but equipped to deal with considerable stress and activity. His cardiologist, an attending at the University of Vermont Medical Center, expressed confidence that "[Sanders] has the mental and physical stamina to fully undertake the rigors of the Presidency"—a pretty ringing endorsement on the health front.
With those vulnerabilities (real or imagined) addressed, let's talk about the argument for why Bernie Sanders would be an effective candidate against Trump. For one thing, he has a connection with younger voters like no other candidate. He absolutely dominates among the youngest voters in Democratic primary polls, and its quite likely that youth turnout would be exceptionally high with Sanders at the top of the ticket. Higher turnout among young voters was a crucial boost for the Democrats in the 2018 midterms, and it could make the difference in the presidential election this year as well.
He's also increasingly demonstrated strength among voters of color. Recent polls have indicated he's the top choice of a plurality of nonwhite Democratic primary voters, and he's been strengthening his position among black voters—a demographic that he struggled to win over in 2016. Despite (largely manufactured) concerns about Sanders' inability to appeal to people of color, it's clear now he has succeeded in building a multiracial movement.
Furthermore, Sanders' message connects with people. The belief that our political and economic system is rigged is both widespread and accurate, and Sanders' ringing denunciations of its inequities strike a chord. Sanders simply has a clear and powerful message that the other candidates lack. What is Biden's central message? What is Buttigieg's? Klobuchar's? Bloomberg's? Warren once seemed to be running a campaign that, like Bernie's, was focused on economic inequality, but as she's capitulated that message has become more and more muddled. Moderation and pragmatism are not winning messages, at least not at this point in history; transformational change is, and that's what Bernie is selling.
Only one Democrat has actually succeeded in winning a presidential election this century: Barack Obama, who pulled it off twice. How? The first time, by running as an outsider who promised "hope" and "change"; the second time, by running an economically populist campaign and painting his opponent as an out-of-touch plutocrat. He won by turning out young voters and people of color in large numbers. Now let's look at the failed Democratic presidential nominees from this century: Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton—all moderates who ran safe, boring campaigns and lost to opponents they should have been able to beat.
Obviously, Bernie Sanders differs from Barack Obama in many ways, both in terms of personal identity and political ideology. But if there's anyone in this election who can replicate Obama's electoral success, it's Sanders. Which other candidate offers the same sense of excitement that Obama once did? The same aspiration for something different than the defective status quo? The same sense that he represents the hopes and desires of regular people in the face of the faceless Establishment? It's Bernie—the reason being that Obama's presidency failed to live up to the promise his campaigns seemed to offer, and the status quo he ran against has proven more durable than we might have hoped.
Sanders also has the ability to convincingly run against Trump's economic agenda, such as the possible entitlement cuts he floated. Medicare and Social Security are two of the most popular programs in the country, but many Democrats have long been offering to work with Republicans in order to cut them. Not Bernie. He's also the only viable Democratic candidate who has been willing to say Trump's USMCA trade agreement isn't good enough, and he has the credibility to do so as someone who opposed NAFTA from the get-go. Every other candidate would be basically conceding that, just as he promised, Trump "fixed" NAFTA—one of his most important pledges from 2016, and an issue that undeniably helped him the Rust Belt states that propelled him to victory.
None of this, as I said, is any guarantee of success. The primaries are off to a rough start, and the battle for the nomination could last all the way to the convention. If the economic news remains (superficially) good, that could certainly help Trump's chances. Plus, his campaign's ruthlessness will only be tempered by the incompetence of the people he often surrounds himself with. But when it's all said and done, the best bet is still Bernie—and it's not even close.
CORRECTION: Previously this post said it had been over 30 years since an incumbent president was defeated; this was incorrect, as George H.W. Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992.
