The pundits are wrong. Bernie
Sanders is the most electable candidate this November.
by Matt
Karp
It’s almost surreal to go back
and watch Bernie Sanders’s presidential
campaign announcement today.
Last April, with a handful of
reporters gathered outside the US Capitol, Sanders strode casually across the
grass and unfolded a crinkled sheet of notes. As he spoke — airing his
now-familiar grievances with the ever-more-unequal American economy —
photographers snapped perfunctory pictures while journalists fiddled with their
smartphones. It was all over in about ten minutes.
If little pomp attended
Sanders’s announcement, there appeared to be even less circumstance. An obscure
Vermont socialist, polling 3 percent nationally, had joined the race against
Hillary Clinton? This was practically the textbook definition of a protest
candidate. “It’s more important to you to get these ideas out,” one reporter
asked Sanders, “than to contest the Democratic nomination?”
The next day, media analysts
sized up Sanders’s candidacy with the same mix of mild amusement and polite
condescension. The best possible outcome for a Sanders campaign, agreed the New York Times, NBC News, and Politico, was that his “liberal zeal” might “force Clinton
to the left.”
Nine months later, this
verdict seems terribly wrong. Not only has Sanders emerged as a serious threat to capture the nomination — his victory in
New Hampshire was the largest in primary history — but his impact on the shape
of the campaign has been almost the opposite of what experts imagined.
Last fall, Sanders’s early
momentum may have pushed an ambivalent Clinton to reject the Keystone Pipeline
and the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. But after this half-step to the left, Clinton has spent the
winter furiously digging an ideological trench between herself and Sanders — opposing his major Wall Street reforms, attacking his proposed tax increases, and declaring that single-payer health care “will never, ever
happen.”
While Clinton continues to
talk up her personal credentials as a “progressive,” in substantive terms the
primary campaign has deepened rather than narrowed the ideological gulf between
the two candidates.
Her forthright opposition to
the Sanders agenda has won Clinton praise from some liberal elites, unable to
disguise their hostility toward even the most
basic social-democratic reforms. Yet unfortunately for Clinton, most actual
Americans do not inhabit the pundit class, and their professional credentials
do not depend on gravely denying the existence of puppies, rainbows, and
successful single-payer health programs.
In fact, Sanders’s ideas
remain extremely popular with voters. As a result Clinton has been
forced to rely more than ever on a dryly pragmatic case for her nomination:
only she can defeat the Republicans in November.
The death of Justice Antonin
Scalia is likely to heighten this discussion of “electability” in the weeks
ahead. “If anyone needed a reminder of how important it is to elect a
Democratic president,” Clinton argued
last weekend, “look at the Supreme Court.”
Leftists sometimes compare
this election-year pitch to a species of blackmail. Vote for us, Democrats tell
voters, not because we’ll do anything positive for you, but because if you
don’t, the other guys will break your legs and take away your abortion rights.
This may not be an inspiring
argument. But like most forms of blackmail, it has undeniable force. And so
far, many Democrats seem to agree that Clinton, not Sanders, is the best bet to
win in November: in both Iowa
and New
Hampshire, she claimed over 75 percent of the voters who put a premium on
“electability.”
But let’s consider the
argument on its own terms. Why should we believe Clinton is more likely to
defeat a Republican than Sanders?
The Unfavorable Favorite
Notably, the case that Clinton
has the best chance to win in November does not seem to depend much on Clinton
herself. This is no coincidence: by a number of measures, she profiles as a
comparatively weak general election candidate.
According to national polls,
nearly 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of
Clinton, which would make her the most disliked presidential nominee in modern
history. Even if incumbents are included, the only candidate with worse numbers
was Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Public perception of Clinton
has been shaped by the intense sexist and right-wing attacks that she has
endured since the 1990s. These polarizing assaults, along with Clinton’s own
partisan record, have helped make her very popular with loyal Democrats, but
unpopular with everyone else.
The problem is that the loyal
Democratic vote is simply not enough to win a general election. In 2012,
Democrats made up only
38 percent of the general electorate, while registered
independents accounted for 29 percent. On his way to defeating Mitt
Romney, Barack Obama won almost half of them.
Clinton’s appeal among these
non-Democratic voters is extremely limited. Just 29 percent of independents
hold a favorable view of her, according to an average of three YouGov surveys
taken since January; over 61 percent view her unfavorably. In the most
recent poll, Clinton’s count was 24 to 67, with 50 percent saying they hold
a “very unfavorable” opinion. These are numbers that should make even Supreme
Court-first liberals feel skittish.
It’s too soon to conclude that
Clinton’s historic unfavorability will spell defeat in November. Yet as Nate
Silver noted with regard to Mitt Romney’s (less pronounced)
unpopularity in April 2012, we should not dismiss these early numbers either.
At the very least, they make it plain that Clinton faces an image deficit
greater than any challenger in recent memory, including landslide losers like
Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, and John McCain.
McGoverns of the Mind
Generally, however, the
“electability” argument skips past Clinton and concentrates on Sanders. And
here the case against Sanders divides into three general paths — one, guided by
historical analogy; another, driven by pundit fears and fantasies; and a third,
oriented around voter ideology and demographics. None are persuasive.
The most common way to dismiss
Sanders is to lump him in with previous progressives battered by conservatives
in general elections — usually Mondale in 1984 or George
McGovern in 1972. “The early enthusiasm for Sanders reminds me of the
McGovern and Mondale races, where two good men were only able to win one state
each in their presidential campaigns,” former Louisiana senator John Breaux told the New York Times in January.
The logic of this analogy
turns on the idea that McGovern and Mondale both lost for the simple reason
that they were too liberal for American voters. The first rebuttal is almost
too obvious to spell out: the 2016 electorate looks nothing like the 1972 or
1984 electorate — quite literally, it is a different set of people.
A healthy majority of voters
this year were not eligible to vote in 1984; almost half of them weren’t even
alive in 1972. People old enough to have cast ballots against McGovern will
probably make up no more than 20 percent of the electorate in 2016. These are
very old historical parallels.
Very old, and very lazy. As
Daniel Denvir has written, the combination of factors that produced the
McGovern disaster bears almost no resemblance to the political situation
today. In 1972 the Democratic Party was in a state of flux. McGovern captured
the nomination with about
25 percent of the primary vote; over 23 percent went to the Alabama white
supremacist George Wallace. Major party leaders like AFL-CIO boss George Meany,
meanwhile, refused to support McGovern in the general election against Nixon.
Today both major parties are
far more ideologically unified and more polarized. Although the Democratic
Party elite has so far shunned Sanders, he is almost as popular as Clinton
among the party’s rank and file. If Sanders wins a clean majority of the
primary vote, it’s hard to imagine any significant chunk of the Democratic
coalition abandoning him in a general election against the Republicans.
But the historical analogies
miss the mark for an even more fundamental reason. McGovern and Mondale did not
lose because they were too liberal, but above all because they faced Richard
Nixon and Ronald Reagan, popular incumbents presiding
over economic booms.
The 1972 and 1984 blowout
losses conform closely to electoral models that measure vote totals based on
underlying economic conditions, without taking any account of candidate
identity or ideology. The Democrats were doomed no matter who they nominated.
If the primary race continues
to tighten, Clinton supporters will no doubt continue to spook Democrats with
the fatal visions of 1972 and 1984. These are but McGoverns of the mind,
false creations conjured by elite pundits and party officials. They offer no actual
evidence that can be applied to the 2016 general election.
Pundit Horsemen of the
Apocalypse
Across the primary season,
Sanders himself has rebuffed “electability” arguments by pointing to poll
results. In hypothetical matchups against the three leading Republicans (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio) he beats them all soundly, and polls better
than Clinton in every case.
We may be skeptical about the
predictive power of these findings, nine months before Election Day. But it’s
wrong to call them “absolutely worthless,” as one political scientist told Vox
last week.
In a comprehensive analysis of
elections between 1952 and 2008, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wleizen found that matchup polls as early as April have generally
produced results close to the outcome in November.
Even much earlier “trial
heats” seem to be far from meaningless. As partisan polarization has increased
over the last three decades, there’s some evidence that early polling has
become more predictive than ever. In all five elections since 1996, February
matchup polls yielded average results within two points of the final outcome.
In other words, if Sanders is
the nominee, his nine-point lead over Cruz is probably safe. Even his
four-point lead over Rubio likely reflects a meaningful advantage.
Of course, mainstream pundits
are quick to dismiss these numbers. Once the Republican attack brigade moves
into action, they argue, talk of socialism and taxes and the Iranian
Revolution will fill the air like fire and brimstone; poor Bernie will quiver and flop
before the vast counterrevolutionary horde.
Occasionally, these liberal
concerns seem to resemble pure reactionary giddiness. But that’s not even
the real problem. The pundit horsemen of the apocalypse have constructed an
argument that has no relationship to actual evidence, either in the current polling
or recent history.
Sanders is far from an obscure
or unknown figure. Across sixteen national surveys since New Year’s Day, an average
of 85 percent of Americans knew enough about Sanders to form an opinion of him.
This is not the profile of a
candidate flying under the radar. John Kasich, who fits that description,
elicited an opinion from just 53 percent of respondents in the eleven surveys that asked about him. More Americans have a
decided view of Sanders than either Rubio (77 percent) or Cruz (81 percent).
That view is strongly
positive. Sanders’s favorability ratio of 51 percent positive to 38 percent
negative is the best of any candidate in the race, by far. His favorability
with independent voters is also much higher than any of his rivals, including
Clinton, Trump or Rubio.
There is simply no historical
precedent for a major party nominee as popular and well-known as Sanders
collapsing in a general election.
Some gleefully apocalyptic liberals have likened Sanders to
Michael Dukakis, who held an early polling lead over George H. W. Bush before
ultimately losing by a large margin in 1988. Yet the comparison falls apart
before it begins.
A stiff technocrat, Dukakis
won the Democratic primary not by packing arenas with passionate supporters,
but chiefly by having more impulse control than Gary Hart and being whiter than
Jesse Jackson. And his early polling strength was clearly a mirage, as contemporaries noted: only 52 percent of voters even had an
opinion of him in May 1988. Dukakis was John Kasich, not Bernie Sanders.
None of this means we should
expect to see the end of the “wait until the Republicans get him” argument any
time soon. It’s a staple of the Clinton primary arsenal.
In February 2008, then-Clinton
chief adviser Mark Penn discounted early polls that showed Barack Obama performing
well in a general election: “Sen. Obama has never faced a credible Republican
opponent or the Republican attack machine, so voters are taking a chance that
his current poll numbers will hold up after the Republicans get going.”
Penn was writing about an
African-American candidate whose middle name was Hussein, and who had spent
much of his childhood in a Muslim country. A month later, a video surfaced
showing Obama’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright saying, “God damn America!”
Did the vaunted “Republican
attack machine” fail to take advantage of what Vox’s David Roberts might have called Obama’s “glaring
vulnerabilities”? Of course not: an independent super PAC spent $2.5 million on Wright-themed advertising in swing states.
None of it had much impact on Obama’s poll numbers against John McCain, which rose
considerably between February and Election Day.
The attacks aimed at Obama may
have reinforced his unpopularity with right-wingers, but they did little to
dent his appeal among Democrats and independent voters. Why does anybody
believe that red-baiting will succeed where racist innuendo failed? When the
Berlin Wall came down twenty-seven years ago, today’s median voter was not old
enough to drink alcohol.
In addition, this year’s polls
show little sign of an electorate ready to abandon Sanders at first exposure to
right-wing talking points.
Only 35 percent of Virginia independents said they would be less
likely to vote for a “Democratic-Socialist” candidate. And when a conservative
push-poll asked Nevada Democrats and independents how they felt about Sanders’s
plans to spend “$15 trillion dollars” for “a government run health care
program,” 53 percent replied that it made them more likely to support
him.
Another and even less
persuasive claim is that Clinton, unlike Sanders, has already withstood every
right-wing attack she can possibly face. Mark Penn also made this point in 2008
— and today Clinton’s unfavorability is even higher than it was then.
Sanders has famously refused
to discuss Clinton’s emails. He has denounced her Wall Street speaking fees,
but has largely refrained from discussing the much larger hoard of cash connected
to the Clinton Foundation — an area that Republicans seem eager to exploit.
That same Nevada push-poll showed that 64 percent of Democrats and independents
were less likely to back Clinton after learning about “foreign donations”
given to the foundation while she was secretary of state.
Republican candidates have
already made various scattered attacks on these subjects, but we’ve seen
nothing like the tornado of Clinton scandal-mania likely to follow if Hillary
is nominated.
Moderates for Socialism
A final line of argument,
exemplified by Ruth
Marcus in the Washington Post, insists that Sanders’s platform is simply
too left-wing for a “moderate” American electorate. Usually this is trotted out
amid broad national surveys that find the country divided between ostensibly
coherent blocs of “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative” voters.
But as political scientists
Shawn Treier and D. Sunshine Hillygus have argued, two-dimensional surveys of voter ideology do
not provide a useful guide to the American electorate. To the great
disappointment of the Post editorial board, many self-identified “moderates”
are not sober Beltway centrists but in fact “cross-pressured” by a mix of
strong liberal and conservative beliefs.
The unstable and
multidimensional identity of the “moderate” voter helps explain why Sanders’s
own polling numbers have regularly
confounded the prejudices of pundits. In New Hampshire, for instance, where
experts repeatedly stressed his strength with “liberals,”
Sanders actually did
even better with “moderate/conservative” voters.
It might also help explain why
Sanders polls well in places like Nevada
and Alaska
— states not known as liberal bastions, but home to a large number of
independent voters.
Who are these independents and
“moderates” voting for Sanders? It seems reasonable to believe that they are
not confused centrists, but “cross-pressured” voters with a wide range of
views, all drawn to Sanders’s left-wing economic message. In fact, Sanders
has a long record of winning over these kind of populist “moderates.”
Consider Caledonia County in
Vermont’s rugged Northeast Kingdom.
Contrary to media cliché, not
all of Vermont was a liberal paradise in the 1980s. Caledonia County twice
voted heavily for Reagan; in 1988, Bush crushed Dukakis there, 61 to 38
percent.
Yet two years later, when
Sanders won his first statewide election for Congress, he defeated the
incumbent Republican in Caledonia County by eleven points. Over the next
decade, Sanders ran well ahead of the centrist New Democrats Bill Clinton and
Al Gore — in 2000, the same year George W. Bush carried the county by seven
points, Sanders won it with 66 percent of the vote.
You can chalk some of this up
to the quirkiness of rural Vermont. But as the primary campaign has unfolded,
Sanders has shown an undeniable ability to connect with the same kind of
lower-income and less-well-educated white voters all over the country, from
Iowa to West
Virginia to Oklahoma.
Democrats have been slowly
losing these voters to Republicans since the 1970s; in the last decade, they
have almost abandoned them entirely. But non-college-educated whites still
represent over 40 percent of the electorate in key swing states like Ohio,
Wisconsin, and Indiana.
Many of these poor and struggling voters — however “moderate” according
to Gallup — seem very receptive to Sanders’s call for universal health care and
a living wage. A Sanders campaign that made deep inroads with working-class
whites across the Midwest would be well-prepared to defeat a Republican in
November.
It’s difficult to find an
equivalent category of voters where Clinton might outperform Sanders in a
general election. Women? Clinton’s most recent favorability
ratio with all women voters is strongly negative: 41 to 54 percent.
Sanders’s mark stands at 44 to 41 percent. In a general election, those numbers
might shift — but would it be enough to give Clinton a significant advantage?
Clinton’s strongest support in
the primary campaign seems to come from the most loyal Democrats, including
African-Americans. But in a bitter campaign against an ethnic nationalist like
Trump or a right-wing Republican like Rubio, would loyal party voters refuse to
turn out for the Democrats, just because Sanders rather than Clinton was the
nominee? It doesn’t seem likely.
None of this is to suggest
that Sanders should take loyal non-white Democratic votes for granted. That is
exactly what Clinton-style New Democrats did when they pivoted to the center in
the 1980s. In a general election campaign, Sanders would have to do the
opposite, and build
a populist coalition that depended on solidarity between black, Latino,
Asian, and white working-class voters.
Unquestionably, it would be
difficult work. But the opposition of an ever-more-reactionary Republican Party
would surely help. And a successful left-of-center coalition would be well
positioned — in both ideological and electoral terms — to mount the much
larger, long-term struggle necessary to achieve even Sanders’s
social-democratic goals.
Of course, it’s impossible to
predict the particular contours of a general election campaign featuring either
Sanders or Clinton. Much depends on the Republican nominee, and also, perhaps,
on the exact proportion of narcissism and pragmatism in the mind of a certain Manhattan
billionaire.
But there’s no question that
Bernie Sanders can win in November — and there is good reason to believe he
would actually be a stronger Democratic candidate than Hillary Clinton.
Last April in front of the
Capitol, when the skeptical reporter asked
Sanders if he really intended to contend for the nomination, he replied
indignantly: “We’re in this race to win!”
Sanders then continued,
insisting that it’s impossible to separate the question of “electability”
from the question of democracy. “If you try to put together a movement which
says, we have got to stand together as a people, and say that
. . . our country belongs to all of us, and not the billionaire class
— that’s not raising an issue, that is winning elections. That’s where the
American people are.”
Far more than the elite media
imagined, that’s where the American people have been, all campaign long.
They’ll still be there in November.
No comments:
Post a Comment