Rachel Bitecofer on Sanders backlash - good read [View all]

[CousinIT]

UNROLLED twitter thread:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1216707059179233280.html

ORIGINAL twitter thread:

Link to tweet

Sanders backlash, a thread.

Sanders supporters are wholly convinced that establishment Ds fear a Sanders nomination bc he's going to deliver for them radical change, change the "pro-corporatists" Ds fear. (Their words)

But the Ds fear a Sanders nomination bc they are wholly convinced that Sanders, and to a lesser (but not much) extent Warren, is a nominee that guarantees Donald Trump wins reelection in 2020.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/477721-democrats-voice-concerns-over-sanders

This believe is rooted in a few things, one of which is in decades of American campaign theory that moderate presidential candidates are a must have. Of course, we just saw an election which defied this principle in every way. Some people have tried to frame Trump '16 as a "moderate" but he ran on building a wall across the southern border, banning Muslims, and repealing Obamacare as his 3 most salient positions & ideology is not merely a policy thing, it also has a behavioral element: Trump is/was an extremist in this regard- to the right of even Barry Goldwater. He was also an unabashed populist and non-interventionist. Let's not forget that. Yet Trump won, and the reason why is that polarization & hyperpartisanship virtually guarantees these party nominees at least 45% of the national vote share. This is a HUGE change from the 70s and 80s. At least we know this is true for the GOP. Despite HUGE reservations, despite losing its intellectual founder class, despite 400+ member letters from the Republican national security community, and the message the party sent by having virtually all of its high ranking electeds boycott the '16 nominating convention, despite more than 30% of VA Republicans suggesting they'd support brokering the convention, despite a video telling America he liked to force himself on women, on Election Day Republicans and right-leaning Indies rallied big time behind Donald Trump, even the reluctant ones, with 89% of them casting their ballots for him, just like a normal election. The mainstream Ds see Sanders/Warren as risky because they see progressive policies as risky to run on. But it probably should be noted that thus far, polling suggests the polarization effect, at the very least, will work both ways and that a progressive nominee is, at the end of the day, quite likely to still get the votes of Democrats and left-leaning Indies. Certainly, we have not seen much evidence in polling to suggest otherwise. Does Biden outperform Sanders in the head-to-head polling we've seen? Marginally. But Sanders still beats Trump in most of these polls. And although a progressive nominee opens the Democrats up to some vulnerabilities that a Biden type doesn't, the one thing it does, indisputably is neutralize completely Trump's "populist" appeal. If the Ds are smart, they will come after Trump (and the GOP) on the economy with laser focus in 2020, w or without a downturn, and I'm not really sure that a Sanders-type nominee hurts in that regard. There is still a deep populist undercurrent in the electorate and the party would do well not to underestimate it. Which is easy for them to do bc the entire brain trust of the Democratic Party, its consultant class, its activist class, and the mainstream media that frames this stuff lives in an economic reality far removed from "real" America, where most people can't see a dentist or fix their car.