Matt Taibbi writes that the dynamics of the 2016 Republican primaries are playing out again in the 2020 Democratic primaries and that it favors Bernie Sanders.
In reality, the results for Sanders cut both ways. On one hand, it’s amazing he can win any state after years of propaganda depicting him as a half-dead cross of Hitler and Stalin (MSNBC before New Hampshire outdid itself with Looney Tunes commentary about “executions in Central Park” and a “digital brownshirt brigade”).
On the other hand, there are signs after New Hampshire that some of the relentless corporate messaging against Sanders is landing. This will inspire orgies of excitement – it’s already happening – as pundits revel in every storyline suggesting Democratic voters are scrambling to find an “electable” alternative.
…One of the lessons of 2016 was that cheeseball clichés like “the Big Mo,” “straight talk,” and the “beer test” no longer had traction. Voter calculations were about rage and nihilism: They were done with catchphrases. Like amputees who still feel a leg is there, pundits continued speaking in this dead language, which widened the credibility gap further.
Four years later, they’re still doing it. Kasich of all people was on CNN Tuesday night talking about “the Big Mo.” Van Jones wondered about the “beer lane.” “Klomentum” is the relic being flogged this morning. The “firewall” might be next.
…As with Republicans in 2016, the defining characteristic of the 2020 Democratic race has been the unwieldy size of the field. The same identity crisis lurking under the Republican clown car afflicted this year’s Democratic contest: Because neither donors nor party leaders nor pundits could figure out what they should be pretending to stand for, they couldn’t coalesce around any one candidate.
These constant mercurial shifts in “momentum” – it’s Pete! It’s Amy! Paging Mike Bloomberg! – have eroded the kingmaking power of the Democratic leadership. They are eating the party from within, and seem poised to continue doing so.
For Sanders supporters, the calculation has always been simpler: Are you bought off, or not? Just by keeping to the right side of that one principle, Sanders will hold his 20-to-30 percent and keep grinding toward victory, “narrow” wins or not. It’s a classic tortoise-and-hare story. When you know where you’re going, you tend to get there.
Mehdi Hasan also finds the current state of media prognostications to be less than inspiring.
Bernie Sanders is now the undisputed frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
…What a difference a year makes. When he launched his second presidential campaign, in February 2019, the independent senator from Vermont was mocked and written off by much of the pundit class. The Washington Post’s Henry Olsen called him a “one-hit wonder,” adding: “After a few concerts that attract ever more ‘selective’ audiences, he will likely drop out and retire, his influence consigned to history.”
…On Twitter, Olsen’s fellow Post columnist Jennifer Rubin described Sanders as “yesterday’s news” and suggested he would face “stiff competition for youth vote” from Beto O’Rourke. (O’Rourke quit the race in November, while Sanders won almost half of 17- to 29-year-olds in Iowa and more young voters in New Hampshire than “all of the other candidates combined.”)
Yet another Post columnist, David Von Drehle, wrote how Sanders would find “that his moment is gone, his agenda absorbed by more plausible candidates, his future behind him.”
Then there was MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who claimed Sen. Elizabeth Warren would “blow out Bernie pretty early on. Bernie will lose his votes to her.” (Warren, for the record, came third in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire.)
MSNBC political contributor Jason Johnson went even further: “I see Bernie Sanders launching his campaign and by August, realizing he won’t be in the top five in Iowa, and dropping out.”
…Up next are the Nevada caucuses on February 22, where only a single percentage point separates Biden from Sanders. In South Carolina, which goes to the polls on February 29 and where Biden once led by a whopping 31 points, Sanders has narrowed the former vice president’s lead to 8 points in the latest Zogby Analytics poll.
…No wonder Democratic Party elites are panicking. We hear the same tired arguments about Sanders lacking “electability.” These arguments conveniently ignore the fact that Sanders beats Trump in head-to-head polling; that the Vermont senator is the most popular member of the Senate; and that this self-proclaimed socialist has both the highest “net favorability rating” among Democratic voters as well as the most enthusiastic base.
Plus, the only way to test “electability” is through actual elections, and so far Sanders is two for two.
Iowa and New Hampshire, though, weren’t only victories for the senator from Vermont; they were also victories for Sanders’s signature issue, Medicare for All. Asked last week in an entrance poll how they felt about “replacing all private health insurance with a single government plan for everyone,” 57 percent of Iowa caucus-goers said they backed it, while only 38 percent were opposed.
In New Hampshire, on Tuesday, again almost six in 10 voters said they supported a Medicare for All system over the current private insurance system, according to an early exit poll.
Yet again, the pundits and prognosticators were wrong. “Iowa Democrats worry ‘Medicare for All’ hurts key industry,” read the headline in the Associated Press in December. “In Iowa, Single Payer ‘Medicare For All’ Loses Ground,” declared Forbes in August. “Medicare For All Isn’t That Popular – Even Among Democrats,” proclaimed FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver a month earlier.
The mainstream media will ignore the inconvenient facts that Taibbi and Hasan point out and ratchet up the volume about how Sanders is not electable and how the policies he proposes are not popular with voters and that voters prefer any one of the center-right candidates, even as each one fails to perform up to their expectations. The cable news networks just cannot bring themselves to admit that Sanders won the most votes in both Iowa and New Hampshire and are desperately seeking to find another way to spin the news.
Sanders falls to last place in new national poll when all of his opponents are added together into a single, non-existent candidate. pic.twitter.com/zEfXM03dDu
— MSDNC – Commentary & Satire (@MSDNCTV) February 12, 2020
Below is what drives the oligarchy crazy, that Sanders attacks their beloved Wall Street banking heroes like former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Here is Blankfein’s criticism of Sanders.
The long-time billionaire head of Goldman, Sachs is very angry about Sanders winning because he'll ruin our economy & "doesn't care about our military."
He somehow links it all to RUSSIA: Putin will likely support Sanders this time, he says.
US oligarchs are rotted and dumb: https://t.co/QZSBiGnatJ
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 12, 2020
Sanders’s campaign team have hit back saying that Blankfein inserting himself into the race is a sign of panic among the oligarchy. Here is Sanders’s own response.
Absolute dad. pic.twitter.com/3DJwJLzIsO
— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) February 12, 2020
You have got to hand it to Sanders. He makes the right enemies and has brought all these billionaires who like to manipulate the system behind the scenes out into the open.
But don’t worry! When all else fails, billionaire Michael Bloomberg who was for almost his whole life was until as recently as 2007 was a registered Republican and registered as a Democrat only in 2018, will ride to rescue the Democratic party! I am sure that Blankfein will approve of him and all those who in the media who now attack Sanders for not really being a Democrat will forget about that.
… billionaire Michael Bloomberg who was for almost his whole life was a registered Republican…
His partisan career has meandered quite a bit. From the 10/10/18 USA Today:
Piss on him anyway.
Thanks Pierce! I have made the correction.
But, likewise, the Bernie supporters will ignore inconvenient facts and draw conclusions that are not actually supported by the facts they do boast, particularly that Bernie is more popular than he actually is.
Take this, for example: “57 percent of Iowa caucus-goers said they backed it, while only 38 percent were opposed.” That doesn’t seem very good. Maybe this includes Republican caucus goers but even then I would expect they made up only a fraction of caucus goers since it wasn’t really contended. (Multiple precincts where I live were meeting at a steakhouse for the Republicans.) So a large chuck of those opposed must be Democrats and, more to my point, that many say they “back it” doesn’t give good indication of how strongly. I personally know people who claim they back M4A but also backed Buttigieg believing (wrongly) that his “Medicare for All Who Want it” is somehow a step in the direction to getting M4A. Will they vote for Bernie if Bernie gets the nomination? OK, sure. But they also seem comfortable with the status quo and, despite saying they back M4A, seem just as willing to back the status quo. My overall point is that 57% figure isn’t all that meaningful because it’s not necessarily accurate or doesn’t tell the full story. So, sorry, but when “pundits and prognosticators” claim it isn’t all that popular, they aren’t necessarily wrong. They could be wrong, but it’s a misunderstanding of how reality works on the part of Sanders supports to look at 57 and see that it is much greater than 38 and believe that’s all the more one needs to know.
Yet, interestingly enough, they mock the idea of 70% of Democratic voters not supporting Bernie as not being important. This goes to my concern that Bernie supporters ignore inconvenient facts as well. They also seem to be overlooking the fact that Bernie needs over 50% of the delegate vote to become the nominee. If he doesn’t have that first ballot, then, based on the currently proposed rules, the superdelegates get to vote on the second ballot. I shouldn’t need to explain how that could be a problem for Bernie. Likewise, as committed delegates get freed of their commitments (different states have different rules on this, it seems, and not all states have set their rules from what I have seen) as candidates drop out, will they go to Bernie or coalesce around one opponent of Bernie’s? Sure, as that tweet notes, no such candidate exists…today. But, come the national convention, that candidate may very well exist.
Lastly, as I have been warning Bernie supporters for perhaps at least two months now, his “most enthusiastic base” needs to get the Bernie Bros reigned in. They’ve taken that “Are you bought off, or not?” question and burned many bridges with it. When Warren presented a transition plan to get to M4A, many didn’t just stop with the legitimate “That’s a stupid plan” criticism, but unsurprisingly pointed to that as evidence that Warren is “bought off.” I warned Bernie supporters that was dumb as he’ll likely need Warren’s supporters to back him to get the nomination. It may already be hurting him as Amanda Marcotte notes (emphasis mine):
Unfortunately, it seems many of Bernie’s supporters are deciding to bury their heads in the sand instead. I’ve seen numerous remarks these past couple of days on Twitter, much like some in the comments on this blog yesterday, challenging people to bring forward legitimate criticisms of Sanders. It seems they are taking these absurd remarks about “executions in Central Park” and a “digital brownshirt brigade” and are declaring any and every criticism of Sanders or his supporters as being equivalent or an attempt to bring Sanders down. I fear this may be a result of this narrative that many are out to stop Bernie from becoming the nominee. Despite there being much truth to it, it may be resulting in a number of his supporters being overly paranoid to the point that they now believe everyone who is not a supporter is out to stop him.
@Leo, I would reign in these Bernie Bros and chastise them, if I knew any. Every Bernie supporter I have met, the ones I actually know, are rather soft spoken people. And I have been describing myself as a Warren supporter for the past 4/5 moths. Some of them have no inclination to vote for anyone aside from Bernie, but they didn’t trash me or my reasoning. As she has slipped, I’m planning to go for Bernie in Nevada. I work on the caucus day, but I can get my support in at an early date.
I eschew social media, and have no facebook or twitter account. So maybe that’s my problem. I avoid poisonous platforms and interact with small communities and real human beings.
[reined, not reigned]
@6, If had edit power, I would correct it. Absolutely.
technically ‘rein’
Oh Leo made that error too, that makes me feel better 🙂
Leo Buzalsky @ # 3: the Bernie supporters will ignore inconvenient facts … they mock the idea … as I have been warning Bernie supporters …
Perhaps if you toned down the sweeping generalizations, you would antagonize fewer of us, and maybe even achieve a dialog.
+1 Pierce
I find it interesting that the question is so often phrased as either-or. Why is that? Who benefits from that framing?
In my own country (Denmark), we have public health care AND I have an extra private health insurance. There’s no conflict. You can have both.
The rich assholes who frame most of the conversation.
On the one hand, it’s kind of nice that the internet has democratized information, so we’re not exactly forced to listen to them anymore. On the other hand, the internet has democratized misinformation too, so we also have to contend with that.
Right, Sander’s plan is basically the same. It’s not like it would abolish all private health insurance, as that question implied. Of course, the types of plans that will make any sense would be different…. They would offer extra coverage, as you put it.
It’s the same situation with plain old Medicare, as everybody in this country should already know…. But some people don’t seem to understand that their “Medicare supplemental plans” (or “Medicare advantage plans” and so on) are not “Medicare.” They just lost the plot long ago, and they may never catch up, although it’s really not that complicated.
Maybe somebody should inform the insurance companies who are dishing out this bullshit propaganda that, for over 50 years, Medicare hasn’t been “replacing all private health insurance” for those covered under it, as evidenced by the enormous amount of private insurance which is sold by those same companies.
That one little word, “all,” is just one little piece of the incessant lying and confusion-mongering that we have to put up with in this country. People should have a reasonable expectation that they’re being asked questions which are relevant, important, honest, fair, that the information gathered would be genuinely useful, that it is not done in the service of propaganda, etc. When the pollsters themselves are contributing to the confusion (and it’s likely this example is deliberate), then you know you have serious problems.