Clinton, Sanders and the post-Indiana campaign
Sanders can be forgiven for indulging in a moment fit for Mark Twain or Jon Snow. Like the great American humorist after hearing the news of his own demise, like the major warrior of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” come back to life, reports of Sanders’ end as a presidential candidate have been greatly exaggerated.
The death notice for his campaign may just be early but for now, the Lazarus of the 2016 presidential campaign is very much with us, celebrating an upset victory over challenger Hillary Clinton in the Indiana Democratic primary.
Sanders predicted he’d have “more victories in the weeks to come” in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon and California. Admitting he faced an “uphill climb” to the nomination, Sanders said that, regardless, he was “in this campaign to win and we are going to fight until the last vote is cast.” Tuesday’s win makes that more than an idle boast.
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That seemed to be pretty much confirmed on Wednesday, when Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told CNN more than 200 workers would be getting pink slips. Sanders told The New York Times the same thing, in an interview. “It will be hundreds of staff members,” he said.
The delegate count makes clear how “uphill” that climb for Sanders still is. Sanders may be doing this to extract leverage in helping to write the Democratic platform at or just before the convention in Philadelphia. But Sanders has been fighting the good fight, raising tens of millions in small-donor contributions, and dragging the Democratic party, kicking and screaming when necessary, further to the inclusive, panoramic left. Not bad for a septuagenarian first-timer on the campaign trail.
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Seth Abramson, writing in The Huffington Post, came up with five reasons why Sanders may be the major beneficiary of the end of the campaign of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Abramson suggests that with the Indiana victory of billionaire attention addict and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump essentially securing him the nomination, there’s no strategic reason for Republican voters to vote for Trump anymore — and that, with open primaries to come, independent voters or Republican voters might cross over and vote for Sanders.
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“Sanders’ vote share in nearly every upcoming primary and caucus just increased, though we don’t know by how much. In some instances, it could be a substantial bump, given that there’s no strategic reason to cast a vote for Donald Trump anymore — now that the Republican National Committee has officially declared him the presumptive nominee.”
That’s nuts. There’s no more of a reason, strategic or otherwise, for Republican voters to vote for Sanders then there is reason for Sanders voters to cross over and vote for Trump. Either way, you’re talking about voters casting their lot with someone who’s their philosophical opposite. What’s the rationale for doing that?
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“Sanders was already looking strong in Oregon, West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, Kentucky, North Dakota and California, but given that he’s within single digits in New Jersey (where Trump is very popular) and performed incredibly well with nonwhite voters in Indiana (meaning New Mexico could be in play), it’s not unthinkable that Hillary Clinton could lose all of the remaining primaries and caucuses and therefore as many as thirteen or fourteen contests in a row to finish the Democratic primary season.”
This could happen, but a straight Sanders sweep of all the remaining contests would be a real stretch. It almost presumes that Clinton walks off the field of battle completely, vacating her familiar biography and a formidable ground game in the heartland she’s drawn strength from. She’s way too invested, too deeply entrenched there for that to happen.
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And never mind Sanders’ challenge to superdelegates: In The Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart takes Sanders to task for his “insistence that superdelegates choose him over Clinton. As reporters at The Post, NPR and Vox have pointed out, even if superdelegates in states that Sanders won switched from her to him he’d still lose the nomination. And those folks don’t really have any incentive to do so. With Tuesday’s results from the Indiana primary factored in, Clinton now has 3.1 million more raw votes than Sanders. So the superdelegates are already backing a winning candidate.”
The one item Abramson may have gotten dead on is the last one, and in some ways the most possibly disturbing:
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Bernie Sanders has his ideological side, we sure as hell know that by now. But by extension, there’s also a pragmatism about Sanders, a recognition of the difference between that which is navigable, and that which is non-negotiable. It’s a grasp of realpolitik that strongly suggests that when the chips are down, with the White House at stake and the existence of a Trump administration in the balance, he won’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. One suspects that voters won't, either.
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With Clinton close-but-not-close-enough to the needed 2,383 delegates between now and the time of the delegate-rich motherlode primary in California, in June, the time’s come to heal the wounds created by four or five months of furious infighting.
After four months of constant intraparty bickering going on, Clinton and Sanders both face the serious challenge of Making Nice: not just cosmetic nice but the kind of nice that heals wounds and unifies the divided factions of the party, and sets the Democrats on (hopefully) a course of action that returns them to the White House in November.
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HEALING THOSE breaches makes a lot of sense, and the sooner the better. During the primary season, Clinton and Sanders could afford to ignore that which is pretty obvious: They haven’t exercised the ability to heal each other in the broken places of their respective campaigns. Reporting on Clinton wins in late April, for example, David Fahrenholt of The Washington Post reported on what for Sanders has been a nagging problem:
“For Clinton, Tuesday’s victories in large, urban states reinforced her case against Sanders: that he has not broadened his coalition much beyond white liberals, and that he struggles to win urban areas and populous states.”
“The problem for Sanders is that he has nowhere to grow. Black voters, who will dominate many of the coming primaries, have not responded to his message. Even black millennials, thought to be good prospects, are breaking in favor of Clinton.”
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That was in February, and not all that much has changed since then. Sanders has been steadily moving forward in contest after contest after contest; we don’t know how much of his current success might be due to those black millennials coming around. So far, Sanders has found a way to succeed, despite being weak with African Americans, that important constituency of whom black millennials are a vibrant subset.
But now it’s crunch time; despite a stream of donations, message and energy, time is the thing Sanders has just about run out of. For black millennials, and the wider African American voter base (a bloc he’d have absolutely needed to win in November), Sanders’ message isn’t penetrating like it has for young white millennials.
Clinton is similarly damaged goods to the hordes of voters who’ve been praising Sanders to the skies all year long. To them, Clinton is the ultimate insider pol, someone whose connections to the Washington establishment, deep-pocketed donors with ties to Wall Street and the major banks – to say nothing of her natural ties to the deeply-moneyed Clinton Foundation, founded by husband Bill — estrange her from the lives and predicaments of most of the American people whose favor she’s seeking today.
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But here’s the rub: Now may be the very worst time for Sanders to close up shop, whether he’s being pushed to do so or not. With nine state primaries and a number of caucuses still to be held — including one in California, the nation’s most populous state —millions of American voters in the politically crucial Western half of the United States would be effectively disenfranchised if Sanders withdraws now.
Fewer things would push disaffected Democrats and independent voters away from the Clinton campaign like the feeling, right or wrong, that Sanders was pressured out of the race (which probably explains Clinton’s relative absence of comments about Sanders after his Indiana win [to be expected since she skipped campaigning in the Hoosier State, sending Indiana Democrats a no-show signal that could come back to bite her in the general]).
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And ironically, for Sanders to pull the plug on his campaign, especially in the wake of an effervescent victory in Indiana, would be to short-circuit its very essence. It would undercut the meme and the meaning of Sanders’ whole campaign — neatly distilled in his post-Indiana intention to “fight until the last vote is cast.”
He’s already reckoned with the competition, the consternation over his continuing to run, and with the outcome that’s all but written already. With Sanders, it’s something he can live with.
In for a penny, in for a pounding.
And why not? Like it or not, in ways that further what democracy is and what democracy means, the Sanders campaign has earned the right to run its course, for better or worse. No Alliser Thorne gets to intervene. In this game for a throne, this year’s Jon Snow must exit by his own hand.
Image credits: Sanders as Jon Snow (detail of photo illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast). Super Bernie: Creator unknown. Clinton-Sanders photo illustration: via salon.com. Clinton lower: CNN.
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