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Vox: Bernie Sanders is the Democrats’ real 2020 frontrunner

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N

Nerazar

Member
Harmen said:
You say that like it is the same people saying that. Trump is too old as well, and cannot even formulate proper sentences anymore. Just watch an old interview where Trump actually can talk relatively normal to see some of the the effects of ageing.
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It is not the same group, but the dismissive "thanks, no"-tone in this thread surprised me. And most of it is based on age, not on competence. I would still vote for an older Bernie against Trump. Age wouldn't matter in the next election except when Trump resigns and someone else will run for the GOP. Everyone is old at that level, that age difference is negligible.

But I see the appeal of a young Macron / Trudeau type of front runner. But that probably won't happen with the democrats now. That party now has a stigma and it should get rid of the old elites quickly.
 
N

night814

Member
fantomena said:
I still remember the woman who was interviewed by Daily Show during the primaries.

"Im a conservative, Trump is a jackass, but if he's the GOP ticket, so be it".
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Very true, Republicans go all in with their chosen one where Dems feel dejected when the person they wanted drops out. Lots of Bernie supports were so anti-Clinton they at least said openly that they would either vote for Trump or not vote at all which is rediculous.

Bernie is an independent not a Democrat people realize this right. It's a big part of why the DNC didn't go full ham on him even when he started naturally succeeding.

Bernie 2020 is a non starter because I seriously doubt he would run again.
 
S

Skellig Gra

Member
Nerazar said:
It is not the same group, but the dismissive "thanks, no"-tone in this thread surprised me. And most of it is based on age, not on competence. I would still vote for an older Bernie against Trump. Age wouldn't matter in the next election except when Trump resigns and someone else will run for the GOP. Everyone is old at that level, that age difference is negligible.

But I see the appeal of a young Macron / Trudeau type of front runner. But that probably won't happen with the democrats now. That party now has a stigma and it should get rid of the old elites quickly.
Click to expand...

GAF will pretty much all vote for anyone put against Trump so its not a relevant talking point. The concern is the general voting public who will use any excuse to either not vote at all or vote some bullshit third party candidate. Meanwhile every Republican voter always falls in line.
 
I

Imperfected

Member
Nerazar said:
It is not the same group, but the dismissive "thanks, no"-tone in this thread surprised me. And most of it is based on age, not on competence. I would still vote for an older Bernie against Trump. Age wouldn't matter in the next election except when Trump resigns and someone else will run for the GOP. Everyone is old at that level, that age difference is negligible.
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Age still matters in that case because you're giving up the advantage of running a young candidate. To put it another way, if someone's coming at you unarmed you don't say, "I should throw down my gun, because he's unarmed so if we're both unarmed it won't matter anyway." You should just, you know, be the one with the gun.
 
R

Rootbeer

Banned
I love Bernie and hope he stays active in the party for a long time to come. But we have to put to rest these pipedreams about him running again in 2020 so we can formulate and focus on a plan that actually has a shot in hell at becoming a reality.

Too old. We need someone who can energize the party and get young voters out of the house.
 
D

Deleted member 231381

Unconfirmed Member
Bam Bam Baklava said:
Wouldn't it be better for all involved if he encouraged a spiritual successor of a younger age to run? Especially considering nobody knows how the story with his wife will end.
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I mean, I agree, but... who is this person? None of the younger Democrats are especially close to Sanders. The Democrats have the same problem as Labour does in the UK - the party became an ideological monoculture and slowly strangled out any alternative kind of thought. All the younger candidates tend to be very clearly Clintonites ideologically, just as most of the younger Labour candidates ended up being Blairites (or Brownites) ideologically. When the mood for change arrived, in Labour, it had to pick up one of the few remaining 'fossils' of an older ideology, since everything new had been squeezed out. You see the same problem with the Democrats - there is no young Bernie.

Almost the entire Democratic field of candidates is pretty poor. All of them represent the liberal intelligentsia, come from excellent universities/law schools, live in relatively urban areas, and represent a totally different class to the type of voter that went Obama -> Trump.
 
A

Aaronrules380

Member
Nerazar said:
It is not the same group, but the dismissive "thanks, no"-tone in this thread surprised me. And most of it is based on age, not on competence. I would still vote for an older Bernie against Trump. Age wouldn't matter in the next election except when Trump resigns and someone else will run for the GOP. Everyone is old at that level, that age difference is negligible.

But I see the appeal of a young Macron / Trudeau type of front runner. But that probably won't happen with the democrats now. That party now has a stigma and it should get rid of the old elites quickly.
Click to expand...

I don't think Bernie is particularly competent either tbh. His one selling point was always charisma, not actual skill. And age absolutely matters because you want a president who will be capable of making it through 2 terms
 
H

Hopfrog

Member
Whatever you feel about Bernie age is absolutely a concern here. We know Reagan was dealing with Alzheimer's during the final years of his presidency and Trump has shown signs of possible cognitive issues which could be age-related. Would prefer to not play the health lottery if possible, and there are more than a few young, ambitious possibilities on the Democratic side. Bernie could play kingmaker if he is willing.
 
Vigilant Walrus

Vigilant Walrus

Member
I love Bernie Sanders, but I also have to wonder; His age?

Secondly, 2020 is going to cost more than 2 billion USD.

It is going to be so expensive, that it seems impossible for Bernie to raise the 500+ million USD for his campaign with small grassroot donations. He lacked so much money the last time he gave up on the south.
So what can he do? If he goes in on the corporate finances, he will look like a hypocrtical. He has spend DECADES talking about the conflict of interest between large corporations and politicians.
His only shot, should he be the frontrunner, is that he will be carried by a massive coalition who will push anyone as a alternative to Trump.


But isn't it too early? In the next 2 years, we're going to see a lot of auotmation. I think that in 2019 we're going to see a lot more people displaced in many sectors. Particularly trucking, retail and even some unforseen sectors like business and perhaps banking.
If this means that people will gravitate towards social policies, and warm up to the idea of universal basic income, then that can be a key factor in Sanders, or someone who shares his policies.
It can also backfire- if the next two-three years turn disasterous, and the right gets more of a chokehold it can create a counter-movement that puts more gasoline on the fire. It might be that we've not even scratched the surface of bad decisions that is going to be made by the voter as things are going from bad to worse over the next 4-8 years.

People do not trust any politician. Then they elected Trump because he was not a politician. In 2020 people are going to decide if they want a non-politician over a politician, and they are going to decide if socialism is still a dirty word.

Lastly, who would center, christian and blue dog democrats cooperate with "purity based" politicians like Elizabeth warren and Sanders? These people are seen by many as having impossible standards.
Like last time, a lot of people like Warren and Sanders, but think it's not doable. Before Bill Clinton, the democrats lost a lot of elections due to their progressive nature. A lot of Americans feel that it's just to conservative, and Democrats win when it's about business, business, business and less pronounced social policies.



So what to do? Hillary was supposed to be the safe bet, but 2016 was not a normal election. Is 2020 going to be a election year when people want a "a safe" candidate? We're not even half into Trumps first term, and everyone is already exhausted and in disbelief. I really wonder what the attitude will be in 2019.
 
A

Aurongel

Member
andthebeatgoeson said:
If anything, this past cycle reinforced the value of polls.

I mean, what do you have to do, to mentally accept this argument, after what happened in this election? Leaps? Jumping? Drugs?

I'll stick to alcohol.
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As has been stated repeatedly, the polls during this past election weren't egregiously problematic, the punditry around them and selective misreading a were. This is something that both this forum and Nate Silver were guilty of.

FiveThirtyEight had a good piece that broke down how Trump's win was perfectly within the margin of error for most major pollsters.
 
K

kirblar

Member
Crab said:
I mean, I agree, but... who is this person? None of the younger Democrats are especially close to Sanders. The Democrats have the same problem as Labour does in the UK - the party became an ideological monoculture and slowly strangled out any alternative kind of thought. All the younger candidates tend to be very clearly Clintonites ideologically, just as most of the younger Labour candidates ended up being Blairites (or Brownites) ideologically. When the mood for change arrived, in Labour, it had to pick up one of the few remaining 'fossils' of an older ideology, since everything new had been squeezed out. You see the same problem with the Democrats - there is no young Bernie.

Almost the entire Democratic field of candidates is pretty poor. All of them represent the liberal intelligentsia, come from excellent universities/law schools, live in relatively urban areas, and represent a totally different class to the type of voter that went Obama -> Trump.
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The Democratic party evolved this way because those racist, isolationist voters you're so enamored with abandoned them in the wake of civil rights legislation because they stopped voting for Democrats. Primary Colors: On Democratic Presidential Politics, Neoliberalism, and the White Working Class

The Left’s story of the split between the white working class and the Party goes something like this. The white working class has, over the past several decades, seen a devastating decline in stable, well-paying industrial work. The Republican and Democratic parties have both proven unwilling to address their plight in part because both have been captured by neoliberalism—the valorization of free market principles and supply-side logic across all areas of public policy—with the GOP naturally falling a bit harder for it than the once progressive Democratic Party. Both parties have cooperated in making matters worse by hacking away at the social safety net and further empowering multinational corporations and the wealthy through deregulation, passing tax cuts, pursuing free trade and undermining unions—all policy aims that have effectively redistributed wealth upwards and significantly deepened economic inequality. What’s more, Democratic liberals have spent years responding to the racist and bigoted attitudes of many white working class voters by calling them racist and bigoted, which has alienated them.

The white working class, dismayed, has responded to all this, and the lack of a truly pro-worker party, by either dropping out of the voting pool entirely or voting for Republicans who unlike the Democrats, are, refreshingly, nicer to them than they are to African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and LGBT people. Right-wing populist appeals, it is argued, have been the only truly populist appeals for decades. Consequently, white working class voters have swung right, in the direction of the only politicians that seem to acknowledge their pain—politicians who have, in fact, been deepening it even more than the liberal politicians who have ceased paying attention. The white working class, in short, has responded to the horrors neoliberalism has inflicted upon them by doing either nothing at all or voting for the more neoliberal party.

None of this, the Left says, was inevitable. Liberals have erred, they argue, in casting all working class whites as politically and perhaps morally irredeemable for the undeniable bigotry and xenophobia of some. And in pushing a narrative of the white working class’ exodus that centers their historical resistance to civil rights and identity politics, they say, liberals have ignored the class dynamics that have been the real driving forces behind their disillusionment—dynamics exacerbated by the Democratic Party’s decision to face right and commit itself deeply to neoliberal economics, as exemplified by the ascendancy of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). It was their move to the center, coupled with their disdain for white workers they see as marked by a kind of original sin that finally pushed those voters away and continues to do so. Blue collar whites have abandoned the Democratic Party simply because the Democratic Party abandoned progressive policies that spoke to the needs of workers and came to loathe the working class itself.

***

It’s a story both simple and substantially untrue. In fact, the decline in white working class support for the Democratic Party at the presidential level began well before the party’s retreat from progressivism and pro-worker politics. Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, and Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who presciently identified the disenfranchised white working class as a force to be reckoned with nearly 20 years ago in America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, laid out the timeline of their departure from the Democratic Party’s coalition in a 2008 Brookings working paper called “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class”. According to Teixeira and Abramowitz, the Democratic vote among whites without college degrees fell from an average of 55 percent in the 1960 and 1964 elections to 35 in the 1968 and 1972 elections—a decline of 20 points in just over a decade. What happened during the 1960s? Had the Party moved substantially to the center? Had the Party become less committed to progressive social programs that would help struggling whites? To the contrary—the 1960s and two Democratic administrations brought the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the expansion of Social Security benefits, the revival of food stamps, minimum wage increases, the launch of the Head Start early childhood education program for lower-income children, increased federal funding for public education, the creation of the Job Corps youth employment program and other vocational education programs, and a dizzying array of other government initiatives that constituted the most expansive array of progressive successes since the New Deal. None of it mattered.

Perhaps, as the labor researcher Penny Lewis has suggested, the white working class was more perturbed by the Vietnam War than popular accounts of the antiwar movement—which commonly frame blue-collar workers as having been hawks pitted against young, relatively well-to-do college students—have portrayed. But most of the drop in support, as nearly every historian surveying the period has agreed, can be attributed to the Party’s full embrace of not only civil rights, but also social liberalism more broadly. The Party emerged from the 1960s championing both economic and social justice and believed it could continue to do so without losing the downscale white voters it had relied on for years. As the election of 1968 made clear, it could not. Those voters fled to Richard Nixon and the segregationist former governor of Alabama George Wallace, who together won 64 percent of the white working class.

Those voters never really looked back. The theory that they would have had the Party offered up truly economically progressive candidates has to contend with the failed candidacies of George McGovern in 1972, whom Nixon trounced with 70 percent of the white working class vote and the staunchly pro-labor and union-backed Walter Mondale, whom neoliberal archdaemon Ronald Reagan trounced with 65 percent of their vote in 1984. Since 1968, two Democratic presidential candidates have done well with the white working class: Jimmy Carter, who dramatically outperformed George McGovern in the demographic by running as a conservative Democrat against Ford in 1976, and the DLC-anointed bubba neoliberal Bill Clinton. Ross Perot’s insurgent populism and his warning that NAFTA would produce a “giant sucking sound” as blue-collar jobs were lost to Mexico failed, ultimately, to prevent the man who backed and signed NAFTA from winning narrow pluralities of the white working class vote in 1992 and 1996.

This is not a voting record that inspires confidence that the white working class has been itching, deep down, to cast votes against neoliberal economics upon hearing the right progressive pitch. But looking at general election results offers only an incomplete picture of the white working class’ exit from the Democratic fold. They largely tell a now-familiar story about Democratic collapse among blue-collar and other whites in the south that masks the gradual erosion of white working class support in northern states where Trump won. It’s the Democratic primaries in the wake of the New Deal coalition’s final rupture in 1968 that provide the clearest picture of how even the portion of the white working class presumably most sympathetic to left-of-center politics—northern blue-collar whites—has moved rightward.
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D

dynamitejim

Member
Crab said:
Almost the entire Democratic field of candidates is pretty poor. All of them represent the liberal intelligentsia, come from excellent universities/law schools, live in relatively urban areas, and represent a totally different class to the type of voter that went Obama -> Trump.
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Most of America lives in relatively urban areas. Most of America wants their kids to go to good schools and get jobs where they don't have to kill themselves. And why are you so concerned about what Trump voters want?
 
Hoho for breakfast

Hoho for breakfast

Member
I voted for him in the primaries and I'd vote for him again. I hope he runs. The age narrative doesn't even matter if he runs with someone like minded and younger.

I bet even if he does run though he doesn't win because the media will be against him and Americans as a collective are like a hive minded box of rocks.
 
D

DonShula

Member
We finally have the Clinton albatross freed from the neck of the Democratic Party (no offense, Hil, I voted for ya) and now we want to put our money on Bernie so we can relive 2016?

No thanks. Dems need fresh faces running and have plenty of them. Open competition in the primary is the best shot at winning. We need to be parading fifteen of these suckers to the debates like the GOP did last year. Let the chips fall where they may and whoever gaffes the least rise to the top.
 
S

Soroc

Member
I like Bernie but felt as the primary period wore on he felt a little weak and couldn't move past his stump speeches which was unfortunate. I think the party need to go in his direction to the left so that we can finally start compromising at the middle again. But I too think he is just too old at that point. If Biden is truly interested he probably is the best bet for the Democratic party.
 
L

Loxley

Member
Hopfrog said:
Whatever you feel about Bernie age is absolutely a concern here. We know Reagan was dealing with Alzheimer's during the final years of his presidency and Trump has shown signs of possible cognitive issues which could be age-related. Would prefer to not play the health lottery if possible, and there are more than a few young, ambitious possibilities on the Democratic side. Bernie could play kingmaker if he is willing.
Click to expand...

I mean, look at McCain. Dude is 80 right now and all you have to do is watch him during the Comey testimonies to see that age has caught up with him - he could barely form a coherent sentence. Now imagine giving him the most stressful job on the planet that requires a ton of energy and mental fortitude.
 
T

theWB27

Member
Hollywood Duo said:
GAF will pretty much all vote for anyone put against Trump so its not a relevant talking point. The concern is the general voting public who will use any excuse to either not vote at all or vote some bullshit third party candidate. Meanwhile every Republican voter always falls in line.
Click to expand...

Which is part of why we lose so much.
 
A

Ac30

Member
Sweeney Tom said:
This is how Trump gets re-elected
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I was looking at that approval tracker on 538 and while Trump is certainly historically unpopular both Obama and Bush won re-election with approval ratings hovering barely over 50% - we'll certainly see his approval jump during the 2020 campaign, even if he's done nothing of value. That incumbent advantage
 
H

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Bernie should find a younger surrogate with a clean record, a lot of charisma and actually has some decent ideas and drive to improve this country and push the fuck out of them. Just voting for Bernie seems like its stemming the tide by 2020 by having Bernie run.
 
I

Instro

Member
I'll vote for whoever isn't Trump, but maybe we should avoid anointing someone like last time, and just have a more open field.
 
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