Is Bernie Sanders the Democrats’ Goldwater, Reagan, or Trump? – By Noah Millman (The Week) / Feb 25 2020
The ghost of George McGovern walks the Earth — or, at least, haunts the pages of center-left and center-right columnists. As Bernie Sanders’ campaign continues its winning streak, and begins to attract bandwagoning support from undecided voters looking for a winner, it’s not just Michael Bloomberg wondering whether the Democrats aren’t repeating their worst electoral decision in modern times, and giving President Trump’s re-election campaign exactly what it wants.
But the McGovern analogy has a great many problems. For one thing, McGovern wasn’t an across-the-board revolutionary; he was a moralist whose rise was powered by a specific issue: forthright opposition to the Vietnam War. Far from presenting himself as the champion of the party’s traditional labor base, that base was the biggest reason why McGovern lost in the general election, as the AFL-CIO failed to endorse for the first time since its founding.
McGovern also won not by attracting a clear plurality of support that snowballed into a majority, but by cannily exploiting the new nomination system put in place after 1968. Finally, it’s important to recall that McGovern was crushed by Richard Nixon, whose approval ratings had barely dipped below 50 percent during his first term, and who combined partisan rhetorical pugnacity with a genuinely moderate stance in government. In many ways, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Howard Dean in 2004 are better analogies for McGovern’s 1972 campaign than Bernie Sanders’ crusade, at least in its 2020 incarnation.
In fact, assuming Sanders wins the nomination, it’ll be the first time the modern Democratic Party has never experienced a phenomenon quite like it: a candidate of an ideological faction running explicitly against the party leadership to take the party over and restore it to its purported true soul, and winning. But the Republican Party has experienced something similar — three times, in fact: In 1964, 1980, and 2016.
Perhaps those precedents tell us more about what Sanders could portend.
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