The Establishment Didn’t Destroy Bernie Sanders – By William Saletan (Slate) / March 11 2020
He destroyed himself.
Tuesday was a bad day for Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator lost decisively to former Vice President Joe Biden in Michigan, Missouri, and Mississippi. Sanders is falling behind in the delegate count, and in 25 primaries and caucuses so far, he has managed to crack 37 percent of the vote in only three, even as the field has narrowed. This low ceiling is the story of his demise. Sanders hasn’t just failed to bring millions of new voters into the process, as he promised. He has also failed, in state after state, to broaden his share of the existing Democratic electorate.
If you look back at Sanders’ share of the vote in each primary, he hasn’t actually lost ground. In Iowa and New Hampshire, he got a quarter of the vote. In Nevada, he got a third. In South Carolina, he got a fifth. On Super Tuesday, he stayed in the same range, drawing about a quarter of the vote in the states he lost and a third of the vote in the states he won. What hurt him was that Biden increased his share of the vote, while Sanders didn’t. As other candidates dropped out, their voters went to Biden, not Sanders. And one reason for this pattern is Sanders’ constant message of antagonism. He has cultivated enemies instead of friends. Now he’s paying the price.
For months, Sanders has talked about “taking on the Democratic establishment.” He ran on that message in Iowa and New Hampshire. Then, after becoming the front-runner, he went around the country boasting that his critics were right to fear him. At a rally in California on Feb. 17, he gloated that his enemies were “trembling” and “crying on television.” On Feb. 21, the day before he won the Nevada caucuses, he tweeted, “I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.”
Running against the establishment is standard populism. But to win with that message, you have to define the enemy narrowly. The more people you denounce as part of the establishment, the more you scare politicians and voters. If you’re proposing single-payer health insurance, for example, the smart move is to stipulate that you’re just targeting insurance companies. Instead, Sanders has threatened the whole medical sector. “We will take on the health care industry,” he vowed at a rally last week. On Monday, he repeated that line to a crowd in St. Louis. On CNN, he blasted the industry for supporting Biden: “The health care industry that is taking out their checkbooks? That is the establishment. We are taking them on.”
Sanders also attacks the press. Voters don’t care about the press, but they get antsy when a candidate sounds paranoid. Instead of playing to reporters’ liberal sympathies, Sanders depicts them as puppets of “the corporate media.” He accuses them of “freaking out” over his success and hurling “venom” at his campaign. Last week, when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pressed Sanders about his failure to turn out new voters, he insisted he was doing well, given that he was “taking on the corporate media.”
Continue to article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/bernie-sanders-anti-establishment-lost-voters.html
