Thank you all very much for being here. Let me begin by acknowledging that last night’s results were disappointing. We lost in the largest state up for grabs yesterday, the state of Michigan. We lost in Mississippi, Missouri, and Idaho.
On the other hand, we won in North Dakota and we lead the vote count in the state of Washington, the second-largest state contested yesterday. With 67 percent of the votes having been counted in Washington, we are a few thousand votes on top.
Poll after poll, including exit polls, show that a strong majority of the American people support our progressive agenda. The American people are deeply concerned about the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in this country. The American people want the wealthy and large, profitable corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes. And the American people want a single-payer national health care system that eliminates copays, deductibles, and premiums, guaranteeing health care to everyone in America as a human right.
Joe Biden is opposed to guaranteeing health care as a human right – on television just the other day, he said he might veto a single-payer health care bill if he is elected President and Congress sends it to his desk. This position is unacceptable, especially in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic we are currently facing. But many Democrats are voting for Joe Biden anyway. Why, you ask? Because they believe he is the safe choice to take on Donald Trump in November.
We need to correct this misconception now, before it is too late. If you want to beat Donald Trump in November, you should vote for me.
I want you to think back to 2016. The same people who are telling you that Joe Biden is the safe choice to take on Donald Trump today were telling you that Hillary Clinton was the safe choice to take on Donald Trump four years ago. We all know how that turned out. Let us not make the same mistake again.
I am the most electable Democrat for two main reasons. First, our campaign continues to win the vast majority of the votes of younger people. Young people’s votes and enthusiasm were a major reason why Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012. Hillary Clinton’s inability to inspire young voters in 2016 was a major reason why she lost that election, and young people also do not trust Joe Biden. You may be committed to voting for either Joe Biden or me in November, but whether we ask them to or not, young progressives – a key constituency we need to beat Trump – can only be expected to knock on doors and vote if I am the nominee.
Why are young progressives uninspired by Joe Biden? It’s because he has been on the wrong side of important fights for decades. I have a 100% pro-choice voting record; Joe Biden has voted over and over again to restrict access to abortion and contraception. When I was in college, I organized to desegregate housing and schools; years later, in the Senate, Joe Biden stood with southern racists and opposed desegregating schools. I’ve fought for free college; Joe Biden helped create the student debt crisis. I opposed the Iraq War; Joe Biden cheered it on. On issue after issue, I’ve been on the right side and Joe Biden has been on the wrong side.
That brings me to the second reason I am the most electable Democrat: I am the polar opposite of Donald Trump. Trump is a pathological liar who is running a corrupt administration. I am recognized even by Republican voters who disagree with my policies for my honesty and integrity.
The contrast will not be so stark with Joe Biden. When Biden points out that Trump has spent his time as President enriching himself and his friends, Trump will point out that Biden’s Wall Street donors got the policies they paid for during Biden’s Senate career. When Biden points out that Trump lies repeatedly, Trump will point out that Biden has plagiarized speeches, fabricated stories, and lied about his record of supporting Social Security cuts. When Biden points out that Trump is a racist and sexist, Trump will point out that Biden was an architect of mass incarceration, advanced racist stereotypes about single mothers, and frequently makes women feel uncomfortable. Even when Biden criticizes Trump for putting kids in cages, Trump will point out that the cages were built and kids first put in them when Biden was Vice President.
Let us be clear: Donald Trump is worse than Joe Biden. But let us also be clear: being better than Donald Trump is not enough. It is not enough for the millions of people who need health care and it is not enough to win an election. Democrats tried it already, in 2016, and we lost. We should not try it again.
So if you live in one of the 26 states that hasn’t voted yet, please tune in to the first one-on-one debate of this campaign on Sunday night. You will see then what you already know now if you’ve seen Joe Biden speak recently or watched my Fox News town hall: in addition to being the only candidate who has fought for you for decades, I am also the candidate best-positioned to defeat Donald Trump.
Donald Trump must be defeated, and I will do everything in my power to make that happen. I hope you will, too, by casting your vote for me in your upcoming primary. Thank you all very much.
The Hillary Clinton campaign is “alarmed by the drift of young voters toward the third-party candidates,” according to the New York Times. So are many Clinton supporters, including Clara Jeffery and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. Jeffery says she has “never hated millennials more,” while Drum directs his hatred not at millennials but at Bernie Sanders, whom Drum argues “convinced young voters that Hillary Clinton was a shifty, corrupt, lying shill who cared nothing for real progressive values – despite a literal lifetime of fighting for them.” Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA is “launching a multimillion-dollar digital campaign that talks about what’s at stake and how a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump.”
These reactions misunderstand and condescend to millennials and ignore vital context about two main points.
First, millennials have very good reasons to oppose a Clinton presidency. As I’ve tried to explain to Drum before (he has ignored me), many millennials, myself included, grew up with his perception of Hillary Clinton – that she is a good Democrat fighting the mean Republicans and subject to a relentless stream of unfair criticism from the corporate press. It has only been during my adult life, after a lot of research, that I’ve developed my current view: Clinton may sometimes be the subject of unfair press coverage, but she also has a large, influential group of media cheerleaders and has been on the wrong side of numerous issues important to populations I care about: war, criminal justice, immigrant rights, LGBT rights, the death penalty, international trade, and anti-poverty policy, to name a few. Drum’s idea that Bernie Sanders’ accurate critiques of Hillary Clinton’s record hoodwinked millennials into our current views is both patronizing and inaccurate.
Millennials recognize that third-party voting comes with tradeoffs. While it does increase the likelihood that the worse of two major-party candidates will emerge victorious in an election (though much less so than third-party critics claim), it also has the potential to help break the two-party system open in the long run and holds Democrats accountable for ignoring the policies their base desires, policies that would help millions of disadvantaged people. “Whether you think the pros outweigh the cons depends on a number of factors,” as I’ve argued before, “including how much optimism you have about a third-party voting bloc’s ability to use its power effectively and how much worse you think Trump is than Clinton.”
Which brings me to my second point: while it’s perfectly fine for someone to believe that defeating Trump should be our top priority, anyone espousing that viewpoint should have supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. The evidence overwhelmingly indicated – for months, getting stronger all the time – that Sanders would have been more likely than Clinton to beat Trump in a general election matchup. The only rebuttal to that evidence – that Sanders hadn’t faced real criticism and that his numbers would tank when he did, if he eventually became the nominee – fell apart very quickly upon inspection.
In fact, what drew Jeffery’s ire was a now-deleted paragraph from a New York Times story that confirmed why Sanders would have been more electable than Clinton:
The third-party candidates draw their strongest support from younger voters. Twenty-six percent of voters ages 18 to 29 say they plan to vote for Mr. Johnson, and another 10 percent back Ms. Stein. A little more than one in five political independents say they will vote for one of the third-party candidates.
Drum points out that millennial support for third-party candidates in the referenced poll is a bit higher than it typically appears to be (he also links to a FiveThirtyEight analysis suggesting that it is strongest among people under 25), but he admits that “Clinton is clearly doing worse among millennials than Obama did four years ago.” These results were completely predictable; millennials and independents were the groups among which Sanders most dominated Clinton in the primary and are two constituencies for whom support for Democrats (and/or showing up in November) is most likely to be conditional. “Voters in these groups – unlike voters in Clinton’s key constituencies – may very well abandon the Democrats if Clinton is the party’s nominee,” I wrote in March. That’s exactly what appears to be happening.
Despite the foreseeability of this result during the primary, Drum asserted that Clinton was “almost certain to be more electable in November than a self-declared democratic socialist,” citing exactly no evidence to back up this claim. It seems odd that he, Jeffery, and other Democrats spent so little of their time analyzing the electability evidence during the primary, given their intense focus on beating Trump today. If they had, they would have known what people like me had been trying to tell them for a very long time – large numbers of millennials and Independents who would vote for Sanders might very well not vote for Clinton – and, if beating Trump was their prime objective, spent their time pleading with older Democratic voters to support Sanders.
Millennial voting patterns are thus not only a product of voters’ legitimate analyses and electoral strategy; they’re also entirely expected. Those upset about them who backed Clinton in the primary and/or advanced the incorrect notion that she was more electable than Sanders have nobody to “hate” but themselves.
In Pennsylvania, the biggest delegate prize on Tuesday, April 26, 11 percent of Democratic primary voters indicated in exit polls that “electability” was the “candidate quality” they cared about most. Of those voters, 83 percent cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton.
The results were similar in Connecticut and Maryland and have been pretty consistent throughout the entire country; the 8 to 21 percent of voters who value electability more than anything else have overwhelmingly voted for Clinton in every state in which exit polling is available except Vermont (where Clinton got “only” 50 percent of the votes based on this criterion). The strongly held belief among Democratic primary voters – at least, those Democratic primary voters who care most about the electability criterion – seems to be that Clinton is more likely than Bernie Sanders to win a head-to-head general election matchup.
This belief, however, is completely at odds with the evidence. Polling data and voting results clearly imply that Sanders would match up better against any of the Republican candidates than Clinton would. If voters who cared about electability had been aware of this evidence when voting, Sanders could very well be on his way to wrapping up the Democratic nomination (rather than facing a very narrow, though not impossible, path to victory).
I don’t personally value perceived electability very much: I care more about candidate records and values, electability often ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy and, given that it requires speculation about numerous unknown factors, electability cannot be gauged with certainty. But I’ve written about it during this election cycle both because there are people who do care and because a fact-free media narrative about electability has been sowing misinformation among Democratic primary voters.
Head-to-head polling matchups against potential Republican candidates are the most direct evidence we have on the question of electability. As the graph below illustrates, those polls clearly favor Sanders, and they’ve done so since before voters in the first primary state (Iowa) headed to their caucus locations.
Pundits continue to insist, as they have for months, that these poll results are “meaningless” (or, at best, that they “overstate [Sanders’] general-election prospects”). They argue that Sanders “hasn’t been attacked” yet by Republicans and that, if attacks began to air, “his advantage over [Clinton] would disappear.” Yet Sanders has been attacked by the GOP; Donald Trump has been calling Sanders a “maniac” and “communist” for the last six months, Right-wingmediaoutlets have been telling people that, under Sanders, “your paycheck will feel the Bern,” and Future 45, a Republican Super PAC, launched an ad campaign back in February intended “to start educating Americans about [Sanders’] out-of-touch record.” In fact, the “glaring [general election] vulnerabilities” one columnist described Sanders as having back in February – being old, being labeled a “socialist,” and wanting to raise taxes – are all things that Hillary Clinton and/or her surrogates have already attacked him for during the primary season.
GOP operatives would surely intensify their attacks on Sanders if he became the Democratic nominee. But the fact of the matter is that head-to-head polling in April is often predictive of general election outcomes and that, in spite of numerous attacks leveled against him over the past few months, Sanders’ popularity has continued to rise steadily. Clinton’s popularity, as the chart below shows, has been consistently headed in the opposite direction.
In addition, young voters, who “arguably won both the 2008 and 2012 elections for Barack Obama,” prefer Sanders to Clinton by very large margins. So do Independents. If the Democrats want to secure these critical voting blocs in November, the next two graphs strongly suggest that they’d be best off with Bernie Sanders as their nominee.
In short, the electability evidence overwhelmingly favors Sanders, and most voters who have seen it, as I’ve been unsurprised to discover while phone banking and canvassing on Sanders’ behalf, find it convincing. The problem is that most people haven’t seen it and/or have been told, erroneously, that it doesn’t matter; that’s the most likely explanation for the exit poll results we’ve seen thus far.
Just for fun, I decided to see what the election would look like in an alternate universe, one in which this evidence was widely available to all voters. Those who prioritized electability would at the very least split evenly between the two candidates, but would more likely vote for Sanders in margins as large as those by which, in the actual results, they’ve broken for Clinton.
Holding every other voter’s preferences constant, these scenarios would have drastically shifted election outcomes. If voters prioritizing electability had been equally as likely to break for Sanders, Sanders would have won Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Nevada. Clinton’s pledged delegate lead would have fallen from 287 to 129, a total that would have been viewed as surmountable. And if Sanders dominated among these voters, he would have won New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as well. As the graph below shows, increased awareness of electability evidence could very well have put Sanders ahead of Clinton by 83 pledged delegates.
In other words, if the facts on electability had been publicized and everything else had remained constant, Sanders might today be the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.
That’s obviously a huge “if” and it doesn’t in any way change reality: Clinton is winning big and time is running out. But electability hypotheticals provide some insight into how the 2016 Democratic primary process, like far too many of our public debates, has been driven more by misleading media narratives than by the facts.
I know, I know – as Sanders likes to remind us, “telling the truth” is considered a “radical idea” in American politics. But as his candidacy has also underscored, that certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
Update (6/5/16): Adam Johnson has thoroughly debunked “The Myth That Sanders Hasn’t Been Criticized.”
A nontrivial portion of online comments are going to be unconstructive and/or offensive. Especially when a columnist writes something provocative, a lot of people are going to be unhappy about it, and many of them, bolstered by the relative anonymity and psychological distance the Internet affords, will respond with vitriol. That said, there are actually a lot of thoughtful readers out there, and even angry responses can sometimes contain good points. Authors who take the time to consider the feedback they receive – to parse the constructive commentary from the trash – can improve their arguments and demonstrate that they’ve really thought through the fairness and implications of what they’ve written.
Unfortunately, many authors don’t do that. And during this election cycle, this failure in self-reflection has been particularly prevalent among prominent Hillary Clinton supporters.
To illustrate what I mean, I’m going to focus on two columnists, Paul Krugman and Michael Tomasky, who share a few characteristics:
They’ve got wide readership. Krugman is much more well-known and writes for the New York Times, but Tomasky has a decent following in his own right; he’s a columnist for the Daily Beast and also edits Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
They’ve written multiple pieces in support of Clinton that express illiberal ideas and/or distort the truth – that is, they’ve done exactly the type of thing they frequently ding Republicans for doing.
Instead of addressing any of numerous valid criticisms of their pro-Clinton articles, they’ve cast all of their critics as “Bernie Bros” who can’t possibly have anything legitimate to say. In “An Ode to My Berniebro Trolls,” Tomasky asserts that there is “nothing” even potentially objectionable about his previous piece, “Time for Bernie Sanders to Get in Line,” except that perhaps the title was an oversell of his main point: Sanders is “going to lose” and should therefore “lay off the attacks on Hillary Clinton, the Goldman Sachs speeches and all the rest.” Krugman, for his part, has long complained of being subjected to the “Bernie Bro treatment,” which seems to mean that he’s been called “a corrupt tool of the oligarchy.” He has recently claimed that the Sanders campaign itself is “getting pretty ugly in a way the Clinton [campaign] hasn’t.”
If Krugman really believes that “[g]ood ideas don’t have to be sold with fairy dust” and that “getting real is or ought to be a core progressive value,” he isn’t currently putting his money where his mouth is. And Tomasky’s insistence that he’s “open to hearing a smart argument against [his] position” would be a lot more believable if he hadn’t thus far ignored those that have been offered. If Krugman and Tomasky are serious about “getting real,” they will begin to acknowledge and address the following points:
Everyone who has made this point recognizes that some Bernie Sanders supporters make sexist, racist, and/or otherwise offensive comments. We condemn those comments. We also request that Clinton supporters stop using a sexist label themselves, one that, when it isn’t being applied to women or people who don’t even support Bernie Sanders, is marginalizing the millions of women (and people of color; the “Bernie Bro” is often cast as an angry White guy) who are staunch proponents of the Sanders campaign (Sanders is actually way more popular than Clinton among young women and, increasingly, among younger Black and Latino voters). As a recent study confirmed about sexism, Internet harassment is a major issue but is mostly not from “the left in general or Sanders supporters in particular.”
There are numerous examples of Hillary Clinton supporters who make sexist, racist, and homophobic comments as well. Whether you’re subject to such comments is both a function of which candidate you support and how much privilege you have (women and people of color who support any candidate are much more likely to be harassed than White men like Krugman and Tomasky or half-Indian men who are perceived to be White like me, for instance). So let’s not go around calling people “Hillary Elites” or “Hillary Straights” or “Bernie Bros.” Instead, let’s condemn harassment without opportunistically twisting the truth about it and focus our energy on substantive debates about issues.
The Sanders campaign’s critiques of Clinton’s record and platform have been significantly fairer than the Clinton campaign’s misleading and/or untrue attacks on Sanders.
The only specific “attack” on Clinton that Tomasky actually attributes to Sanders is his call for Clinton to release the transcripts of three speeches Goldman Sachs paid her $225,000 (each) to make during the past few years. But Sanders’ critique here is completely fair (as is what Tomasky calls Sanders’ “anti-Rahm Emanuel tincture”). Clinton has repeatedly claimed that the money she receives from Wall Street doesn’t influence her; the American people have a right to know how her remarks to bankers comport with her professed commitment to regulate them (though how her comments could possibly look as bad as her continued refusal to share them is anyone’s guess).
To be fair, the precise definition of “attack” is open for debate, but despite Krugman’sassertions to the contrary, the fact that Clinton’s campaign has been much more insidious isn’t. Throughout the primary, the Clinton campaign has repeatedly distorted the truth. Clinton has disingenuously accused Sanders of sexism and racism, made false statements about his health care plan and history of health care advocacy, and misled the public about his record on the auto industry, immigration, Wall Street, and a variety of other issues. Her team has also engaged in red-baiting, trashed taxes Democrats are supposed to support, and co-opted the language of intersectionality to inaccurately paint Sanders – a rare politician who recognizes the connections between social and economic issues and is advancing a comprehensive social justice agenda – as a single-issue candidate. Clinton’s campaign might not embody “the most negative campaign of any Democratic presidential candidate…in a presidential primary season” label that her staffers have tried to apply to the Sanders campaign, but the Clinton team’s tactics have been – by far – the most negative in this year’s race.
Sanders has a very strong track record as a legislator and executive.
Tomasky incorrectly argues that Sanders is an ineffective legislator, citing a lack of cosponsors on his bills as evidence that he doesn’t work well with Congress. Tomasky omits, however, that Sanders recently negotiated a bipartisan bill “to expand veterans’ access to health care” with John McCain, a bill which is widely viewed as a huge success. Sanders’ Republican colleagues, despite their disagreements with him, liked working with Sanders and praised him for his integrity and work ethic, while Democratic Senators said that, without Sanders, they “don’t think [they] would have gotten [the bill] done.”
Tomasky also fails to mention that Sanders has mastered the art of adding power-balancing amendments to larger bills; his accomplishments include (but are not limited to) securing funding for community health centers in the Affordable Care Act, blocking imports made with child labor, and increasing transparency about one-time government officials’ subsequent employment opportunities.
Sanders’ record as mayor of Burlington also shows that he’s an excellent executive. He has a history of setting big goals, fighting for them, and eventually working out the best deal he believes he can. The citizens of Vermont love Sanders for a reason – they know his record a lot better than Krugman and Tomasky do, and it’s a damn good one.
If anything, I’d prefer Sanders were much less into what Krugman calls “hardheaded realism” than he actually is. That’s because Krugman is wrong about how to make change; we are served best not by “accepting half loaves as being better than none,” but by reframing issues and forcing policymakers’ hands. As climate expert Bill McKibben explains, major accomplishments like gay marriage and civil rights legislation weren’t driven by leaders all too willing to compromise; they were driven by “big, impassioned movement[s] that cleverly changed the zeitgeist.” Sanders gets this dynamic more than any major presidential candidate in recent memory, and that’s why his “political revolution” carries so much potential to change this country’s politics.
All the evidence suggests Sanders is a more “electable” general election candidate than Clinton.
Both Krugman and Tomasky write off the head-to-head polling that has consistently shown Sanders to outperform Clinton in hypothetical general election matchups with Republicans. Tomasky argues that “a billion-dollar onslaught” from the GOP, targeted at the “tax increases he’s proposing,” would tank Sanders. Yet as I’ve explained before, the GOP would also mercilessly attack Clinton, and the idea that those attacks would work better against Sanders is entirely inconsistent with other polling trends. As shown below, Clinton’s favorability ratings have been steadily declining, while Sanders’ have continued to rise as voters have become more familiar with him.
As I’ve also explained before and the graphs below show, Sanders does significantly better than Clinton among two demographic groups key to winning a general election: young people and Independents.
Voters in these groups – unlike voters in Clinton’s key constituencies – may very well abandon the Democrats if Clinton is the party’s nominee. I wouldn’t personally recommend basing your vote on perceived electability, but if that’s what you’re planning to do, the evidence indicates that you should vote for Sanders.
There are substantial, important differences between Sanders and Clinton. These differences are in some respects much larger than the differences between Clinton and various Republicans.
Krugman argues that the differences between Sanders and Clinton “are trivial compared with the yawning gulf with Republicans.” Ironically, the context for those comments – an article about financial policy and donations – provides a compelling counterexample: Wall Street does not like Sanders, but the industry seems to like Clinton more than many of the Republican candidates, as the graph below shows. And though many of them likely agree with Krugman that the differences between Clinton and the Republicans are larger than those between Sanders and Clinton, numerous smart people and policy experts whose existence Krugman ignores believe both that Sanders’ Wall Street plans are much better than Clinton’s and that Sanders is far more likely than Clinton to surround himself with a staff that will execute a power-balancing policy vision.
For an even better example, consider foreign policy. Clinton has embraced an incredibly hawkish position on Israel, used the same foreign policy consulting firm as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (among other politicians), and supported a coup in Honduras in 2009; in fact, she has earned the support of many neoconservatives for her long history of supporting civil liberties violations and aggressive interventions that have resulted in the mistreatment and/or deaths of millions of innocent people. Tomasky is right to point out that Sanders’ doesn’t get particularly high marks on foreign policy from “actual leftists,” but there’s a reason Congresswoman and Iraq War veteran Tulsi Gabbard resigned from the Democratic National Committee to endorse Sanders at the end of February (see video below): he’s much less imperialistic than the typical major party candidate.
Then there’s the death penalty: Sanders opposes it, but Clinton, like the Republicans, is okay with it. There’s also the subject of immigrants’ rights: Clinton’s professed outrage over Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border is hard to reconcile with her repeated support for a border barrier in the past, support she touted as recently as November 2015. Her newfound commitment not to deport children fleeing violence is also hard to believe given her defense of such deportations a mere seven months ago. In contrast, Sanders has consistentlyopposed both a border fence and deportations.
In light of all these facts, Tomasky’s argument that Democrats should refrain from criticizing Hillary Clinton (who he thinks will be the Democratic nominee), like a similar argument from Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos, is a hell of a lot scarier to people like me than a Donald Trump presidency. This undemocratic idea elevates party tribalism over good policymaking and “winning” over holding politicians accountable. It presents a major obstacle to the change the world’s most disadvantaged populations desperately need, change which perpetual endorsements of lesser-of-two-evilsism will never deliver. Such a misguided notion of “political pragmatism undermines progressive goals,” as I’ve argued before.
Sanders still has a legitimate shot to win the Democratic primary.
Half the country still hasn’t cast their ballots and Bernie Sanders isn’t all that far away from the pledged delegate targets he’d need to win the nomination; Tomasky is wrong to assert that “Sanders can’t win the delegate race now.” Yes, winning will be difficult, but there’s still a clear path for him to do so, and as Sanders’ historic upset win in Michigan shows, an election isn’t over until the voters actually cast their ballots. Krugman thinks an extended primary isn’t “good for the Democratic party;” I, on the other hand, think the Clinton coronation he and the Democratic party Establishment have been pushing is a whole lot worse, as it flies in the face of a lot of what the party is supposed to stand for.
All of that said, Krugman and Tomasky are right about one thing: Sanders supporters should avoid the reflexive attribution “of foul and malevolent motives” to Clinton supporters.
I know a lot of awesome Clinton supporters who do great work. People support presidential candidates for a variety of reasons, and instead of jumping to conclusions about the character of those who disagree with us, we should listen to those reasons and evaluate them on their merits. In fact, I’d urge everyone to extend the same courtesy to Bernie Sanders supporters, to Jill Stein supporters, to those who refuse to vote, and yes, even to people who plan to vote for one of the Republican candidates. We should consider the possibility that others have thought through their electoral choices and have entirely legitimate reasons for making them.
At the same time, ethics and evidence matter, and it’s perfectly fine – in fact, it’s essential – to hold voters accountable for attending to them. If you say your top priority is raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, for example, you can’t possibly defend a vote for a Republican this year. You also can’t really explain a vote for Clinton, which is why Sanders supporters were justifiably furious when the Service Employees International Union endorsed Clinton in November.
I suspect that Krugman and Tomasky don’t share all of my values and priorities. We agree on a lot – I enjoy their writing outside of election season and appreciate much of what they advocate for – but they seem much more comfortable with the policy status quo than I am. I reject the idea that public policy must inevitably leave millions of people behind; they very well may not. In Tomasky’s words: “Fine. I can appreciate that.” If more voters share Krugman and Tomasky’s values than share mine, so be it.
The problem, however, is that Krugman and Tomasky haven’t been writing about value disagreements. Instead, rather than acknowledging and responding to the evidence and logical arguments that contradict their claims, they’ve continued to pen inaccurate and/or highly misleading articles for popular media outlets. Is it any wonder that, in response to such widely read misinformation, they’ve received angry responses from Sanders supporters?
My best guess is that Krugman and Tomasky are suffering from a severe case of confirmation bias: they’re convinced that Clinton is the best option and have developed tunnel vision to avoid the cognitive dissonance that actually considering feedback might bring about. But that doesn’t make what they’re doing okay. And given howoftentheyassign “foul and malevolent motives” to Republicans who write fallacious things, they’d do well to reflect on why it is that their readers have recently been doing the same thing to them.
Of those who know who he is, most voters like Bernie Sanders. He is the only major presidential candidate with a positive net favorability rating among the general public. Yet despite these facts and his wildly popular ideas, he remains the underdog in the race for the Democratic nomination. Why?
The answer appears to be perceived electability. When I’ve phone banked for Sanders, I’ve talked to a lot of voters who say they’re a big fan of his, and they’re glad he’s in the race, but they just aren’t sure he can win a general election. They’re scared of the Republicans, they tell me, and their foremost concern is making sure the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is, wins in November.
I think this attitude is misguided, both because there are large and important differences between the Democratic candidates and because electability arguments can be circular, self-fulfilling prophecies. In no small part because electability considerations are speculative, we’re much better served by casting our vote for the candidate whose record and platform is most aligned with our values.
That said, given that a lot of people think about electability, it’s worth looking at some evidence. The numbers indicate that the Democrats’ electoral prospects would be better under Bernie Sanders than under Hillary Clinton for two important reasons:
1. Young people, who arguably won both the 2008 and 2012 elections for Barack Obama, love Sanders. Many do not like Clinton.
In Iowa’s Democratic primary, Sanders beat Clinton among Democrats aged 18-29 by 70 percentage points. In New Hampshire, he won that age group by 65 percentage points. And in the most recent national poll from Quinnipiac University, Sanders held a net favorability rating among 18-34 year-old voters of all political affiliations that was 57 percentage points better than Clinton’s (see graph below). Sanders is more popular among millennials right now than Obama was among young voters in 2008 and 2012.
On voting results alone, my generation won Indiana and North Carolina for Barack Obama in 2008 and Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in 2012. In addition, the youth contribution to electoral success extends beyond the vote; as Pew reported in 2008:
…young people provided not only their votes but also many enthusiastic campaign volunteers. Some may have helped persuade parents and older relatives to consider Obama’s candidacy. And far more young people than older voters reported attending a campaign event while nearly one-in-ten donated money to a presidential candidate.
It is extremely hard to believe that millennials would turn out and vote for Clinton in such large numbers if she becomes the Democratic nominee; over 41,000 people, for example, have already pledged to write Bernie in if he loses to Clinton in the primary. There is also an undeniable “enthusiasm gap” between the Sanders and Clinton campaigns; even if most Sanders supporters would suck it up and turn out for Clinton if she ends up as the nominee, which is hardly guaranteed, we won’t see anything close to the volunteerism millennials are already engaged in on Bernie’s behalf. If your main concern is electability, do you really want to gamble with the key demographic group from the last two presidential elections?
2. Independents and Republicans are more likely to vote for Bernie Sanders than for Hillary Clinton.
Sanders also has much higher favorability ratings than Clinton among non-Democrats; his net favorability among them was 39 percentage points better than Clinton’s in the most recent Quinnipiac poll, and in New Hampshire, he won Independents by 47 percentage points. His class-based, anti-Establishment message resonates. If you heard Sanders speak at Liberty University (a conservative hotbed; see video below) last September, you know what I’m talking about; his direct, honest pitch for people who disagree about social issues to band together in pursuit of economic justice was very well-received. He didn’t win an army of converts overnight, but he did get people thinking; one Liberty alum estimates that half of the Liberty community could potentially Feel the Bern.
Read this take from teenage-conservative-icon-turned-Sanders-supporter CJ Pearson. Listen to the growing contingent of “Lifelong Republicans Who Love Bernie Sanders.” Or consider my (admittedly anecdotal) experience talking to several voters and reading numerous Internet comments of folks who are deciding between Donald Trump and Sanders. As Daniel Denvir notes, that doesn’t mean that Sanders will win over the most prejudiced Trump supporters, but his brand of economic populism may make him “the Democrats’ only chance to wrest white working class voters from a billionaire’s hate-filled dystopian rage.”
The coalition we’re seeing for Sanders in the primaries already indicates the appeal he holds for voters who less consistently vote Democratic. Polling data shows that “Sanders has forged connections to lower-income New Hampshire and Iowa Democrats that eluded Obama and every other progressive primary challenger in recent history.” Unlike Clinton, Sanders may be able to turn out people who don’t often vote, bring in some folks who usually vote against their economic interests, and unite both groups with traditional Democratic voting blocs.
Polls that explore head-to-head matchups also suggest that Sanders would do better than Clinton against each of the top five Republican candidates. Clinton-backer Paul Krugman calls such polls meaningless (he did, however, cite them himself to raise concerns about Barack Obama’s electability in March of 2008), and I personally wouldn’t read too much into them – we’re still very far out from the general election and opinions can surely change – but arguments that these numbers will flip remain completely evidence-free. Here’s why:
– Republican attacks would work at least as well against Hillary Clinton as they would against Bernie Sanders.
Yes, Bernie Sanders defines himself as a Democratic Socialist. If he is the nominee, GOP attack ads would surely use that label to cast him as insane, dangerous, and/or un-American…which is exactly the same thingthey did to Barack Obama for eight years and would surely do to Hillary Clinton as well.
Anyone who would run screaming from a 30-second ad decrying socialism without doing any research isn’t going to vote for Sanders or Clinton in a general election. But since most of Sanders’ platform, as mentioned earlier, is extremely popular, many voters who actually do their homework will quickly learn that his brand of democratic socialism isn’t scary at all (it’s not even particularly radical).
While the Republican party would undoubtedly dream up additional smears to use against Sanders, the GOP doesn’texactlyhave a crisis of imagination – or a lack of materialtowork with – when it comes to attacking Clinton. The idea that Sanders, a candidate whose popularity continues to grow with his name recognition, would be hurt more by such attacks than Clinton, whose favorability has steadily tanked over the last few years, is pure folly.
– Candidates labeled “unelectable” by party elites and the punditry have won before.
While Clinton supporters lovecomparing Sanders’ candidacy to the unsuccessful campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, these comparisons don’t hold water. Electoral dynamics today are drastically different than they were in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
At least two presidential candidates in more recent history have been labeled “unelectable” and gone on to win. One was Ronald Reagan. The other, as alluded to earlier, was Barack Obama. That history isn’t proof that Sanders will follow suit, but it indicates that “expert” opinions about electability should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.
For all their talk about the importance of evidence-based electability arguments, Krugman and his fellow naysayers haven’t actually provided any. They rely instead on a dubious application of the psychological principle of loss aversion and a simplistic political categorization model, among other speculative arguments, each of which is unconvincing.
None of that’s to say that Sanders doesn’t still have a lot of work to do if he wants to win the Democratic nomination. Clinton, despite having a very bad record on racial justice, currently holds a big lead among non-White voters. Sanders will need to cut into that. Clinton’s lead is likely due more to voters’ unfamiliarity with Sanders than anything else, however, and as more non-White voters learn about him, Sanders’ popularity among those voters should continue to rise.
When it does, we’ll have a real primary election on our hands. And while I’d advise against putting too much stock in electability arguments, the candidate in that primary with the best record and policy platform – Bernie Sanders – also happens to be the Democrats’ best shot in November.
The National Education Association (the union to which I used to belong) is considering an early endorsement of Hillary Clinton. This decision, like the American Federation of Teachers’ endorsement of Clinton on July 11, would be a huge mistake.
One reason is that it would violate members’ trust. As Peter Greene, Steven Singer, and Anthony Cody have noted, teacher voice is too often ignored in education reform conversations. If the NEA follows the AFT and makes a presidential primary endorsement without ample membership involvement, its teachers will feel silenced by their own union. Not only would that likely depress voter mobilization efforts and spark a backlash within the union, it also runs counter to the very principles of what a union is supposed to be.
An early Clinton endorsement would also be a mistake because she’s a suboptimal candidate. While Clinton is far more union-friendly than anyone running for the Republican nomination, her labor credentials are significantly worse than her main challenger in the Democratic primary, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Sanders has been a steadfast union supporter since the 1970s. His advocacy on behalf of workers as mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s helped foster the growth of the city’s socially-responsible business culture. “Thanks to the enduring influence of the progressive climate that Sanders and his allies helped to create in Burlington,” The Nation reported in June, “the city’s largest housing development is now resident-owned, its largest supermarket is a consumer-owned cooperative, one of its largest private employers is worker-owned, and most of its people-oriented waterfront is publicly owned. Its publicly owned utility, the Burlington Electric Department, recently announced that Burlington is the first American city of any decent size to run entirely on renewable electricity.”
Sanders has continued to advocate for the same causes in Congress over the past 25 years. In 1994, for example, he introduced the Workplace Democracy Act, legislation designed to strengthen collective bargaining rights. He currently supports the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workplaces to hold union elections, and plans to introduce a new Workplace Democracy Act this fall. He has “convened annual meetings of labor activists to help them develop more successful organizing and bargaining strategies” and still walks picket lines with workers.
To be fair, Clinton also supports the Employee Free Choice Act. Her campaign rhetoric is pretty pro-union, and the promises she makes in her video to NEA members don’t sound all that different than those made by Bernie (videos below).
But Clinton’s record is significantly worse than Sanders’. She served on the board of directors of Walmart – which to this day remains one of the nation’s most notoriously anti-union businesses – from 1986 to 1992, for instance. According to reports that surfaced in 2008, Clinton sat through dozens of board meetings without ever speaking up on behalf of organized labor. Instead, she stated that she was “proud of Wal-Mart and what we do and the way we do it better than anybody else.” Though she has since renounced Walmart’s business practices, Clinton maintains close ties with Walmart executives and lobbyists. And during her presidential campaigns, she’s surrounded herself with staffers who have troubling anti-union connections.
The following meme, describing cumulative donations the candidates have received over the past thirty years, is illustrative:
Clinton has worse policy positions on key union issues as well. Bernie Sanders has been a leader in the effort to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a “free trade” deal that could undermine environmental and consumer safety protections and have harmful impacts on workers both in the US and abroad; Clinton, despite recent attempts to distance herself from the TPP, was heavily involved in negotiating and promoting it. Sanders has been a vocal proponent of a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage by 2020, which workers around the country are campaigning for; Clinton long resisted taking a specific position on the issue and only recently spoke favorably about raising the federal minimum to $12-an-hour.
Sanders’ positions on education issues also tend to be more power-balancing than Clinton’s. Both candidates have called for universal pre-K and increased college affordability, but while Sanders believes education is a right that should be guaranteed free of charge to all students, Clinton hypocritically opposes free college for “kids who don’t work some hours to try to put their own effort into their education.” At the K-12 level, Sanders also has a stronger vision and record. After initially supporting the House of Representatives’ version of No Child Left Behind in May of 2001, he voted against the final version of NCLB that year because he foresaw problems with “the bill’s reliance on high-stakes standardized testing to direct draconian interventions;” Clinton, on the other hand, cast her vote in favor of NCLB. Sanders believes that “the federal government has a critical role to play” in education policy, one that includes “guaranteeing resource equity,” “increased emphasis on a well-rounded curriculum,” and providing “the resources necessary to provide effective professional development;” Clinton might not necessarily disagree, but while Sanders asserts that he will “direct education funding toward the low-income students who need it most” in his response to the AFT’s candidate questionnaire, this commitment is noticeably absent from Clinton’s writeup.
In fact, on practically every topic – from criminal justice issues to health care to foreign policy – Sanders has Clinton beat. His platform isn’t perfect, but it’s far and away more in line than Clinton’s with what typical Democratic voters profess to want. As far as I can tell, nobody at the AFT (or NEA) actually argues that Clinton has better policy positions than Sanders; their endorsement processes seem to be driven by the belief that Clinton is more electable.
The problem with that thinking is twofold.
First, Sanders is actually just as electable, if not more so, than Clinton. In national polls that pit potential Democratic nominees against potential Republican nominees, Sanders and Clinton do about as well as each other. If Sanders had anything like Clinton’s name recognition, he’d almost certainly outstrip her; among voters who know who he is, Sanders’ favorability is much higher than Clinton’s (see page 5). He’s shooting up in Democratic primary polls as more and more voters learn about him and now holds sizable leads in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Oregon. College students prefer Sanders to Clinton by more than a 3-to-1 margin, policy positions like the ones he holds are wildly popular across the board, and his campaign is showing no signs of losing momentum.
Second, the biggest impediment to a Sanders victory is none other than the political calculus the unions seem to be engaged in. Politicians are electable if people are willing to support them, while concerns about electability generally undermine progressive goals and become self-fulfilling prophecies. Rather than settling for Hillary Clinton because they – erroneously – think she’s the best that people will buy, unions should rally behind the better candidate – Bernie Sanders – and start selling him to the American public.
Labor for Bernie, a grassroots movement started by rank-and-file union members, could ultimately prove more important than endorsements from the major national unions. And Sanders already has the support of National Nurses United. Nonetheless, it’s incumbent upon NEA leadership, and the leaders of other major unions, to start paying attention to why so many union members feel the Bern. Sanders, much more than Clinton, deserves organized labor’s official support.
Update (10/3/15): The NEA endorsed Clinton – without any explanation of why members should prefer her to Sanders.
Update (10/26/15): For those interested in the analysis behind the updated meme below, which compares donations during the 2016 presidential campaigns alone, see this post.
Guest Authors
Ben Spielberg
Darius Liddell
Jon Zaid
Run It Black Podcast
34justice 
Pro-Clinton Writers Make Illiberal Arguments and Then Complain When They’re Called Out On It
A nontrivial portion of online comments are going to be unconstructive and/or offensive. Especially when a columnist writes something provocative, a lot of people are going to be unhappy about it, and many of them, bolstered by the relative anonymity and psychological distance the Internet affords, will respond with vitriol. That said, there are actually a lot of thoughtful readers out there, and even angry responses can sometimes contain good points. Authors who take the time to consider the feedback they receive – to parse the constructive commentary from the trash – can improve their arguments and demonstrate that they’ve really thought through the fairness and implications of what they’ve written.
Unfortunately, many authors don’t do that. And during this election cycle, this failure in self-reflection has been particularly prevalent among prominent Hillary Clinton supporters.
To illustrate what I mean, I’m going to focus on two columnists, Paul Krugman and Michael Tomasky, who share a few characteristics:
If Krugman really believes that “[g]ood ideas don’t have to be sold with fairy dust” and that “getting real is or ought to be a core progressive value,” he isn’t currently putting his money where his mouth is. And Tomasky’s insistence that he’s “open to hearing a smart argument against [his] position” would be a lot more believable if he hadn’t thus far ignored those that have been offered. If Krugman and Tomasky are serious about “getting real,” they will begin to acknowledge and address the following points:
The “Bernie Bro” narrative is “a Cheap Campaign Tactic Masquerading as Journalism.”
Everyone who has made this point recognizes that some Bernie Sanders supporters make sexist, racist, and/or otherwise offensive comments. We condemn those comments. We also request that Clinton supporters stop using a sexist label themselves, one that, when it isn’t being applied to women or people who don’t even support Bernie Sanders, is marginalizing the millions of women (and people of color; the “Bernie Bro” is often cast as an angry White guy) who are staunch proponents of the Sanders campaign (Sanders is actually way more popular than Clinton among young women and, increasingly, among younger Black and Latino voters). As a recent study confirmed about sexism, Internet harassment is a major issue but is mostly not from “the left in general or Sanders supporters in particular.”
There are numerous examples of Hillary Clinton supporters who make sexist, racist, and homophobic comments as well. Whether you’re subject to such comments is both a function of which candidate you support and how much privilege you have (women and people of color who support any candidate are much more likely to be harassed than White men like Krugman and Tomasky or half-Indian men who are perceived to be White like me, for instance). So let’s not go around calling people “Hillary Elites” or “Hillary Straights” or “Bernie Bros.” Instead, let’s condemn harassment without opportunistically twisting the truth about it and focus our energy on substantive debates about issues.
The Sanders campaign’s critiques of Clinton’s record and platform have been significantly fairer than the Clinton campaign’s misleading and/or untrue attacks on Sanders.
The only specific “attack” on Clinton that Tomasky actually attributes to Sanders is his call for Clinton to release the transcripts of three speeches Goldman Sachs paid her $225,000 (each) to make during the past few years. But Sanders’ critique here is completely fair (as is what Tomasky calls Sanders’ “anti-Rahm Emanuel tincture”). Clinton has repeatedly claimed that the money she receives from Wall Street doesn’t influence her; the American people have a right to know how her remarks to bankers comport with her professed commitment to regulate them (though how her comments could possibly look as bad as her continued refusal to share them is anyone’s guess).
To be fair, the precise definition of “attack” is open for debate, but despite Krugman’s assertions to the contrary, the fact that Clinton’s campaign has been much more insidious isn’t. Throughout the primary, the Clinton campaign has repeatedly distorted the truth. Clinton has disingenuously accused Sanders of sexism and racism, made false statements about his health care plan and history of health care advocacy, and misled the public about his record on the auto industry, immigration, Wall Street, and a variety of other issues. Her team has also engaged in red-baiting, trashed taxes Democrats are supposed to support, and co-opted the language of intersectionality to inaccurately paint Sanders – a rare politician who recognizes the connections between social and economic issues and is advancing a comprehensive social justice agenda – as a single-issue candidate. Clinton’s campaign might not embody “the most negative campaign of any Democratic presidential candidate…in a presidential primary season” label that her staffers have tried to apply to the Sanders campaign, but the Clinton team’s tactics have been – by far – the most negative in this year’s race.
Sanders has a very strong track record as a legislator and executive.
Tomasky incorrectly argues that Sanders is an ineffective legislator, citing a lack of cosponsors on his bills as evidence that he doesn’t work well with Congress. Tomasky omits, however, that Sanders recently negotiated a bipartisan bill “to expand veterans’ access to health care” with John McCain, a bill which is widely viewed as a huge success. Sanders’ Republican colleagues, despite their disagreements with him, liked working with Sanders and praised him for his integrity and work ethic, while Democratic Senators said that, without Sanders, they “don’t think [they] would have gotten [the bill] done.”
Tomasky also fails to mention that Sanders has mastered the art of adding power-balancing amendments to larger bills; his accomplishments include (but are not limited to) securing funding for community health centers in the Affordable Care Act, blocking imports made with child labor, and increasing transparency about one-time government officials’ subsequent employment opportunities.
Sanders’ record as mayor of Burlington also shows that he’s an excellent executive. He has a history of setting big goals, fighting for them, and eventually working out the best deal he believes he can. The citizens of Vermont love Sanders for a reason – they know his record a lot better than Krugman and Tomasky do, and it’s a damn good one.
If anything, I’d prefer Sanders were much less into what Krugman calls “hardheaded realism” than he actually is. That’s because Krugman is wrong about how to make change; we are served best not by “accepting half loaves as being better than none,” but by reframing issues and forcing policymakers’ hands. As climate expert Bill McKibben explains, major accomplishments like gay marriage and civil rights legislation weren’t driven by leaders all too willing to compromise; they were driven by “big, impassioned movement[s] that cleverly changed the zeitgeist.” Sanders gets this dynamic more than any major presidential candidate in recent memory, and that’s why his “political revolution” carries so much potential to change this country’s politics.
All the evidence suggests Sanders is a more “electable” general election candidate than Clinton.
Both Krugman and Tomasky write off the head-to-head polling that has consistently shown Sanders to outperform Clinton in hypothetical general election matchups with Republicans. Tomasky argues that “a billion-dollar onslaught” from the GOP, targeted at the “tax increases he’s proposing,” would tank Sanders. Yet as I’ve explained before, the GOP would also mercilessly attack Clinton, and the idea that those attacks would work better against Sanders is entirely inconsistent with other polling trends. As shown below, Clinton’s favorability ratings have been steadily declining, while Sanders’ have continued to rise as voters have become more familiar with him.
As I’ve also explained before and the graphs below show, Sanders does significantly better than Clinton among two demographic groups key to winning a general election: young people and Independents.
Voters in these groups – unlike voters in Clinton’s key constituencies – may very well abandon the Democrats if Clinton is the party’s nominee. I wouldn’t personally recommend basing your vote on perceived electability, but if that’s what you’re planning to do, the evidence indicates that you should vote for Sanders.
There are substantial, important differences between Sanders and Clinton. These differences are in some respects much larger than the differences between Clinton and various Republicans.
Krugman argues that the differences between Sanders and Clinton “are trivial compared with the yawning gulf with Republicans.” Ironically, the context for those comments – an article about financial policy and donations – provides a compelling counterexample: Wall Street does not like Sanders, but the industry seems to like Clinton more than many of the Republican candidates, as the graph below shows. And though many of them likely agree with Krugman that the differences between Clinton and the Republicans are larger than those between Sanders and Clinton, numerous smart people and policy experts whose existence Krugman ignores believe both that Sanders’ Wall Street plans are much better than Clinton’s and that Sanders is far more likely than Clinton to surround himself with a staff that will execute a power-balancing policy vision.
For an even better example, consider foreign policy. Clinton has embraced an incredibly hawkish position on Israel, used the same foreign policy consulting firm as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (among other politicians), and supported a coup in Honduras in 2009; in fact, she has earned the support of many neoconservatives for her long history of supporting civil liberties violations and aggressive interventions that have resulted in the mistreatment and/or deaths of millions of innocent people. Tomasky is right to point out that Sanders’ doesn’t get particularly high marks on foreign policy from “actual leftists,” but there’s a reason Congresswoman and Iraq War veteran Tulsi Gabbard resigned from the Democratic National Committee to endorse Sanders at the end of February (see video below): he’s much less imperialistic than the typical major party candidate.
Then there’s the death penalty: Sanders opposes it, but Clinton, like the Republicans, is okay with it. There’s also the subject of immigrants’ rights: Clinton’s professed outrage over Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border is hard to reconcile with her repeated support for a border barrier in the past, support she touted as recently as November 2015. Her newfound commitment not to deport children fleeing violence is also hard to believe given her defense of such deportations a mere seven months ago. In contrast, Sanders has consistently opposed both a border fence and deportations.
From Clinton’s support for the escalation of the War on Drugs and move to more draconian welfare policy to her longtime opposition to gay marriage to her promotion of “free trade” deals that have prioritized the interests of multinational corporations over those of the bulk of the world’s citizens, Clinton’s history is closer to many Republicans’ than to Sanders’, who has a very good (albeit imperfect) record on racial justice issues, anti-poverty work, LGBT issues, and opposing bad trade deals. To be sure, there are some causes on which Sanders has found Republican allies, but those causes have generally been ones – like opposition to corporate welfare – that Tomasky’s “actual leftists” support.
In light of all these facts, Tomasky’s argument that Democrats should refrain from criticizing Hillary Clinton (who he thinks will be the Democratic nominee), like a similar argument from Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos, is a hell of a lot scarier to people like me than a Donald Trump presidency. This undemocratic idea elevates party tribalism over good policymaking and “winning” over holding politicians accountable. It presents a major obstacle to the change the world’s most disadvantaged populations desperately need, change which perpetual endorsements of lesser-of-two-evilsism will never deliver. Such a misguided notion of “political pragmatism undermines progressive goals,” as I’ve argued before.
Sanders still has a legitimate shot to win the Democratic primary.
Half the country still hasn’t cast their ballots and Bernie Sanders isn’t all that far away from the pledged delegate targets he’d need to win the nomination; Tomasky is wrong to assert that “Sanders can’t win the delegate race now.” Yes, winning will be difficult, but there’s still a clear path for him to do so, and as Sanders’ historic upset win in Michigan shows, an election isn’t over until the voters actually cast their ballots. Krugman thinks an extended primary isn’t “good for the Democratic party;” I, on the other hand, think the Clinton coronation he and the Democratic party Establishment have been pushing is a whole lot worse, as it flies in the face of a lot of what the party is supposed to stand for.
All of that said, Krugman and Tomasky are right about one thing: Sanders supporters should avoid the reflexive attribution “of foul and malevolent motives” to Clinton supporters.
I know a lot of awesome Clinton supporters who do great work. People support presidential candidates for a variety of reasons, and instead of jumping to conclusions about the character of those who disagree with us, we should listen to those reasons and evaluate them on their merits. In fact, I’d urge everyone to extend the same courtesy to Bernie Sanders supporters, to Jill Stein supporters, to those who refuse to vote, and yes, even to people who plan to vote for one of the Republican candidates. We should consider the possibility that others have thought through their electoral choices and have entirely legitimate reasons for making them.
At the same time, ethics and evidence matter, and it’s perfectly fine – in fact, it’s essential – to hold voters accountable for attending to them. If you say your top priority is raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, for example, you can’t possibly defend a vote for a Republican this year. You also can’t really explain a vote for Clinton, which is why Sanders supporters were justifiably furious when the Service Employees International Union endorsed Clinton in November.
I suspect that Krugman and Tomasky don’t share all of my values and priorities. We agree on a lot – I enjoy their writing outside of election season and appreciate much of what they advocate for – but they seem much more comfortable with the policy status quo than I am. I reject the idea that public policy must inevitably leave millions of people behind; they very well may not. In Tomasky’s words: “Fine. I can appreciate that.” If more voters share Krugman and Tomasky’s values than share mine, so be it.
The problem, however, is that Krugman and Tomasky haven’t been writing about value disagreements. Instead, rather than acknowledging and responding to the evidence and logical arguments that contradict their claims, they’ve continued to pen inaccurate and/or highly misleading articles for popular media outlets. Is it any wonder that, in response to such widely read misinformation, they’ve received angry responses from Sanders supporters?
My best guess is that Krugman and Tomasky are suffering from a severe case of confirmation bias: they’re convinced that Clinton is the best option and have developed tunnel vision to avoid the cognitive dissonance that actually considering feedback might bring about. But that doesn’t make what they’re doing okay. And given how often they assign “foul and malevolent motives” to Republicans who write fallacious things, they’d do well to reflect on why it is that their readers have recently been doing the same thing to them.
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Filed under 2016 Election, US Political System
Tagged as Bernie Sanders, Berniebro, electability, evidence, Hillary Clinton, journalism, Krugman, online comments, political pragmatism, Republicans, Tomasky