“The 2016 Democratic primary effectively ended Tuesday night, with Hillary Clinton as the all-but-certain winner,” the media has declared. Bernie Sanders needed some wins, they tell us, and “his path to the nomination is now essentially blocked.” Since Clinton is over 300 pledged delegates up on Sanders – more than twice as many as Obama ever was on Clinton in 2008 – the president of Clinton’s Super PAC insists that it “is all but mathematically impossible for Bernie Sanders to overtake her lead.”
The only problem with the media and Clinton campaign narratives? They’re not true.
That’s not to say the results on Tuesday, March 15 weren’t disappointing for Sanders supporters, who were hoping for a repeat of Sanders’ historic upset in Michigan a week before. But that result was always unlikely; Sanders wasn’t actually predicted to win a single state on Super Tuesday II. As the graph below shows, Sanders came close to meeting expectations in Ohio and exceeded them in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina. In other words, while it was a tough night for Sanders in terms of pledged delegates, it was a pretty good night for Sanders relative to projections, not to mention the massive polling deficits he faced mere weeks ago.
Sanders also still has a clear, albeit outside, shot at winning the Democratic nomination. We’re only halfway through the primary calendar and he is likely to do well in upcoming contests. Tuesday put him behind the targets he would need in one possible path to the nomination, but there are a number of large, delegate-rich states left, including New York and California, and a good run in the next round of primaries and caucuses would keep Sanders well within striking distance of Clinton. Again, winning the nomination is definitely a long shot for him – he’d need to pull off more Michigan-like upsets to do it – but if Sanders supporters keep donating, phone banking, and otherwise volunteering their time, it’s also definitely still possible.
Despite these facts, the media and the Clinton campaign will be selling a different, inaccurate story. It will be up to Sanders supporters to make sure that voters don’t buy it.
Harry Enten, a forecaster at FiveThirtyEight, believes he isn’t a favorite of Bernie Sanders supporters; they “don’t exactly love me,” Enten recently wrote. That may be true, as Enten’s coverage of Sanders during the Democratic primary has, for the most part, been extremely dismissive. When Sanders entered the race in April of 2015, for example, Enten asserted that Sanders had “pretty much no shot of winning.” And despite the massive growth in Sanders’ support in the time since, Enten had barely changed his tune nine months later – at the beginning of March, in an article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s Got This,” he argued that “Clinton eventually will win the nomination with relative ease.”
Enten’s underlying analyses have generally been based on polling, endorsements, demographics, and other reasonable indicators. And Sanders supporters have long understood that Sanders’ path to the Democratic nomination is an uphill climb. The main objection with Enten-type coverage is not that it’s based on faulty data analysis – it’s not – but that it is at least as much a driver as a predictor of election results.
What does that mean? It means that two of Sanders’ biggest obstacles to winning the Democratic nomination – perhaps the two biggest obstacles – are the facts that many people aren’t familiar with him and that, of the people who are, many don’t think he has a chance to win. The latter has driven organizations and individuals who should be natural Sanders allies to, because of a misguided sense of pragmatism, endorse Clinton instead. It has also driven highly unbalancedmedia coverage. These outcomes make it harder for Sanders to introduce voters to his extremely popular ideas, his consistentrecord of fightingforsocial justicecauses, and his history of legislative and executive success.
Unsurprisingly, the more voters hear about Sanders, the more support Sanders gets. The problem is that, because of Enten-type assertions that Sanders doesn’t have a chance, fewer voters get to hear about Sanders than otherwise would. That lack of exposure ensures lower levels of support, thus often confirming the forecasters’ original predictions and emboldening them to make new ones that further feed into this loop. Forecaster predictions, in other words, are frequently self-fulfilling prophecies.
That’s one reason Sanders’ historic win in the Michigan primary is so important – by exposing how wrong pundit predictions have been, it has the potential to break this self-reinforcing cycle. The results in Michigan illustrate more than the inherent uncertainty in data analyses; they show that pundit assertions about which candidates have a chance should always be viewed with skepticism.
To Enten’s credit, he responded to Sanders’ victory by owning how wrong he’s been – “Bernie Sanders made folks like me eat a stack of humble pie on Tuesday night,” Enten wrote. Vox’s Matt Yglesias, who openly mocked the Sanders’ campaign’s chances in Michigan six days before its victory, also admitted his error.
Where did the Sanders campaign get this idea that he can win Michigan?
Yet while these one-time corrections are a good start, they’re also not nearly enough. Rather than having humility as their dessert, Enten, Yglesias, and the rest of the punditry would do well to consume a little more modesty before – not after – their future political meals.
Hillary Clinton won Nevada’s caucus last night by about 5.5 percentage points. We don’t have official voting results by race, but polls taken before voters caucused (“entrance polls”) suggested the following demographic breakdown:
The Clinton campaign and severaljournalists have raised questions about whether Sanders actually won the Latino vote. They argue that Clinton “won the parts of Nevada that are most heavily Latino” and that there are also reasons to doubt the accuracy of previous polling of Latino voters in Nevada.
It’s certainly possible that the entrance polls are unreliable. However, if that’s true, the Clinton campaign and these journalists should not make that claim selectively. The polls actually matched the final results in Nevada incredibly well, as shown in the graph below.
So if Clinton did better with Latino voters than the entrance polls suggest, she did worse with other demographic groups. Suppose, for example, that Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon’s speculation that she actually won something more like 61 percent of the Latino vote is correct (that result would be way outside the poll’s margin of error, but let’s not worry about that at the moment). If we assume that the entrance polls got the Black vote and Other Non-White vote totals correct, that would mean that Clinton actually lost the White vote by 9 percentage points, not 2. If we assume that the entrance polls got the White vote correct and the Black vote wrong, then Sanders lost the Black vote by 15 percentage points, not 54. And if we assume that the entrance polls got both the Black and White votes correct, then Clinton, instead of winning the Other Non-White vote by 2 percentage points, lost it by 55. It’s probably most likely, if the entrance polls are indeed wrong, that none of the above numbers can be trusted.
The Clinton campaign would probably prefer to believe that she won the Latino vote while losing the White vote by more than the polls indicate. Sanders supporters (myself included) would probably prefer to believe the entrance polls or, at the very least, to believe that he still did very well among Latino voters while doing better among Black voters than the entrance polls indicate. The truth is that we cannot know for sure.
What we do know for sure, however, is that the entrance polls cannot be selectively wrong. The Clinton campaign and journalists reporting on the results would do well to remember that.
Update (2/23/16): The William C. Velasquez Institute, a nonprofit that has been “conduct[ing] research aimed at improving the level of political and economic participation in Latino and other underrepresented communities” since 1985, issued a strong statement today on this issue. An excerpt:
Simply put there is no relevant statistical inconsistency between Edison’s Entry Poll results for Latinos, Whites, and Blacks and the overall election results. Based on this fact WCVI concludes that there is no statistical basis to question the Latino vote breakdown between Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders.
We note that some analysts have said that Secretary Clinton’s victories in heavily Latino precincts proved that she won the Latino vote. However[,] the methodology of using heavily Latino or “barrio” precincts to represent Latino voting behavior has been considered ineffective and discarded for more than 30 years due to non-barrio residential patterns…common among Latino voters since the 1980’s.
The reason Sanders probably won the Latino vote despite losing heavily Latino precincts? He did well among young Latino voters who may not live in majority-Latino areas (thanks to Jonathan Cohn for the heads up on that).
Lela Spielberg is a lifelong advocate for gender equality. She has worked in the education and social services field as a teacher, policy analyst, and program designer at a local family foundation in Washington, DC. In this post, she describes how the dialogue about Bernie Sanders and his supporters illustrates some of the problems with a particular brand of American feminism.
Lela Spielberg
Over the last month, as Bernie Sanders has gained popularity in the polls, the media and prominent political figures have ramped up their attacks against him. At first, these attacks were unsurprising to me: “he’s inexperienced;” “he’s too idealistic;” “he’ll never get anything done.” These statements are part of the typical chorus of attacks that Washington insiders and committed capitalists have used against progressive candidates since the beginning of time. I won’t spend my time debunking these myths, as there have been several articles, includingones on this blog, that have done so already. However, about a month ago, a new strand of attacks emerged that I have found more troubling – as a woman, as a millennial, and as an American. These attacksallege that Bernie and/or his supporters are anti-feminist. Not only are they untrue, but their language also demonstrates the deep sense of elitism and entitlement that pervades traditional American feminism.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. I’m a Bernie supporter. I’ve identified as a socialist ever since I learned about the concept in my eighth-grade world history class, and I’ve admired Bernie’s activism since I moved to Washington over six years ago. Until Bernie jumped into the race, I had planned on casting a rather unenthusiastic vote for Hillary Clinton. While I believe Clinton to be smart and hard-working, her past support for bad trade deals, aggressive war, and welfare reform are not aligned with my values of fairness, peace, and economic equality. Bernie, on the other hand, has spent decades fighting for these values and has a record to prove it.
Moreover, all of these issues are at the heart of what I believe feminism to be—fighting for fairness for all women, regardless of their race, sexual identity, education level, and economic position. Consider, for example, that two thirds of workers who earn the minimum wage are women. While Clinton has voiced support for raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour, only Sanders has embraced and aggressively campaigned for the $15 minimum wage that thousands of women throughout the United States are demanding. Or think about the young women and girls being rounded up and deported by the Obama Administration. Clinton defended these actions six months ago and still won’t commit to ending them. Sanders, on the other hand, has spoken out strongly against the deportation raids and in support of Central American children. To me, feminism is not just about abortion rights and breaking the glass ceiling; it’s also about making sure that all women have access to good, reliable prenatal care and early screenings for breast cancer under a Medicare for All health care system, which Bernie Sanders supports and Hillary Clinton does not. Feminism is about fighting for the empowerment of disadvantaged women both in the United States and around the world.
Yet powerful public figures, including two “feminist icons,” have called my feminism (as well as the seriousness of my convictions) into question by mocking my choice to support Bernie over Hillary. While they’ve since issued partial apologies for their most egregious comments – Gloria Steinem’s assertion that young women only support Bernie because “the boys are with Bernie” and Madeleine Albright’s statement that “there is a special place in hell for women who won’t help other women” by voting for Hillary Clinton – the fact that they made them at all, and their failure to really own them, propagates an American feminism that isn’t about supporting all women, but is about supporting wealthy, powerful, white women. So do comments by the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who said in an interview with the New York Times in January that she sees “a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.”
The idea that young women are complacent and don’t have a sense of history is wrong. I appreciate the strides women have made, in politics and in boardrooms across the country. These accomplishments are wonderful, and they should be celebrated and continued. However, in crowing about these accomplishments without acknowledging that most of them only benefit middle- and upper-class white women, it is Steinem, Albright, and Wasserman Schultz who forget the lessons of history. Even with Roe v. Wade, poor and working-class women still lack access to safe, affordable abortions and family planning choices that their wealthier female counterparts have. This deep inequality that has only grown in recent generations is one of the reasons I am voting for Bernie Sanders.
As it turns out, my peers feel similarly – Sanders leads Hillary when it comes to female voters under 45, and he beat Hillary by 11 percentage points among all women in the New Hampshire primary. Yet many media voices continue to paint Bernie supporters as mostly male by using the term “Berniebro.” Coined in an article in the Atlantic, the Berniebro label originally characterized Bernie supporters as “white; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, ‘upper middle-class’); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands.”
Numerous other commentators, including Paul Krugman, have now picked up on this label. In their estimation, the Berniebro is not only a privileged white man, but a sexist, online harasser, too. In reality, however, the term Berniebro is sexist. When it isn’t accusing women of being “bros,” it’s ignoring the voices of women (and, for that matter, the people of color and working-class people) who support Bernie.
Let me be clear: I am not defending anyone, Bernie supporter or otherwise, who makes sexist, nasty remarks about Hillary Clinton. Nor am I denying that Hillary Clinton encounters sexism that Bernie Sanders and other men never will – she absolutely does. However, I am challenging those writing and speaking about the election, and about Bernie and Hillary in particular, to broaden their thinking and definition of feminism. Kevin Young and Diana C. Sierra Becerra wrote a wonderful piece for Alice Walker’s blog where they eloquently sum up this tension within the feminist community. They write:
In the US feminism is often understood as the right of women — and wealthy white women most of all — to share in the spoils of capitalism and US imperial power. By not confronting the exclusion of non-whites, foreigners, working-class people, and other groups from this vision, liberal feminists are missing a crucial opportunity to create a more inclusive, more powerful movement.
We have a long way to go before we have the truly inclusive, powerful feminist movement that the authors envision. Electing Clinton won’t get us there. To be fair, neither will electing Sanders. But not shaming women for casting a vote against economic, racial, and myriad other forms of inequality is one place we can start.
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.
PolitiFact just issued a completely incorrect ruling on one of their “fact checks.” Here is the correct ruling on the following statement from Bernie Sanders:
PolitiFact called it “false” because they found a few polls in which Clinton does better. Their “fact checking” was grossly negligent, however. While the meaning of “Almost all of” can be debated and I would have rather Sanders said “In general,” the worst anyone who has actually done their homework could rule this statement is “mostly true.”
RealClearPolitics compiles results from every poll and reports averages in many matchups. The chart below shows how Clinton and Sanders fare on average against each of the top five Republican candidates (shown in order of the candidates’ average ranking in Republican primary polls). As is obvious from looking at the graph, Sanders polls better on average than Clinton against each of the candidates, and significantly better than Clinton against Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the two leading candidates in the Republican field (for example, while Sanders beats Cruz by 3.3 percentage points in the average poll, Clinton loses to Cruz by an average of 1.3 percentage points).
People can have reasonable debates about how to interpret the poll results. Should Democrats be most worried about Marco Rubio? Maybe. Do the results mean much, given that all the matchups are hypothetical at this point and the general election is still a long way away? Maybe not. But the evidence we do have is clear: the polls absolutely, as Bernie Sanders said, “suggest that [he is] a much stronger candidate against the Republicans than is Hillary Clinton”
That may not have been PolitiFact’s ruling, but it is the truth. How’s that for a fact check?
Update (2/26/16): As the chart below shows, newer RealClearPolitics data shows that Sanders is now doing even better relative to Clinton against the leading Republican candidates than he was doing a month ago.
HuffPost Pollster also aggregates polling data. Democrats will be comforted by their results, which are much more favorable to both Sanders and Clinton than the results from RealClearPolitics.
What is also abundantly clear from both sites’ models is that, as time goes on, Sanders’ standing against the top Republican candidates improves and Clinton’s gets worse. These polls still certainly aren’t the be-all and end-all of electability evidence, but especially given the trends and Sanders’ superior popularity among millennials and Independents, the argument that these polls tell us nothing is getting harder and harder to justify. I recommend basing your vote on your values, not on perceived electability, but if electability really is your primary concern, the data very obviously indicates that Sanders is the better pick.
Update (3/19/16): Hillary Clinton is now polling much closer to (though still not) as well as Sanders against Donald Trump, but is getting destroyed relative to Sanders against Ted Cruz and John Kasich.
Update (4/12/16): Sanders is still outperforming Clinton in head-to-head general election matchups.
Update (5/17/16): Sanders still has a large head-to-head polling advantage over Clinton when matched up against Trump, who will be the Republican nominee.
Several months ago, Black Lives Matter activists targeted Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders with protests. Many of my fellow Sanders supporters thought these protests unfair, in large part, as I explained at the time, because Sanders “has an excellent record on racial justice issues, much better than any other candidate running for president.” Sanders backers noted that his “passion for economic justice…is intimately connected with a passion for racial justice. Income, wealth, and opportunity inequality in this country disproportionately affect communities of color, and a commitment to addressing them is in many ways in and of itself indicative of a view that Black Lives Matter.” Since Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidates “have almost-uniformly worse records and stances…on issues affecting Black Americans,” Sanders supporters didn’t understand “why Black Lives Matter [was] applying pressure primarily to the candidate most sympathetic to their cause.”
These very same arguments are now surfacing again in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who recently took Sanders to task for failing to support reparations (restitution for the centuries of plunder America has visited upon Black communities). These arguments are still, to a large extent, fair to make. It is also fair to point out some notable problems with Coates’ characterization of Sanders and his positions:
Sanders is not the self-proclaimed “radical” Coates thinks he is – Sanders is making fun of that label in the quote Coates pulls and frequentlysays on the campaign trail that his ideas, which are wildly popular, are not radical;
Sanders is not, as Coates asserts, “posing as a pragmatist” – he most definitely isa pragmatist (just a more power-balancing one than we usually see in American politics);
Sanders is in fact “the candidate of…unification” in the Democratic primary, despite Coates’ claim to the contrary; and
As Daniel Denvir and Kevin Drum have noted, Sanders’ responses to the questions he’s been asked about reparations – that he supports “making massive investments in rebuilding our cities, in creating millions of decent paying jobs, in making public colleges and universities tuition-free, basically targeting our federal resources to the areas where it is needed the most and where it is needed the most is in impoverished communities, often African American and Latino” – don’t sound all that different from a reparations proposal Coates himself has previously entertained.
At the same time, the thrust of Coates’ articles is entirely legitimate and extremely important, as were the Black Lives Matter protests. “For one thing,” as I mentioned previously with regard to the protests, “while racial and economic justice are intimately connected, they are not the exact same thing.” Coates, like the protesters before him, wants Sanders to “promote a specific racial justice platform complementary to his economic justice agenda, and [he has] every right to demand that [Sanders] do so.” For another, Coates is justified in focusing on Sanders “precisely because he’s a natural ally and the candidate most likely to respond” productively to Coates’ concerns.
Many Sanders supporters…correctly point out that Clinton handprints are all over America’s sprawling carceral state. I agree with them and have said so at length. Voters, and black voters particularly, should never forget that Bill Clinton passed arguably the most immoral ‘anti-crime’ bill in American history, and that Hillary Clinton aided its passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth. A defense of Clinton rooted in the claim that “Jeb Bush held the same position” would not be exculpatory. (“Law and order conservative embraces law and order” would surprise no one.) That is because the anger over the Clintons’ actions isn’t simply based on their having been wrong, but on their craven embrace of law and order Republicanism in the Democratic Party’s name…
[Similarly, t]hat a mainstream Democrat like Hillary Clinton embraces mainstream liberal policy is unsurprising. Clinton has no interest in expanding the Overton window. She simply hopes to slide through it.
But I thought #FeelTheBern meant something more than this. I thought that Bernie Sanders, the candidate of single-payer health insurance, of the dissolution of big banks, of free higher education, was interested both in being elected and in advancing the debate beyond his own candidacy. I thought the importance of Sanders’s call for free tuition at public universities lay not just in telling citizens that which is actually workable, but in showing them that which we must struggle to make workable. I thought Sanders’s campaign might remind Americans that what is imminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things, and while actualizing the former we can’t lose sight of the latter.
Coates is verbalizing here what we deserve from every politician, but especially from the candidate we are pledging to support: a willingness to advocate for what’s right, even when it’s not particularly popular. And whether Bernie Sanders’ dismissal of reparations is semantic or substantive, whether it’s driven by true opposition or by political pragmatism, it’s wrong. His campaign’s lack of engagement with Coates thus far, who has reached out to the Sanders team several times, is particularly disappointing.
That certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote for Sanders (and, to be clear, there is no possible interpretation of Coates’ argument that should lead anyone to vote for Clinton). Many people who supportreparations have endorsed and are campaigning for him, and there is strong support for Sanders even in the Coates household (see video clips below)!
Coates discusses Sanders and reparations with Chris Hayes.
Michael Render (also known as Killer Mike), who is “pro Reparations for any people used and abused like Blacks have been here and other places,” explains why “Bernie Sanders is our guy.”
But no politician, no matter who he or she is running against, should ever be immune from critique. And in Sanders’ case, demands for justice from oppressed people are exactly what his political revolution is supposed to be about. It’s thus incumbent upon Sanders supporters to stop hassling Coates for asking tough questions and, instead, to start thanking him for holding all of us – including someone who may very well be the next President of the United States – accountable for being the very best we can be.
Bernie Sanders just released his new proposal for a single-payer health care system. As former US Labor Secretary Rob Reich notes, Sanders’ plan would be “a huge advance over what we have now.” Reich’s summary:
It builds on the strengths of Medicare. Like Medicare, it’s universal — separating health insurance from employment, and enabling people to choose a health care provider without worrying about whether that provider is in-network: All they’d need do is go to the doctor and show their insurance card. No more copays, no more deductibles and no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges.
Through a single national insurance system, we’ll no longer be paying for the marketing and advertising of private for-profit health insurers, nor their giant executive salaries, or their complex billing systems. Government will negotiate fair prices with drug companies, hospitals, and medical suppliers.
The plan’s release came right before the fourth Democratic debate and after a week of attacks from the Hillary Clinton campaign, which had been simultaneously complaining about not having plan details and distorting the details of a similar proposal Sanders introduced in the Senate in 2013. Even those sympathetic to Clinton have labeled these attacks “questionable” or “genuinely strange,” while those willing to more accurately describe her team’s “GOP fear tactics” have noted that they are “wildly misleading,” “flagrantly mischaracterizing,” “mostly false,” “nonsense,” “disingenuous,” “stupid,” and “dishonest.” Sanders’ plan would expand Medicare, not “dismantle” it; cover more people, not “strip millions” from coverage; ensure that insurance is provided in every state, not “empower” governors to “take [it] away;” and save most Americans lots of money, not “cost” them.
That last point in particular deserves more emphasis, as it’s one about which Clinton appears to have been lying outright. Speaking to George Stephanopolous about single-payer health care on Wednesday, January 13, Clinton said: “Every analysis that I’m aware of shows it’s going to cost middle-class families and working families.” Yet I have never seen such an analysis, and every analysis I am aware of says the exact opposite: that most families would gain big from a switch to a Sanders-style health care system (as Sanders explained at the debate, their savings from not having to pay premiums anymore would outweigh any increased taxes they would have to pay to fund the program).
Consider, for example, a 2013 analysis of the Expanded and Improved Medicare For All Act from UMass-Amherst economist Gerald Friedman. Physicians for a National Health Program called this bill and Sanders’ old plan (which, despite Clinton’s suggestion to the contrary at the debate, is not all that different from his new one) “simply two expressions of the one single payer concept;” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon agreed that the two bills were “similar” in a recent interview. As shown in the graph below, Friedman estimated that everyone in the bottom 95% would see their after-tax incomes rise under such a proposal. Fallon is clearly familiar with this analysis – he selectively referenced parts of it in the interview linked above – and it’s been the most common citation for cost estimates that Clinton herself has used; it’s near impossible to believe that Clinton was not “aware of” it.
Distributional analysis, from UMass-Amherst economist Gerald Friedman, of a 2013 proposal for single-payer health care.
Friedman now estimates that, “[f]or a middle-class family of four with an income from wages of $50,000 and an employer-provided family plan of an average price, the Sanders program would save $5,807, or 12% of income.” Similarly, the Sanders campaign had previously estimated that his old plan would have saved a typical family between $3,855 and $5,173. PolitiFact argued that employers might respond to the financing scheme in that plan by reducing workers’ paychecks, but still estimated, even under pessimistic assumptions, that “the average family would save $505 to $1,823 a year.”
There have also been analyses of proposed state-level single-payer health care plans. A proposal in Vermont in 2001 would have saved an estimated $995 on average for families making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, while a proposal in California in 2006 would have saved families in that same income range an estimated average of $2,942 (the poorest families – those making less than $10,000 a year – would have saved an estimated average of $608 in both states).
Each of these analyses indicates that Bernie Sanders-style single-payer health care is a major win for low- and middle-income Americans. It’s theoretically possible that Clinton both isn’t “aware of” any of them and that she and Fallon are sitting on credible analyses that say something different, but I’d give that possibility much lower odds than Martin O’Malley winning the Democratic nomination. And while Clinton shifted gears slightly at the debate in response to Sanders’ new plan, many of her comments, like the assertions that Sanders would “tear [the Affordable Care Act] up” and that Democrats “couldn’t get the votes for” a public option during the ACA debate, were still extremelymisleading.
This conversation about single-payer health care has become a perfect window into the choice facing Democratic primary voters. After receiving millions of dollars from the health insurance industry, Hillary Clinton no longer supports the type of truly universal health care coverage she backed in the early 1990s. Instead, she has attacked Bernie Sanders’ support of such a plan with very similar tactics to those she herself decried in 2008 as “right out of Karl Rove’s playbook” (see video below). These attacks, besides being dishonest, undermine key Democratic values.
On the other hand, Bernie Sanders has a consistent record of fighting for those values. He rejects money from special interests and believes, as his new proposal reiterates and he said at the debate, that health care is a right that “should be available to all of our people.” As he also pointed out, the real question isn’t whether single-payer health care is desirable – it’s quite clearly “a pretty good deal.” The more pertinent question is “whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all of their money, and the pharmaceutical industry.”
Sanders certainly does. Let’s hope the voters choose wisely.
Update (5/29/16): The Tax Policy Center issued an analysis of Sanders’ overall proposals on May 9. While headlines have tended to focus on their estimates of how much the plan would increase the national debt – estimates which other analysts sharply dispute – less attention has been paid to the fact that the Tax Policy Center also found, consistent with every other analysis above, that Sanders’ plans would bring large benefits for low- and middle-income families.
If Hillary Clinton ends up winning the Democratic nomination for president, some Bernie Sanders supporters will vote for her anyway. I can respect that decision. While the differences between Democrats and Republicans are often overstated – to give just two examples (there are many), the same people advise Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz on foreign policy and Hillary Clinton is at least as cozy with Wall Street as most Republicans – there are some real and important reasons to worry about a Republican White House. The Supreme Court and heads of agencies are, in my view, the biggest concerns in this vein. I’d have low hopes for Hillary Clinton’s appointees but no doubts that they’d be better on balance than those offered by a Trump, Cruz, or Rubio.
Yet I will not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. While I understand the lesser-of-two-evils mentality, I disagree with it; most of Clinton’s policy positions are unacceptable to me. If Sanders loses the primary, I will probably vote for Jill Stein.
Wouldn’t that be a strategic blunder, some friends and family ask me? Democrats who aren’t quite as polite ask if I’m an idiot. Don’t I realize that this type of thinking led to George W. Bush becoming president in 2000 and that I may similarly “blow this election” by deciding to vote my conscience?
The premise of these questions, however, is completely wrong, and not just because, as Jim Hightower documented at the time, voting records show that “Gore was the problem, not Nader,” in the 2000 election. In fact, refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election is both a principled and strategic decision that I encourage more people to embrace.
There are two possibilities when it comes to my vote: it will either impact the outcome of the election or it won’t. If my vote won’t impact the outcome of the election, I might as well vote for the candidate with the best policy positions, regardless of his or her supposed electability.
If my vote will impact the outcome of the election, I may have to decide which matters more: (a) the differences between a bad Democrat and worse Republican over the next four years or (b) the degree to which I’d undermine our chances to enact fundamental change to a broken political system in the long-run by pursuing a lesser-of-two-evils voting strategy.
As I’ve noted before, the type of political “pragmatism” that would lead someone to choose (a) undermines power-balancing policy goals. Because politicians and Democratic party officials know that many voters think this way, they have little incentive to listen to our concerns. Instead, they can pay lip service to progressive values while crafting a policy agenda and decision-making process more responsive to wealthy donors than to their constituents.
That dynamic is on full display already in the 2016 Democratic primary election. Clinton is campaigning against priorities, like single-payer health care, that Democrats are supposed to embrace. While early union endorsements for Clinton initially improved her rhetoric on education issues to some degree, she is already backtracking to assure corporate donors that her positions are unchanged. The unions who endorsed Clinton early have no negotiating power relative to rich donors who make their support contingent on Clinton pursuing their interests; given that fact and her record, she seems unlikely to keep her promises if elected.
The Democratic National Committee’s actions are also illustrative. The party establishment lined up behind Clinton before the race even started, and the DNC’s debate schedule is, despite their protestations to the contrary, quite obviouslyconstructed to insulate Clinton from challenge. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s recent decision to suspend Sanders’ campaign’s access to its voter data (in response to a data breach by a since-fired Sanders staffer; the access was restored after the Sanders campaign sued the DNC) has caused even party loyalists to believe that the DNC “is putting [its] finger on [the] scale” and pro-Clinton journalists to acknowledge that the DNC’s behavior “makes Clinton’s lead look illegitimate, or at least, invites too many ‘what ifs.’”
Both Clinton and party leaders are making a mockery of many of the principles the party is supposed to stand for. And pledging to support Clinton in the end – no matter what she and the DNC do – enables this kind of behavior. It’s hard for me to see how we will ever fix our political process and reclaim our democracy by refusing to draw some lines in the sand.
I could accuse those who disagree with that assessment of propping up a sham political system. I could say that, by downplaying the unfoundedsmears the Clinton campaign has spread against Sanders and insisting that we must support Clinton in the general if she wins the nomination, they are destroying the Democrats’ credibility and thus helping to ensure ever more privilege-defending and corrupt elected officials and government policy. But it would be a lot fairer of me to acknowledge that a lot of the Republicans are really scary, that my strategy isn’t guaranteed to work the way I think it will, and that people evaluate the risks differently than I do.
Similarly, those who disagree can continue to accuse people like me of “helping the GOP” in the 2016 election by pointing out that the Democrats have extreme flaws and don’t always deserve our support. But it would be a lot fairer of them to acknowledge that millions upon millions of people have suffered at the hands of lesser-of-two-evils candidates over the years, that an open commitment to support a lesser-of-two-evils candidate robs voters of bargaining power, and that the Democratic Party has brought voter discontent upon itself.
Hopefully Sanders will win the Democratic primary and this discussion will become a moot point. In the meantime, it’s good for those of us who believe in social justice to push each other on our tactics. We would just do well to remember that reasonable people with the same goals can disagree about which electoral strategy is most likely to help us achieve them.
Two things that happened this week illustrate much of what’s wrong with the Democratic party.
First, Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon doubled down on Clinton’s commitment, voiced at the last Democratic debate, to avoid any tax increases at all on the “middle class.” Second, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) endorsed Clinton for president.
Taken together, these events demonstrate a long-term problem that plagues Democrats and prevents the growth of a truly power-balancing agenda: the prioritization of political opportunism over principled policymaking. Despite the presence of an increasingly viable progressive alternative, Democrats continue to lean against their own interests in the mistaken belief that it will help them win elections. Then they wonder why we’re stuck with rising inequality and a political system rigged against the majority of the population.
For starters, Clinton’s and Fallon‘s attacks on Sanders’ single-payer health care proposal were wildly misleading. Fallon cited a scary-sounding statistic about the cost of Sanders’ plan when it would actually save Americans significant amounts of money: taking private insurers out of the mix would lower overall health care costs and thus boost disposable income for most Americans. Clinton gave a similarly disingenuous description of Sanders’ plan at the debate – she said Sanders would “eliminate Medicare” when he would actually expand it (in fact, Sanders frequently touts his plan as “Medicare for All”).
Fallon is right to insist that “the wealthiest Americans finally start paying their fair share” – higher taxes on the rich could raise a sizable amount of money and are an appropriate first step – but it’s unlikely that policymakers could make the investmentsAmerica needs without at least some additional contribution from the bottom 96 percent of families, the members of which, at least in Fallon’smind (see table FINC-07), are all apparently included under the heading of “middle class.” (It’s also relevant that Sanders, much to Donald Trump’s chagrin, is far more committed to making the wealthy “pay their fair share” than is Clinton, perhaps because wealthy donors bankroll Clinton’s campaign.)
Social Security and Medicare, two of our most important and effective government programs, are financed by payroll taxes that hit the actual middle class, as would be paid family leave legislation introduced by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (of which Sanders is a co-sponsor). Complaints about taxes that pay for these sorts of programs are supposed to come from Republicans, not the Democratic frontrunner. The Clinton campaign’s anti-tax rhetoric obscures the fact that social spending is well worth taxpayer dollars; it lends credence to attempts to gut government revenue sources and slash important programs.
Unions can’t be fans of such rhetoric, as it spells trouble in the long-run for both their members and the disadvantaged populations for whom they advocate. Compared to Clinton, Sanders also has a much better record and equivalent or better policy positions on just about every issue that unions care about. Yet the majority of national unions to endorse so far have jumped on the Clinton bandwagon (the exceptions are National Nurses United and the American Postal Workers Union).
Why are unions endorsing the candidate less in sync with their interests? The most likely reason is (what they believe to be) political pragmatism. It’s natural to want to be remembered as early allies and to want to be as involved as possible in Clinton’s policymaking process; especially if they believe a Clinton victory to be inevitable, unions may view an early endorsement as the best way to curry favor with and influence the platform of the eventual nominee.
This perspective isn’t crazy; the American Federation of Teachers in particular, the first major union to endorse Clinton, has almost certainly had a hand in Clinton’s “evolving” rhetoric on education policy. Union endorsements probably also played a role in Clinton’s reversal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
At the same time, the unions’ political calculus undermines progressive goals. It sends a terrible message to both Clinton and the Democratic Establishment: that even in the primary, unions care more about backing the anointed frontrunner than they care about working for candidates who actually fight for their values. As Glenn Greenwald observed several years ago:
There’s a fundamental distinction between progressives and groups that wield actual power in Washington: namely, the latter are willing (by definition) to use their resources and energies to punish politicians who do not accommodate their views, while the former unconditionally support the Democratic Party and their leaders no matter what they do…Any self-interested, rational politician — meaning one motivated by a desire to maintain power rather than by ideology or principle — will ignore those who behave this way every time and instead care only about those whose support is conditional.
Union support for Clinton is also misguided because Sanders can definitely win both the primary and the general election. He’s significantly more popular than Clinton among independents, White voters, and young people and has better overall net favorability ratings. While Sanders is currently much less popular than Clinton among Black and Latino voters, that’s in large part due to a lack of exposure and name recognition. As Cornel West notes, his support should grow “once Black [and, I’ll add, Latino] people find out who Brother Sanders is.”
This year’s primary election is, in many ways, a referendum on the soul of the Democratic party. Will the party’s main virtue continue to be what it isn’t (as crazy as the Republicans)? Or will the Democrats begin to live up to the principles they purport to stand for? We won’t know for at least a few months, but in the meantime, both the Clinton campaign and union leaders should take a long, hard look in the mirror.
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