How can one get over that hurdle? Like, I can totally get the idea of supporting Biden because the white moderate, problematic as they genuinely are, will likely not run for the hills when compared to Sanders, but how does one bypass the obstacle that if those numbers are not based on building coalitions and just on the policy front, many people are saying they support the candidate who is more likely to be a source of their problems than the other candidate?
Like if those results are not based on a coalition but on the candidate exclusively, most people are wrong. They're supporting the candidate who has policies that are worse for them! How do you surpass what looks like a kind of political battered wife syndrome? I think that's going to be the obstacle, because tribalism, the idea of the ""Democratic establishment"" is going to be a pillow to protect people who have history of terrible policy in the face of someone who has the courage to call that out. That seems like something people are going to fail at surpassing, and not just exclusively a Sanders failure.
So, I think this is kind of a misread of the argument. I would say that Bernie's failure
is a failure of coalition building. That's where the lack of trust comes from. It's not so much about him as a person, because voters don't know him as a person. Most of them met him 4 years ago. But they can tell that he's not reaching out to people they do trust, and that he's actually kinda tearing a lot of them down. There was this great twitter thread that actually got posted here as a pro-Bernie talking point but I thought was really on point for why Bernie struggled so much with older black voters. To them, the Democratic party wasn't white dudes from up north, it was their neighbors, their teachers, their family. People they knew, who were also Democrats. People that the Bernie campaign did not a great job of reaching out to. That's what's got to change.
It's also why I think AOC is going to continue to be a freaking rockstar because she really does seem to get that. She's got the policy, but she's also just an incredibly effective political agent who truly gets how you play the game (and I mean that as an enormous compliment). I'd be thrilled to back her in 2024, open primary or no, if that's what she decides to do (tho I'd prefer she take Chuck Schumer's seat first).
it definitely can be used as a partisan attack against him, as Biden has demonstrated, but yeah, Bernie is more pragmatic than some give him credit for
like, even his position on Medicare for All is less about ideological rigidity and more about a basic understanding of how compromise actually tends to work
Yeah. He's a better politician than his campaign messaging is really giving him credit for. It's weird, and frustrating. There was a great Vox piece about the "Bernieworld" reaction to SC and Super Tuesday and I think it brought up something that I don't see a lot, the internal divisions in the campaign. You've got the more coalition-building faction that was responsible for stuff like the "king of amendments" line and the Obama ad, and the more factional one that unfortunately seems to be running the show most of the time.
