Was it really all down to Obama and the endorsement game? Is there anything we can learn from it, or is the lesson "Dems will never accept even simple reforms and should be let go"? Most importantly: how do you answer when people say "you mean the same Bernie that couldn't even win the primary?" Other than the truth which is: Dems couldn't accept someone the party was completely hostile to, had the field been level we'd have sweeped.
It really should've been his to win.
Some reasons why Bernie failed:
- Bernie ran a much worse campaign in 2020 than in 2016, he sounded like any other democrat (orange man bad, putin is terrible etc etc).
- Bernie filled his campaign with highpaid DNC consultants who fucked up out-reach on multiple fronts (don't have the sourcing ready on this but Fiorella Isabel did a lot of good work talking to people in Bernies campaign who were very frustrated with the campaigns direction).
- Amongst democrats 70% of the electoral still believes the media is an imperfect but fundamentally impartial arbiter, instead of the corrupt corporate tools of US capital tied to the hip of the DNC they really are.
- Bernie tried playing nice with the media hoping they would give him a chance see nr 3 for why that would never happen.
- Bernie offered a critique of capitalism by focusing on the current living conditions for the vast majority of americans, but that is not enough, if you want to win, you have to convince them that you are willing to fight. Bernie never went against the establishment and thus never gained true outsider status like Trump got in 2016.
- Bernie never critiqued the democratic party for betraying workers or Obama's term for how much of a disaster it was.
- Bernie russia gated, while not as much as other democrats, it made him sound like all the other democrats, and it still came back to bite him, both when he was forced to partake in the senate hearings (discussions with people inside the campaign said this cost him dearly in Iowa) and in the end when it was used against him right before Nevada.
- For most of the democratic primary electorate this election was "about beating trump", Bernie kept saying "joe biden is my good friend, he's a decent guy and he can beat trump", making his candidacy too risky for suburban liberals who mainstream media kept telling that Bernie was a commie radical and could never win an election.
- Bernie was terrible at picking allies, he burned bridges with other progressives and it left his campaign a lot weaker.
- Snakes on a campaign (warren was clearly a spoiler candidate meant to divide the progressive wing of the party)
Finally, maybe don't concede the primary to a demented racist rapist corporate sellout warmonger when you entire agenda is being proven right by a pandemic and subsequent economic depression. Especially when millions of working people have given you money and are putting their hopes in you helping their lives.
Maybe he could at least fight to get some concessions from biden like he did in 2016, but instead we got the obvious bullshit that was "the task forces", we don't need another group of people to brainstorm "how we fix the problems", the fixes are obvious at this point.
There was also a more fundamental problem with the Democratic Party. Just like with the media, Democratic rank-and-file still have an incredibly naive trust that their party elites have their best interests at heart. Whereas the Republican rank-and-file fucking hate their own party elites and will gladly primary incumbents in favor of an esvalating cast of psychos, Democrats are terrified of or unwilling to do the same. So an "anti-establishment" candidate isn't going to gain the same traction with Democrats than with Republicans.
Its a major reason why this should be the final signal that a "bore within" strategy with the Democrats will fail time and time again, and that there is no future for the left within the Democratic Party.
Great write up, thanks! I feel like he chose targets of ire that were a bit too intangible for alot of people. I feel like a strategy of deep diving on down ballot issues and candidates in the primary states combined with targeted rhetoric against the clear failings of biden could've been more effective.
Alot if libs I spoke to kept mentioning how tired they were of hearing about corporate boogeymen, idk he was the first actual candidate I canvassed for but im am quite disillusioned with electoralism.
Alot of good arguements in the recent Biden v trump threads.
Voting PSL but am feeling trump as the harm reduction candidate/best set up for any actual progressive electoralism chances.
To the media point, I think a lot of that is Trump's fault. When he attacked CNN and the New York Times, it made Democrats who might have been potential Bernie voters start to form an identity around uncritically accepting the mainstream media. Then, a couple years later, CNN and NYT started smearing Bernie and they ate it up because they still had that attachment.
The phrase "corporate media" used to be common parlance even among super establishment libs. Now, I basically never hear it, and I think it ought to be brought back.
I dunno, as FDR gets further from the american political memory I think new deal politics have less and less purchase. Look at Joe "most progressive platform since FDR" Biden - not only is that an incredibly low bar to clear, Biden is 100% part of the neoliberal cadre that pillaged the Democrats. All of the New Deal dems are dead and we're stuck with their shitty children.
The political system is the home turf of the capitalist class. Any ground gained there for the working class and against the capitalists is subject to a direct intervention in the system by capitalists (in the form of breaking the rules, violence, and then if the election is won, intentional sabatoge of production, flight of capital, brain-drain, etc.). I think a Bernie presidency was a pipe dream and the only real purpose the campaign served was to serve as a platform to radicalise people through.
I’m tired of telling people to read this shit but https://tdmsresearch.com/
There are a lot of reasons why Bernie failed based on campaign fundementals, but I'm going to completely ignore all that because these were all concerns that should've been understood as being a threat from the beginning.
It's that people still didn't turn out to vote in the numbers he needed them too. Youth turnout was still higher during the Obama primaries than it was this time around. Latinos still vote at a lower rate than most other demographics. While he did fantastic within these groups that did vote, the majority of them still didn't vote.
Now, this wasn't really as true within the earlier states. But that was because they invested a shit ton of time into ground game in all of these places that simply didn't exist in any of the super Tuesday or later states outside of California.
Does your low turnout theory take into account the voter suppression?
Voter suppression is a real problem, but I don't think it was everything, we would've seen tighter margins if that was the deciding factor.
Additionally his success in the early states signaled to me that a lot of it was not making enough contact with their voter block in some of the later states.
Honestly, I'm a bit tired of people's armchair campaigning. He lost. It hurts me to say this, but I don't think he could have won without sacrificing key parts of his platform like healthcare, and maybe not even then. Any change in strategy may have worked on the margins, but we needed more than that if we wanted to win this. Anyone who has a genuine belief in a historical materialism should know that Bernie's campaign drew a line in the sand, and while it was the righteous line, it was not the winning one. Even if we'd won the primary, it's hard not to imagine a situation similar to Corbyn where he gets sabotaged from the inside.
I'm sorry, but this tankie shit about how Bernie didn't go scorched earth enough on the DNC and media sounds cool and edgy, but that only scores points in places like this. If that were actually the winning strategy then Mike Gravel would have made it onto ballots. Maybe that works for something much more militant, but certainly not an election within the democratic party.
I'm not one for being obsessed with electoralism, but he came close enough that there's a possibility for meaningful discussion of things he might have done to win
Sure. But I feel like what needs to be said on the matter has been said already. And I'm not sure how relevant Bernie's campaign is to ongoing political campaigns at this point. We're entering the end of the primary election cycle and there are protests happening up and fucking down this country. I do believe that electoralism is an avenue worth pursuing when the moment is right, but that doesn't feel like the place our energies should be going now. Talk of the campaign just feels like people are chasing a high they can't get back at this point.
