Michael Moore: Sanders Can Beat Trump In 2020
Filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, a frequent critic of President Trump, believes Sen. Bernie Sanders can defeat the president heading into the 2020 election.
Moore argued that the weakness of the president could make Sanderss White House bid successful in 2020 in a Tuesday interview with MSNBCs Chris Matthews.
Trump was impeached by the House last week on two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Moore added that Sanders was being perceived as the real deal by voters, and that could also be a boost to his campaign.
Hes outside the box the way Trump was Moore told Matthews.
Matthews pressed Moore on whether Sanders, who is 78, could go the distance, all the way through four years.
Moore responded that he saw Sanders give a speech Saturday that went an hour and a half and he didnt use that lectern as a crutch or anything.
He stood there and powerfully told the people that what we have to do to make this a better country. It was so amazing, and if youd been there Ill tell you, it wasnt the old Bernie stump speech, Moore said.
Moore endorsed Sanders among the crowded field of 2020 Democratic candidates in October, saying that he absolutely can win this at the time. Moore also endorsed Sanders over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary.
Sanders’ Endorsement May Be Important For Biden
Sanders made his support for Biden clear and swift, unlike four years ago when his endorsement of Clinton was viewed as late and tepid.
The Vermont senator has repeatedly called Trump “the most dangerous president” in modern American history and exhorted supporters to get behind Biden, his politically moderate rival.
In turn, Biden has moved a bit to the left. He now says public colleges and universities should be free for all lower-income and middle class families because of the coronavirus pandemic, though he continues to oppose “Medicare for All,” one of Sanders’ signature campaign issues.
“I think people are going to be surprised. We are apart on some issues, but we are awfully close on others,” Biden told Sanders during a joint live-streamed appearance five days after Sanders suspended his campaign in April. “I’m going to need you. Not just to win the campaign but to govern.”
Sanders’ endorsement could sway some reluctant supporters to get behind the former vice president, Paleologos said.
Among those in the Suffolk poll who knew about Sanders endorsement of Biden, 80% were voting for Biden, he said. Among those who didnt, only 63% said they would vote for the former vice president.
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How Huge Of A Turnout Surge Does Sanders Need To Be As Electable As A Moderate
The case that Bernie Sanders is just as electable as the more moderate candidates thus appears to rest on a leap of faith: that youth voter turnout would surge in the general election by double digits if and only if Bernie Sanders is nominated, compensating for the voters his nomination pushes to Trump among the rest of the electorate.
There are reasons to doubt a Sanders-driven youth turnout surge of this size would materialize. First, people who promise in surveys they will vote often dont, meaning the turnout estimates that Sanderss electability case rests upon are probably extremely inaccurate. Second, such a turnout surge is large in comparison to other effects on turnout. For example, Sanders would need to stimulate a youth turnout boost much larger than the turnout boost Barack Obamas presence on the ballot stimulated among black voters in 2008.
Third, Sanderss electability case requires this 11 percentage point turnout increase among young voters in 2020 to occur on top of any turnout increase that would otherwise occur if another Democrat were nominated.
And this enormous 11 percentage point turnout boost is only enough to make Sanders as electable as the more moderate candidates, given the other votes he loses to Trump. For him to be the most electable Democratic candidate based on his ability to inspire youth turnout, Sanderss nomination would need to increase youth turnout by even more.
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Make No Mistake: He Can Still Win This Thing
Mr. Sanders can win if he modulates his message, according to Elizabeth Spiers, the founder of a political consulting firm. As Ezra Klein explains at Vox, Mr. Sanderss portrayal of himself as an insurgent against the system is central to his appeal among his most loyal supporters, but it also may be preventing him from winning over the rest of the Democratic electorate. The campaign needs to articulate a vision that allows people to get on board if they regard Sanders as a flawed candidate or not totally aligned policy-wise, Ms. Spiers said on Twitter.
To beat Mr. Biden, Mr. Sanders must also convince voters that hes not just the better choice, but the safer choice, writes Matt Karp, an associate professor of history at Princeton, in Jacobin magazine. In his view, its an easy case to make: In a bare-knuckled battle with Trump, does real safety belong with this candidate, whose name is a synonym for the swamp around Capitol Hill, whose political career is an extended advertisement for Beltway malfeasance, and whose only real asset a kind of musty aura of the Obama years is considerably diminished by his inability to speak in complete sentences?
Mr. Sanders could also make the case by comparing Mr. Bidens candidacy to Hillary Clintons in 2016.The journalist Mehdi Hasan tweeted:
And perhaps most persuasively:
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Another Campaign Another Disappointment For Women As Elizabeth Warren Bows Out
For many women, Elizabeth Warren dropping out of the presidential race was a familiar punch to the gut. The highest glass ceiling in the land remains intact.
Each of their campaigns insists it is poised to draw groups of voters who have not been enthusiastic about their politics and to craft a pitch that crosses ideological and demographic boundaries, as Obama succeeded in doing in 2008.
But Obama, a relative newcomer to the national political stage then, charged into his race free of the burdens that Sanders and Biden carry. Decades of experience helped propel the two septuagenarian politicians to the front of a huge field of candidates this cycle, but that also weighs them down as they struggle to reach new audiences.
Hes going to talk about building a big coalition, Sanders campaign co-chair Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley congressman, vowed in a video interview he posted Wednesday on Twitter. He is committed to being a unifier.
That message reflected an insurgent campaign chastened by Super Tuesday election returns that indicated Sanders needs to adjust his approach.
But even as the Biden campaign reveled in its success Tuesday, advisors acknowledged that the former vice president, too, must expand his reach.
But his limited reach with voters younger than 45, whom Obama was so successful at energizing, is not encouraging for a Democratic Party eager to attract new blood.
Yet it was Sanders who had by far the tougher night on Super Tuesday.
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Nonvoters Are No Monolith
Expanding turnout is the core of the electability argument that Sanders offers in his campaign appearances.
“At last week’s contentious debate in Nevada, he said, “In order to beat Donald Trump, we’re going to need the largest voter turnout in the history of the United States,” and at Tuesday night’s debate in South Carolina he promised to keep working toward that historic turnout.
“We need to bring working people back into the Democratic Party,” he said. “We need to get young people voting in a way that they never have before. That is what our campaign is about.”
During a campaign rally in Iowa last month, Sanders argued at length that he’s best suited among the Democratic candidates to inspire such a surge in voting.
“So I would hope the people of Iowa, people of America, ask themselves: Which campaign is the campaign of energy and excitement?” he insisted in Des Moines on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“Which is the campaign that is reaching out to working class people, many of whom are disillusioned with the political process and too often do not vote? … simple truth is that young people have not voted at the kind of rate that they should have. Which campaign is capable of bringing in millions of young people into the political process?”
“This is why the whole Sanders theory of the case is so suspect,” says Teixeira. “It’s not like we don’t know about nonvoters … and, given what we know, it’s not at all clear that his case makes much sense.”
Opinionhow A Socialist Candidate Can Win The Us Presidential Election In 2020
The social forces that propelled Sanders to the national stage in 2016 after years as an obscure voice for progress seemed to surprise even him and even more so than last time, hes running to win, not just to start a conversation.
Of course, his candidacy would never have taken off the way it did in 2016 or again in 2020 if grassroots movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter hadn’t empowered regular, working class people to talk about our political-economic system’s failure to deliver on their promises for all but a lucky few. And, more recently, the nationwide wave of teachers strikes both fed into, and was fed by, the movement behind Sanders.
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Get A Grip Bernie Bed
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The Bernie bed-wetting has reached full-blown rubber sheet mode. With Bernie Sanders hanging on to a slim polling lead in Iowa and an even bigger one in New Hampshire, panicked Democrats are sounding the alarm that Bernie Sanders could surf a wave of unstoppable momentum all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. Nominating Sanders to run against Donald Trump would be an Act of Insanity, according to New York magazines Jonathan Chait. Dems Tormented Over How to Stop Bernie, read a recent Politico headline, which quoted Rahm Emanuel, the high priest of boardroom centrism, proclaiming with authority that Sanders will repel swing voters. The New York Times cited Bonnie Campbell, a longtime supporter of Hillary Clinton and now Joe Biden, talking about Sanders as if he was infected with the coronavirus. I can tell you, I hear from friends and colleagues who say: Oh, my God, what are we going to do if Bernie wins? Campbell said, sounding haunted.
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Bernie Is a Celebrity
Bernie Understands the Media
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Another Shot At The Prize
Four years ago, Sanders also followed a tight result in Iowa with a victory in New Hampshire. That contest was actually more decisive – a 20-point win over Hillary Clinton, who was considered the prohibitive favourite entering the race.
Sanders’ 2016 New Hampshire triumph, however, was a springboard into an empty pool.
He followed his win in the overwhelmingly white New England state with a narrow loss in Nevada and a drubbing in South Carolina, where the Democratic voting population is majority black. Although there were a few bright spots after that – victories in Michigan and Wisconsin – Clinton spent the next few months pulling away from Sanders in the nomination race.
Now Sanders is back, hoping history doesn’t repeat itself. Facing a more crowded field, he appears to be in a much better position, as the nomination fight becomes a state-by-state slog on a battleground that stretches the breadth of the nation.
There is no Clinton machine waiting to do battle against the Sanders insurgency this time around. Instead, the Vermont senator heads out of New Hampshire along with a ragtag mix of candidates all scrambling for a foothold.
Joe Biden, the apparent front-runner through much of 2019, is grievously wounded by poor showings in the first two contests. Elizabeth Warren, the other candidate appealing to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, has finished behind Sanders twice now and shows no signs gaining any ground.
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And Then Coronavirus Changed Everything
In the US, concern about coronavirus hit suddenly and decisively around mid-March, pushing politics to the periphery in news bulletins but not necessarily in the minds of Americans.
Healthcare was front of mind. So too was the economy. Presidential leadership mattered in a way it hadnt during the Russia probe or Ukraine scandal.
With sports and TV shows cancelled, millions of Americans tuned in to the first one-on-one debate featuring Biden and Sanders.
Biden, aided by the lack of a cheering crowd, laid out step-by-step plans for how hed fight the virus if he were president today.
Sanders stuck to the same policy ideas he always had, talking about redistributing wealth and overhauling the healthcare system.
It has nothing to do with Medicare for All. That does not solve the problem at all, Biden responded.
People are looking for results, not a revolution.
The next round of primaries again went to Biden. Then the next.
Living through a world turned upside down, Americans went the way of South Carolina and decided they could no longer entertain the idea of a political revolution or a sudden shift to socialist policies. They wanted safety, security and predictability.
They wanted Joe Biden.
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The Reason Sanders Appears Equally Electable
These Bernie or bust voters that come off the sidelines for Sanders in our survey are almost entirely limited to one group: Democrats and independents under age 35. These voters are about 11 percentage points more likely to say they would vote for Democrats if Sanders is nominated and almost all of them say they would not vote at all or vote third party if hes not on the ballot.
However, the Bernie or bust phenomenon appears almost entirely limited to left-leaning young people, who are usually a small share of the overall electorate. This stands in contrast to many theories of Sanderss electoral appeal: For example, whites without a college degree a demographic some speculate Sanders could win over are actually more likely to say they will vote for Trump against Sanders than against the other Democrats. The same is true of the rest of the electorate, except left-leaning young people.
This finding in our data mirrors many other surveys: Morning Consult finds dramatic increases in young Americans stated turnout intentions when asked how they would vote in matchups between Sanders and Trump.
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