In 2016, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money, but lost to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. In 2020, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money but lost to Biden, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. Sanders got almost no backing from elected Democrats in 2016, and didn’t court the party establishment that much in 2020 either. That was a major barrier to his candidacy — not only did Sanders again get little support from the party elite, but that same elite was instrumental in helping Biden consolidate the field and winnow the race to a two-man contest. [...]
Sanders and his aides also made new mistakes in 2020. There were some clear indications that some of Sanders’s success in 2016 — among white voters without college degrees, in particular — had more to do with anti-Clinton sentiment than strong support for Sanders. But the senator’s advisers seemed to think that Sanders had a unique appeal to white working-class voters that would simply continue in 2020. So the Sanders campaign decided to invest heavily in the March 10 primary in Michigan, a state packed with white voters without a college degree. Biden not only won Michigan easily, but he won overall among white voters without a college degree (and pretty comfortably). [...]
We made this case in more detail in an article earlier this week, arguing that Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic left were always going to face an uphill climb in the 2020 primary. Democrats’ overriding priority in 2020 has been defeating Trump, and many in the party view left-leaning ideas as something that makes it harder to win over swing voters. The boomlets around former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, neither of whom had the traditional qualifications for a presidential nominee, had the feeling of the Democratic Party desperately searching for a white, male, centrist-y candidate to take on Trump. The party landing on Biden (white male, centrist-y) fits that general narrative. [...]
The way the primary process played out, with Sanders the clear front-runner after the Nevada caucuses and Biden needing a surprising comeback to win, suggests that Sanders could have won in 2020. But it would have been somewhat fluky if a candidate (Biden) who led in the polls for basically the entire race crashed without the party’s establishment able to mobilize behind any alternative. Had Biden not run in 2020 or faltered fairly early, could Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Sens. Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, or even Warren have defeated the Vermont senator in the same way Biden did, by getting into a one-on-one race with Sanders, running to his right and receiving the bulk of support from the party’s establishment? That seems entirely possible.
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