The New Yorker: Bernie Sanders's Electability Tour

[Donkees]

The candidate makes a Midwest bid for front-runner status.

By Eric Lach 5:00 A.M.

Excerpts:

In 2016, Sanders, in some ways, was caught short by his own success, prompting headlines like “Bernie Sanders Never Thought It Would Get This Far.” But his current campaign, with its robust staff, its fund-raising, and its fleshed-out foreign-policy platform, has been built for a front-runner. “There’s a three-out-of-four chance we are not the nominee,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, recently told The Atlantic, “but that one-in-four chance is better than anyone else in the field.”

The final stop of Sanders’s tour was a Fox News town hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at the former Bethlehem Steel mill, which, since its closure, in 1995, has been converted into a corporate arts-and-cultural center called SteelStacks. Outside the venue, police patrolled the parking lot on horseback, and Trump supporters held signs protesting a Fox News event. Inside, the old Bethlehem Steel furnaces were visible through the walls of glass. A few hundred people were in the seats. Even though the audience was selected by Fox News through an online registration—a process that included answering a series of questions, including one that prompted participants to share their views on socialism—it seemed like a fairly Sanders-friendly bunch.

Sanders got through the town hall in the same way he gets through all his campaign stops, taking it back to his message and statistics at every turn. A few minutes before the show started, his campaign had released his tax returns, and the hosts were eager to talk about the twenty-six-per-cent rate that he paid last year, on more than five hundred thousand dollars in income. Why didn’t he volunteer to pay more taxes, MacCallum asked. “Well, you can volunteer, too,” Sanders said, to cheers. “Progressive tax rate!” someone in the audience shouted, instructions be damned. The hosts tried to poke him on socialism, his age, the tax increases that Medicare for All will demand. But the room was clearly with the candidate. It seemed to confirm what Sanders is so fond of saying—that many of the ideas considered “radical” when he ran four years ago are now the litmus test for the Democratic field. Whether that means he’ll win is another question. “Relax,” Sanders said, at one point. “We’ll get through this together.”


In a carefully curated tour of the Midwest, Bernie Sanders visited states where he believes his hopes for the Presidency lie.Photograph by Maddie McG​arvey / NYT / Redux

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/bernie-sanderss-electability-tour