Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager is warning that Democrats would struggle in a general election against Donald Trump if Bernie Sanders is the nominee.

In an interview with POLITICO, Jim Messina predicted that Trump would exploit Sanders’ stamp of socialism in battleground states needed to defeat Trump, keep control of the House and have a shot at winning the Senate.

“If I were a campaign manager for Donald Trump and I look at the field, I would very much want to run against Bernie Sanders,” Messina said. “I think the contrast is the best. He can say, ‘I’m a business guy, the economy’s good and this guy’s a socialist.’ I think that contrast for Trump is likely one that he’d be excited about in a way that he wouldn’t be as excited about Biden or potentially Mayor Pete or some of the more Midwestern moderate candidates.”....

“From a general election perspective, socialism is not going to be what Democrats are going to want to defend,” Messina added.“If you’re the Democratic nominee for the Montana Senate race, you don’t want to spend the election talking about socialism.”

Messina is the latest Democrat to raise concerns about Sanders at the top of the ticket. Endangered House Democrats are coalescing around Biden because of concerns that Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could threaten their reelection hopes, POLITICO reported Saturday.

On favorability, the extent of Biden’s advantage among African Americans is just as pronounced. At 69 percent favorable and only 13 percent unfavorable, Biden’s net favorability (plus-56) tops that of Sanders (plus-48), Warren (plus-39) and Buttigieg (plus-8). The good news for Buttigieg is that 34 percent of African American voters haven’t even heard of him and 21 percent have heard of him but have no opinion. He has room to grow, in other words. If Biden were the nominee, he would get 82 percent of African Americans. No other candidate would draw more than Sanders’s 74 percent.

Part of the explanation for their preference for Biden may be that African Americans overwhelmingly prioritize winning (57 percent) over agreement on issues (33 percent). In addition, by a 61 percent-to-21 percent margin, African American voters favor continuing President Barack Obama’s policies over policies that are more progressive than his. Whether this is based on loyalty to Obama, an assessment of what the voters as a whole will accept or their own moderate ideology (or some of each) is debatable. (When Warren talks about “big” and “fundamental change,” she probably is not endearing herself to these voters.)

There has been a long-standing debate in the Democratic Party about the continued status of two overwhelmingly white states in the first and second positions in the primary schedule. When one candidate dominates among African Americans to the extent Biden does, Iowa may prove predictive of nothing at all. If Biden eventually wins the nomination, it might be the perfect time to rethink the entire primary process, by rotating states, giving primacy to states that are the most diverse or moving to a regional primary system with a series of Super Tuesdays.

Finally, the media should take stock of their coverage to date. The overwhelmingly white national press corps has consistently devalued Biden’s strong base of support and harped on things that are entirely irrelevant to supporters or even endear him to them (e.g., gaffes, his hokey language). Mainstream outlets that pay more attention to Twitter than to African American voters, especially older African American voters who are not active on social media, may have underestimated Biden’s chances and overestimated the chances of candidates who, like them, are active on social media. This should be a reminder for the chattering class that their assessments of candidates do not necessarily correspond to reality.

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are assessing whether Russia is trying to undermine Joe Biden in its ongoing disinformation efforts with the former vice president still the front-runner in the race to challenge President Donald Trump, according to two officials familiar with the matter.

The probe comes as senior U.S. officials are warning that Russia’s election interference in 2020 could be more brazen than in the 2016 presidential race or the 2018 midterm election.

Part of the inquiry is to determine whether Russia is trying to weaken Biden by promoting controversy over his past involvement in U.S. policy toward Ukraine while his son worked for an energy company there.

Trump was impeached by the House and faces a trial in the Senate over his pressure on Ukraine’s president to investigate Biden, the early front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, as well as an unsupported theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.

A Kremlin strategy to undermine Biden would echo its work in 2016, when American intelligence agencies found that Russia carried out a sophisticated operation to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton and ultimately help Trump, according to the officials, who asked not to be identified discussing the sensitive matter.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has decided to attack Joe Biden, claiming that the moderate former vice president, who sits atop virtually every national poll with solid African American support, is somehow unelectable. His argument is that Biden couldn’t possibly be elected because he voted for the Iraq War nearly 20 years ago and for the North American Free Trade Agreement 27 years ago. There is no data to support that argument and, logically, one would think that running as a self-described socialist now is a much bigger electability problem than Biden’s past votes, but we do not have to speculate.

Some of Sanders’s signature, super-progressive issues play very poorly in swing states. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Blue Wall Voices Project last year found that “large shares of swing voters in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin say stopping detainments at the U.S. border for people cross into the country illegally and a national Medicare-for-all plan are ‘bad ideas.’ ”
Moreover, polling over the last week or so shows clearly that picking Sanders would be a gamble. While he once was leading outside the margin of error in head-to-head matchups against President Trump, he is now losing or at best within the margin of error while Biden continues to be the most viable candidate against Trump.....

Moreover, given that Democratic victories are heavily dependent on African American turnout, it is difficult to see that Sanders, who gets a fraction of the African American support that Biden does, could turn out a bigger African American vote than Biden could. (Recall that in the 2016 primary, Hillary Clinton walloped Sanders among African American voters.) In the latest Fox News South Carolina poll, Biden gets 43 percent of the African American vote, Sanders just 12 percent.

And finally, remember that in the 2018 midterms, super-progressive candidates endorsed by Sanders did not flip a single House seat from red to blue. All those House seats were flipped by Biden-type moderates.

There will be a debate next week. That might be a good moment to quiz Sanders on where his claim to superior electability comes from. So far, there is not a whole lot — if any — evidence to back up his boast.

If former vice president Joe Biden wins the Democratic presidential nomination, his success might be attributable to two factors: his defense of President Barack Obama’s record and his foreign policy views. He showed off both Wednesday night.....

Biden accomplishes two things here. First, he reaffirms his bond with Obama, who remains overwhelmingly popular with Democratic voters, most especially with African American voters. Certainly, Biden benefits from association with a popular ex-president, but he also reminds Democrats that unlike his opponents who want “revolutionary change," he wants to build on the Obama legacy. Second, Biden’s analysis is essentially correct, and his rivals would be foolish not to adopt it....

It is one thing to criticize Trump for making hash out of our Middle East policy, however, and quite another to construct a coherent plan for improving matters. What is the endpoint we seek? If we aim to renew the Iran deal, decrease Iranian aggression in the region and maintain vigilance against the Islamic State, then immediately bugging out of Iran, Syria and Afghanistan — as some of Biden’s opponents suggest — would be foolhardy. Simply reciting platitudes such as “Get out of the Middle East” does not engender confidence among voters and frankly does not present much of a contrast to Trump.

Biden offers something more concrete and realistic: Keep allies together, use carrots and sticks to get back to an acceptable nuclear deal and attempt to ratchet down the chance for war. That requires a whole lot of finesse, which is not amenable to bumper-sticker promises: Work with our allies. Don’t govern by tweet. Use diplomacy. That’s as simplistic and unimpressive as “Iran won’t get a nuclear weapon on my watch.” Biden opponents’ one-liners or one-upmanship about who opposed the Iraq War first will strike many voters as childish.

Candidates need to show that they understand the challenges they will face going forward. One of them might inherit the Trump legacy of chaos, instability, broken alliances and disdain for human rights.