WaPo: DNC going to offer convention concession to Sanders

[Jim Lane]

85. What's new isn't having divisive candidates. What's new is that so many voters are so fed up.

Obviously, Sanders and Trump are miles apart ideologically. Nevertheless, there are some similarities in how voters respond to them.

Sanders, in challenging so much of what passes for the Democratic Party orthodoxy, is no more divisive in his platform than Kucinich was in 2004 and 2008. The difference is that Sanders is averaging around 40% instead of 4%. Nobody called Kucinich divisive -- he didn't significantly divide the party because he attracted only a tiny segment of it.

This year, Clinton was the establishment candidate. There's never been a nonincumbent Democrat (not even Al Gore in 2000) who began the primary season with such a big lead in the polls and in support from the party pooh-bahs. Against her is this old guy (strike one), Jewish (strike two), from a small state (strike three), who hasn't even been a Democrat (strike four), and who in fact called himself and still calls himself a socialist (strike five). How did he do so well against an overwhelming favorite? He spoke his mind, he was willing to be highly critical of the party establishment, and he discovered that millions of people were hostile to that establishment.

That's roughly what happened on the Republican side. Trump was, in his way, as unconventional a candidate as Sanders. He was like Sanders in that the party establishment despised him. (If the party national committees had picked the nominees from the initial field, Sanders would have finished fifth out of five and Trump would have finished somewhere around sixteenth out of seventeenth, maybe one spot higher or lower.) He was also like Sanders in that he was willing to say things that the party establishment didn't want to hear. Like Sanders, he had various strikes against him; the party of social conservatism wasn't the obvious place for a twice-divorced casino mogul who'd never held elective office and who'd often supported Democrats. Nevertheless, like Sanders, he discovered that a lot of the voters in the primaries and caucuses had had it with the party establishment.

To call these candidates "divisive" implies that they caused divisions. I disagree. The divisions were there. Sanders and Trump each far surpassed the expectations for him by speaking to a big segment of the electorate.