Beinart: Regular Democrats Just Aren't Worried About Bernie [View all]

[DanTex]

A good article. Among activists and party insiders, it can seem like a "civil war" of Bernie vs everyone else, which explains where the "75% voted against Bernie" talking point comes from. These pundits assume that, since the pundit class is roughly divided into "pro-Bernie" and "anti-Bernie", the voters are as well. But that's just not the case. Among actual voters, not only is Bernie the most popular of the candidates, but voters who choose one of the other five or six leading contenders also have a positive opinion of Bernie, they just happen to prefer one of the others.

Judging by media coverage and the comments of party luminaries, you might think Democrats are bitterly polarized over Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid. Last month, Hillary Clinton declared that “nobody likes” the Vermont senator. Last week, James Carville, who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, said he was “scared to death” of the Sanders campaign, which he likened to “a cult.” Since the beginning of the year, news organization after news organization has speculated that Sanders’s success may set off a Democratic “civil war.”

But polls of Democratic voters show nothing of the sort. Among ordinary Democrats, Sanders is strikingly popular, even with voters who favor his rivals. He sparks less opposition—in some cases far less—than his major competitors. On paper, he appears well positioned to unify the party should he win its presidential nomination.

So why all the talk of civil war? Because Sanders is far more divisive among Democratic elites—who prize institutional loyalty and ideological moderation—than Democratic voters. The danger is that by projecting their own anxieties onto rank-and-file Democrats, party insiders are exaggerating the risk of a schism if Sanders wins the nomination, and overlooking the greater risk that the party could fracture if they engineer his defeat.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/regular-democrats-arent-least-bit-worried-about-bernie/606688/