A pretty good opening game of the season for Sen. Bernie Sanders.
So he lost. Politics, as is often noted, ain’t bean-bag. But in this case it ain’t baseball or basketball, either, where teams either win or lose, or even football, where it is theoretically possible to tie. In politics, as in the National Hockey League, a team can get points even if it loses.
Sanders lost by three-tenths of a percentage point. No, they can’t do that even in the NHL. But in any league, that’s hardly any loss at all, and hardly any win for Hillary Clinton.
The next game is on a playing field more to Sanders liking, one in which he is the early favorite. All in all, the candidate dismissed as a distraction by most of the political world when he joined the race eight months ago now looks like a real contender.
And a real winner?
Oh, let’s not get carried away. Vermont’s independent senator still faces formidable obstacles in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, at least one of them created by his own supporters. But his candidacy is viable. It isn’t that it is no longer a joke. It never was. It’s that the political world finds it harder to keep calling it a joke.
Not that it doesn’t keep trying. The prevailing post-Iowa view among the poll-watching (poll-worshiping?) analysts was that even his Iowa “virtual tie” (as Sanders called it) and a likely win in New Hampshire would avail him little. That’s because what awaits him thereafter are the Nevada caucuses (Feb. 20) and the South Carolina primary (Feb. 27).
In both states, this conventional analysis points out, many Democratic voters are minorities – Hispanics in Nevada and African-Americans in South Carolina. The senator from ultra-white Vermont has little connection with these communities. Clinton has close ties with both. No wonder the polls show her leading in both states.
All true, and no one should be surprised if Clinton wins both contests, blunting and perhaps reversing the Sanders surge.
But when he entered the race in May, Sanders was 50 points behind Clinton in Iowa. On caucus night, the difference was less than 1 percent. Black and Hispanic voters can “feel the Bern” too. They aren’t all that different from white Anglo voters. They have the same problems (plus a few more) and watch some of the same television programs. Sanders may not have as big a campaign treasury as Clinton, but he has more than enough money to make his case in both those states.
And he and his associates turn out to be pretty good at making that case. His television commercials are as effective as anyone else’s. He has started to put money into staffing more field organizations in several states. Whatever else he may be, he is now competitive. No, he’s still not the favorite. But he’s in the game, perhaps until it’s over.
In fact, there is some indication that minority voters are already beginning to feel that Bern. According to one poll (by CBS News and YouGov), Clinton led among South Carolina black voters 82 to 14 percent in November. Last month it was 76 to 22 percent. Still a pretty good lead. If it holds, she’ll probably win that primary.
But no one knows whether it will hold. Like some of the pollsters themselves (and like credentialed experts in some other fields. Think: economists), the poll-driven analysts tend to think of people as integers, as intangible inputs.
They are not. Unlike integers and inputs, people have minds. They have the power to change those minds, and often do. Especially in intra-party contests, voters often change their minds, sometimes just before they vote. It will not be easy for Sanders to change the minds of many African-American and Hispanic voters. It will not be impossible.
Sanders faces other obstacles, one perhaps from the intensity of his own supporters, who loudly booed Clinton on caucus night in Iowa when she called herself a “progressive.” Some of the most committed Berniacs cannot always control themselves from displaying their own self-proclaimed moral superiority, scorning anyone who differs with their hero as benighted if not downright corrupt.
Whatever else is wrong with this attitude, it is bad politics. People do not like being scorned. They don’t even like to see other people being scorned and shouted down. Sanders is, by his own account, leading a cause – a “political revolution” – and not just a campaign. That’s fine. But if he becomes identified as the leader of an intolerant self-righteous mob, he’ll be in trouble.
Besides, by any objective political standard, Hillary Clinton is indeed a progressive. She is not as far left as Sanders on most issues, but on almost all of them she is decidedly left of center and far left (not much of a trick) of any of the Republican contenders.
It is also true that she has moved left in recent years. Some of this is in response to the Sanders challenge. But most of it is not. As inequality has burgeoned, as opportunity and living standards have declined for working men and women, the entire Democratic Party has moved left. To a lesser but noticeable extent, so has the whole country. Just look at all those Republican states that voted to increase the minimum wage.
Clinton’s move left may have been a political calculation. Or maybe, as people do, she changed her mind. She is hardly alone.
Meanwhile, the devoted Sanderistas brag that their man hasn’t changed at all, that his policy positions of 2016 are the very ones he put forth when he first started running for office in the early 1970s.
That may be an exaggeration. Still, it’s worth asking: is that supposed to be a compliment?
