Democrats 2020

Get a Grip, Bernie Bed-Wetters: His Message and Media Machine Could Be Potent Against Trump

Socialist Schmocialist. Sanders has a set of political assets—celebrity, fundraising power, committed foot soldiers, media sophistication, relentless consistency—possessed by no one else in the race.

By Peter Hamby

January 31, 2020

Image may contain Human Person Clothing Apparel Bernie Sanders Text Crowd and Margaret Wanjiru Gakuo

The Bernie bed-wetting has reached full-blown rubber sheet mode. With Bernie Sanders hanging on to a slim polling lead in Iowa and an even bigger one in New Hampshire, panicked Democrats are sounding the alarm that Bernie Sanders could surf a wave of unstoppable momentum all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. Nominating Sanders to run against Donald Trump would be an “Act of Insanity,” according to New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “Dems Tormented Over How to Stop Bernie,” read a recent Politico headline, which quoted Rahm Emanuel, the high priest of boardroom centrism, proclaiming with authority that Sanders will repel swing voters. (Gotta print a Rahm quote!) The New York Times cited Bonnie Campbell, a longtime supporter of Hillary Clinton and now Joe Biden, talking about Sanders as if he was infected with the coronavirus. “I can tell you, I hear from friends and colleagues who say: ‘Oh, my God, what are we going to do if Bernie wins?’” Campbell said, sounding haunted.

The concerns are understandable. Nominating a socialist as a major party nominee for president would mark an extraordinary break from tradition and over 100 years of faith in the idea that the United States is fundamentally not a socialist country. Several of Sanders’s signature policies, like decriminalizing border crossings and replacing private insurance with a government-run Medicare-for-All system, are deeply unpopular. Those ideas have been litigated in a Democratic primary but have never been subject to sustained attacks in a general election. The Trump campaign will gleefully rope the socialist tag around Bernie’s neck in Florida, terrifying every Fox News–viewing retiree and micro-targeting every Cuban and Venezualan with Facebook ads reminding them of broken regimes back home. Khaki-wearing PTA members in northern Virginia and suburban Denver might recoil in horror at the idea of Sanders rattling the markets and their 401(k)s, putting states recently thought to be safely blue back in play. It shouldn’t be forgotten, either, that Sanders is 78 and suffered a heart attack in October, the subject of an anti-Sanders television ad currently running in Iowa.

Everything about Sanders—his ideas, his stubborn dogma, his sometimes-kooky supporters, his contempt for greenroom culture and the party circuit—is completely foreign to the intellectual and cultural fabric of Washington. In that universe, the claim that Sanders is unelectable is more or less gospel. The same Democrats who were assured of Hillary Clinton’s victory are now starting to worry about a Goldwater or McGovern-style Electoral College wipeout with Sanders atop the ticket. If they were so inclined, the bed-wetters could easily Google a year of polls showing Sanders beating Trump in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. A Texas Lyceum poll just this week showed Sanders performing better against Trump in Texas than any Democrat, losing by just three points. That’s on top of a raft of polls showing Sanders beating Trump back those precious Upper Midwest states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. These polls aren’t totally hypothetical, either: Sanders boasts near universal Name ID. Most voters know who Sanders is and what he stands for—and they’re still choosing him, whether they actually like him or just because his name isn’t Donald Trump. The president and his advisers are starting to notice, according to recent stories in the New York Times and Daily Beast. Both outlets reported in recent weeks that some Trump advisers are worried about Sanders’s strengths—his populist appeal, perceived authenticity, and his durable popularity with the same white non-college voters who voted for Trump. “I think he’s tough in places where people are making $12 an hour,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale recently told CBS News, who said the media is underestimating his appeal. Trump himself has started asking his team about Sanders’s polling performance in key battleground states, specifically Pennsylvania, the Daily Beast reported.

Democrats fretting about the prospect of nominating Sanders should consider, for a moment, how the few years in American politics have exposed the frailty of conventional wisdom and incremental thinking. They might also consider Xanax. But they should consider, too, listening to Parscale, who has access to troves of data much richer than any Democratic campaign right now. He and others in the Trump orbit apparently see what Sanders supporters have seen for a long time: that Sanders is a uniquely powerful politician, with strengths no other Democrat brings to the table. Yes, he has vulnerabilities, but so will any nominee. Still, if Sanders winning the Democratic nomination gives you a particularly bad case of night sweats, it might be useful to put aside your priors for a moment and think about him another way. Instead of asking if Sanders is unelectable, ask another question: What if Sanders is actually the MOST electable Democrat? In the age of Trump, hyper-partisanship, institutional distrust, and social media, Sanders could be examined as a candidate almost custom-built to go head-to-head with Trump this year. Here, in fact, are five good reasons why he might just be the one. At the very least, bed-wetters, maybe they’re just five good doses of positive thinking that will help you sleep better until the Iowa caucuses on Monday.

Bernie Is a Celebrity

Ideologues and policy wonks sneer at the idea that the political process is about attention and celebrity, that candidates should have to somehow debase themselves by doing interviews with YouTubers or making Spotify playlists or talking in simple sound bites. But running for president has always been about winning the attention war, and the competition for attention has never been more difficult than it is in 2020, with the decline of legacy media, the bounty of choice across screens, and the power of algorithms. Even Sanders danced on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Whoever becomes the Democratic nominee will have to compete for the public’s mindshare not just with Trump the President, but also Trump the Performer. As I wrote a few weeks ago about a series of Crooked Media focus groups with low-information Democratic voters in battleground states, the participants had firm opinions of Trump, but were largely unable to name the Democrats running for president, with the exception of Sanders and Biden. They cared little for conventional politics. But every panelist, including the African Americans and Hispanic voters, knew of Sanders and had a sense of his agenda, even just keywords like “free college” and “health care.”

But unlike Biden and any Democrat in the race, Sanders is also a cultural figure who, like him or not, transcends politics. Sanders is flecked across our culture anywhere you look. There are hand-painted murals of Sanders in almost every city in this country. Superfans hawk DIY Bernie merch across the internet. Sanders has more endorsements from celebrities and musicians than any Democrat in the field. The Strokes, Vampire Weekend, and Bon Iver are performing concerts for Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire. The same Democrats who celebrated these kinds of cultural totems when Obama ran for president—remember Shepard Fairey? Obama Girl?—seem to scoff at them when Sanders is the heralded one. As odd and simplistic as it sounds, for many millions of people, Bernie is cool. Unless the Biden campaign figures out a way to recapture the aviator-wearing virality that helped define his vice presidency, Sanders is currently the only Democrat famous and clickable enough to compete with Trump among voters who have only a passing interest in politics. Which is most Americans.

Bernie Understands the Media

Going back to his days as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, when he hosted his own public access show on local television, Sanders has always sought out new ways to go around what he likes to call “the corporate media.” Taking his message directly to his supporters at the core of his political style, as it is with Trump. When Sanders and his team talk about “media,” they are fundamentally talking about the smartphone-connected internet, which is where we spend our time today. In 2019, time spent on mobile screens surpassed time spent watching TV for the first time in history. With the possible exception of Andrew Yang, Sanders is the only Democrat running who seems to not only to understand that behavior, but to relish and exploit it for political gain. With most Democrats still dedicating valuable time to traditional media channels and only tinkering on the margins with innovation, Sanders has instead focused on building a huge content machine that exists mostly outside the view of the mainstream press. His media engine is the only one in Democratic politics that comes close to matching Trump’s vast and decentralized content empire.

He has more followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram than any active politician other than Trump. The only Democrat who’s come close is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who happens to be one of Sanders’s most valuable public allies. After his failed 2016 bid, Sanders returned to the Senate and quickly hired a producer from the digital-first news outfit NowThis to produce distributed video across every big digital platform. Views of his Facebook livestreams regularly climb into the millions. Streams of his Iowa campaign tour last week were watched by a combined 3.3 million viewers. Sanders clearly loves it. “The idea that we can do a town meeting, which would get a significantly larger viewing audience than CNN at that time, is something I would not have dreamed of in a million years, a few years ago,” Sanders told reporter Gabriel Debenedetti in 2018. Sanders still plays the TV news game—and you can tell he craves the insider validation that he was deprived of for so many years as a Senate gadfly—but he clearly knows that traditional channels are just one stale slice of the media pie. His decision to embrace and promote the endorsement of podcaster Joe Rogan was met with blowback from politically correct keyboard jockeys who howled on Twitter that Rogan has said transphobic and sexist things in the past, but Sanders shrugged it off. Like Trump, he doesn’t much care about elite opinion and hurt feelings. He cares about winning. Sanders’s decision to embrace Rogan embodied his belief that nontraditional players, with deep and data-rich connections to their audiences, now carry more weight than traditional ones do. And importantly, those new actors often reach people who don’t usually participate in the political conversation. After the Rogan flap, New York Times technology writer Kevin Roose tweeted that “the biggest lesson of the Bernie/Rogan conversation is that a lot of people still don’t understand how different YouTube politics are from pre-YouTube politics.” Sanders and his team are most definitely not in that group.

Bernie Has a Message

Sanders’s power is derived from his message. He’s an insurgent who promises political revolution. Despite being a career politician, he comes off as someone who bristles at politics as usual, even at the Democratic Party itself. He says he will overhaul health care, provide free public education, boost wages, tax the rich, and fight climate change with a Green New Deal. These ideas are as fundamental to his appeal in 2020 as they were in 2016, especially to people under 35 who came of age at a time of war and middle-class stagnation, and think political parties are generally useless. How would the revolution unfold? When it comes to how he’d actually pay for these programs or even get them through a divided Congress, Sanders is usually thin on the details and heavy on magical thinking, something that aggravated Hillary Clinton to no end. Sanders had no answer for CBS’s Norah O’Donnell this week when she asked him how much his plans would cost. “You don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows. This is impossible to predict.” Gotcha? Not really. Politically, these answers don’t seem to hurt him at all. Sanders has been vague about costs for years, and here he is on the cusp of winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Besides, the current occupant of the White House doesn’t read books. There’s just not a lot of evidence that voters, even the most fact-based Democrat dorks, care very much about the nitty-gritty of pay-fors and committee procedures. Voters are moved by big ideas. Let the politicians and think tankers figure out the details later.

Which gets to a larger point about Sanders, beyond the substance of his agenda or what he can actually get done. Whether you think his ideas are crazy or not, the very fact that he has a clear, consistent and easy-to-understand message makes him a formidable politician. In every debate, in every interview, Sanders says the same thing. Literally, the same words. Reporters loathe interviewing him, because he refuses to play pundit or engage in personality fights. Sanders wants to talk about taxing the billionaires and helping the working people of this country. For the press, that’s boring. For voters, it’s authentic and respectable. I’ve written in the past about the simple and often-overlooked utility of having a message. Knowing why you are running for president, and communicating that message effectively and repeatedly to voters, is a superpower. Kamala Harris sank from great heights because she had no clear message, and Elizabeth Warren’s recent slide has coincided with a drift from the policy-focused message that carried her through much of 2019. Having a message allows candidates to stay on offense, pivot to a safe harbor in stormy times, and ignore Trump when he tries to attack or distract. Bernie can get cranky, but it’s hard to see Trump throwing him off message in debate. I wrote last year about how voters are willing to look past certain flaws and weaknesses as long as a candidate has a strong point of view. Remember the maxim about George W. Bush during his 2004 reelection bid: You might not like him, but at least you know where he stands. The same might be said for Sanders in a race against Trump, who lies every day. Trust is a valuable currency in politics, and Sanders has plenty of it to spend.

Bernie Is a Fundraising Beast

Whoever becomes the Democratic nominee will have to scale up their campaign fast. As Democrats figure out the nomination and squabble about wine caves—a process that could last until June—Trump is carpet-bombing battleground states with endless variations of ads targeted at every conceivable universe of voter. Trump has over $100 million in the bank, not counting money from the Republican National Committee, and an unmatched ability to command earned media attention. Among the Democrats running, only Sanders has a proven ability to raise large sums of money overnight from small donors, and if he becomes the nominee, transform a primary operation into a general election campaign overnight. In the fourth fundraising quarter of 2019, Sanders raised a mammoth $34.5 million from more than 1.8 million donors. That amount was the largest quarterly fundraising total for any Democrat since the race began. While other candidates like Biden and Pete Buttigieg max out their big donors, Sanders has an endless fire hose of money at his disposal, thanks to the loyalty of his supporters.

But critics would be mistaken if they think that Sanders is just raising cash from the same bucket of loyal Redditors who play Magic: The Gathering and throw him $20 every few weeks. On the week he announced his campaign last year, Sanders raised $10 million in a single week—but nearly 39% of those donors used an email address that had never before been used to give to Mr. Sanders, according to the New York Times. Sanders isn’t just fueling his bid by tapping the same people who loved him in 2016. He is expanding his base of financial support. What’s more, in that first quarter of last year, Sanders raised six times as much as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who represents Wall Street in the United States Senate. With small dollars alone, he continues to outraise Biden, a former two-term vice president, and Pete Buttigieg, who has proven himself perhaps the most able high-dollar Democratic fundraiser since Barack Obama. Neither of them, though, were anywhere near matching Trump’s fundraising total from the fourth quarter: $46 million. Sanders was the only candidate who came close.

Bernie Has an Army

The biggest knock on Sanders is that, as an avowed socialist, he would repel every Charles Schwab client from Maine to Manhattan Beach. This is a capitalist country, after all, and the Revolution seems fun until it comes for your bank account. The road to the House majority for Democrats last year ran through the suburbs, after all, powered by fired-up women and plenty of Romney–Clinton voters who just can’t stomach Trump. Moderates proclaim that Sanders would scare these people away if he were nominated, that they would stay home on Election Day or even vote for Trump instead. Maybe some will. At the same time, anyone who has talked to a Democratic voter lately has a hard time believing that the suburban mom who voted in 2018 won’t vote for Sanders over the guy who put helpless migrant children in detention centers, where several died. In November, Democrats will barefoot run over broken glass, Die Hard–style, to vote for whoever has a D next to his or her name in November. But if there are worries that Sanders would turn off some middle-of-the-road pocketbook voters, it’s also true that he has the chance to peel off some Trump voters and activate a whole new set of voters. That’s why some Trump advisers are worried. Sanders’s raw economic populism seems like a worthy match for Trump in the Midwest, where he consistently, if narrowly, outpolls the president.

It’s Sanders’s unique appeal among young voters, though, that has the greatest potential to reshape the electorate. Millennials and Gen Z, combined, make up the largest voting-eligible demographic in the country. Sanders is, far and away, the top choice of young people, to the point where any other nominee is unthinkable. In a Quinnipiac poll released this week, 53% of Democratic voters under 35 named Sanders was their top choice. Warren was a distant second. TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are full of new-to-politics young people professing their straight-to-camera love for “Daddy Bernie”—as Cardi B likes to call him—but also their distaste for candidates, like Biden, who promise anything less than profound change. The younger generation is as radically disconnected from the Washington media ecosystem as Sanders, who, if nominated, would have a better chance of pulling young voters into the process than any other Democrat in the field. Plenty of those Sanders die-hards are digital natives who understand the vocabulary of the internet and the power of influencers, memes, and peer-to-peer persuasion on social media. The New York Times wrote a piece this week on the more troubling aspects of Sanders’s “Internet Army,” the mansplainers and anonymous trolls who harass anyone on the internet who isn’t a Bernie Bro, often with sexist and racist bile. But a crude reality of our moment is that ever-cautious Democrats are no match for Trump’s grassroots army of shameless trolls and MAGA freaks, who are immensely skilled at creating shareable bad faith content and sprinkling disinformation around social media, with or without Trump’s permission. A handful of Democratic strategists are thinking about how to compete in the meme and influencer wars, which would require relinquishing message control and sometimes caving to the worst emotional impulses of the internet. But social media is now the primary touchpoint for American politics, for old people and young. Sanders, if nominated, would step immediately into a race against Trump backed by thousands of self-starting digital creators, editors, and trash meme-makers. The troops in Bernie’s Internet Army might be extremely annoying, but they are also the only people involved in Democratic politics willing to wage war on the internet on Trump’s terms, however distasteful that prospect may be.