With the Iowa caucuses on the horizon, it’s the time the serious slashing starts, as the candidates desperately seek an advantage in a tight race. Folks will gather in schools, churches, living rooms and other meeting places across Iowa the evening of Feb. 3 to stand up for their candidates.
More than two dozen candidates exercised their presidential ambitions in the past year and many of them already have withdrawn from the fray. Iowans will start the process of cutting down those ranks to three or four solid candidates who will go on to New Hampshire for the Feb. 11 primary, followed by Nevada caucuses Feb. 22 and South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary.
After that comes “Super Tuesday” on March 3, when primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia, plus caucuses in American Samoa, could well determine the nominee.
With that front-loading of delegate selection, it’s no wonder Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren started attacking each other, with the Sanders campaign putting out the word that Warren was the candidate of the elites and wouldn’t expand the base while Warren complained that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t get elected president.
Democrats shouldn’t get distracted by this controversy, which was stoked by CNN during the Jan. 14 debate in Des Moines. Warren said Sanders made the statement and Sanders denies it. It’s possible both candidates are telling the truth, according to their memories of what was said. In the absence of tapes, we’ll never know for sure, and it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. We do know Hillary Clinton got three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, and she lost only because voter suppression efforts in Detroit and Flint, Mich., and Milwaukee, Wis., along with Clinton’s failure to campaign in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the closing days of the 2016 campaign let Trump creep through to victory by a margin of less than 80,000 votes in those three states, which gave him the win in the Electoral College.
It’s an old rule that the only way to run in an election is scared, and that applies to Democrats picking a candidate to oust Trump, but there is no need to panic when you remember that Trump won’t sneak up on us this time. In 2016, Trump drew to an inside straight and won, with the help of his Russian enablers who skillfully manipulated FaceBook, WikiLeaks and other social media. But we won’t get fooled again. Trump played an economic populist in 2016 and he made all sorts of promises about protecting American jobs, particularly in steel mills and coal mines, but all he’s really done is produce tax cuts for corporate bosses and shareholders while he cut regulations for polluters and made it more difficult for citizens to hold corporate scofflaws accountable.
Trump has been disapproved by more than half of potential voters in FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls since mid-March 2017, with 53.4% disapproval and 42.2% approval as of Jan. 21. And there’s little good news for Trump in the battleground states. As of Dec. 31, even with a relatively good economy, Trump was “underwater,” with greater disapproval than approval, in Morning Consult tracking polls in at least nine states he carried in 2016: He is underwater in Alaska by two points, Arizona by three points, Florida by one point, Georgia by two points, Iowa by nine points, Michigan by 15 points, Ohio by four points, Pennsylvania by five points and Wisconsin by nine points. And he was tied, 48-48, in Texas and North Carolina. If Trump has to campaign in Texas, it’s good news for Democrats in other swing states. That means Republicans must keep Democrats from voting.
Pundits have warned, without much evidence, that Sanders and Warren are too far left for the electorate. But their proposals to expand Medicare to cover everybody — which was the original plan when Medicare was created in 1965 — is still pretty popular, particularly while Trump and the Republicans have been aggressively trying to abolish the Affordable Care Act and gut the guaranteed coverage of pre-existing medical conditions.
Polls show Sanders and Warren are competitive with Trump in battleground states. A Marquette Law School poll of registered voters in Wisconsin, released Jan. 15, found Joe Biden leading Trump 49-45, Sanders leading 47-45 and Warren trailing Trump 48-45. Warren’s gap was within the 4.1% margin of error, but she also led Trump 44-42 in the Jan. 8 Fox News poll in Wisconsin (which also was within the margin of error).
An EPIC/MRA poll in Michigan released Jan. 15 showed Biden, Sanders and Warren leading Trump by 6, 5 and 3 points, respectively. A Florida Atlantic University poll in Florida released Jan. 15 showed Biden, Sanders and Warren leading Trump by 2, 6 and 2 points, respectively.
Progressive Democrats must make a hard choice between Sanders, who has been a progressive stalwart for decades, and Warren, a former Republican from Oklahoma who began to vote Democratic in 1995 because she believed the Republican Party was tilting the playing field in favor of large financial institutions and against middle-class American families.
While Trump and the Republicans will engage in character assassination against whoever ends up with the nomination, they’re undoubtedly eager to target Sanders, who got comparatively gentle treatment in 2016 from the media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Geoffrey Kabaservice, a center-right activist, wrote in The Guardian Jan. 16 that he got a glimpse of the Republican opposition research book on Sanders, “which was so massive it had to be transported on a cart.” Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who got to see some of its contents, declared in 2016 that “it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn [Sanders] apart.”
According to Eichenwald, the book includes damning material such as the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to Texas where it would be dumped in a poor Hispanic community, that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and that he appeared at a 1985 rally in Nicaragua at which Sandinista supporters chanted “Here, there, everywhere / the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.” Then there’s Sanders’ fictional 1972 essay he wrote for an alternative newspaper in Vermont in which he described a woman fantasizing being raped by three men.
Unfair? Distorted? Taken out of context? You can count on it. And Trump will have plenty of money and Fox “News” to smear Sanders 24/7. Instead, let Bernie be our Moses.
All Trump has on Warren is that she has Native American ancestry, enough that her grandparents had to elope because her grandfather’s family objected, but there’s not enough Indian blood for her to qualify for tribal casino profits. And she wants to expand Medicare to cover everybody, paid by billionaires and corporations.
We believe that, once Democrats unify, Warren can beat Trump in the swing states, and she will pursue progressive populist policies as president. If she doesn’t win the nomination, we are confident Warren will support Sanders, or Biden, or whoever wins the Democratic nomination, and so will we, because none of us can risk giving Trump four more years to abuse presidential power. Nobody can afford to sit out the election this year. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2020
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