Bernie Sanders had a very good day with the Nevada caucuses Feb. 22 and his success had the anxiety level growing among supporters of the rest of the field, as well as downballot candidates for Congress and state legislative races.
Sanders got 34% of the first vote and 40.5% of the final vote in Nevada caucuses, and he is expected to end up with 24 national delegates from Nevada. Finishing in second place was Joe Biden with 18.9% of the final vote and nine delegates, followed by Pete Buttigieg with 17.3% of the final vote and three delegates. Elizabeth Warren got 11.5% of the vote and no delegates.
Sanders has qualified for 45 national convention delegates so far, of the 100 delegates awarded in the first three states, but 47 states remain to be heard from in the race for the 1,991 delegates needed to win the nomination. More than a third of the national delegates — 1,357 — will be at stake on March 3, “Super Tuesday,” when Democrats in 14 states, including California, Texas and North Carolina, cast their ballots.
After Nevada, the number crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com forecast that Sanders’ chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates before the convention are 46%. They figure there is a 40% chance no candidate will have clinched the nomination before Milwaukee.
Some Democrats fear Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, will drag down the ticket, particularly when Republicans broadcast videos of Sanders when he visited the Soviet Union on a 1988 bipartisan delegation from Burlington, Vt., when he was mayor; Nicaragua, where he hailed the Sandinista revolution led by Daniel Ortega in 1985, and statements of admiration for some of the accomplishments of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro — which already has stirred Cuban émigrés in Florida. You can bet all will be taken out of context and played on TV and social media 24/7.
Sanders should get ahead of the mudslinging by assuring potential swing voters that he is not a communist, and explaining that his brand of “democratic socialism” is basically a revival of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal economic program that saved American capitalism in 1930s, by regulating corporations to protect workers, small businesses and family farmers and ranchers from unscrupulous plutocrats.
We still think Elizabeth Warren is the better progressive candidate, since she supports much of what Sanders wants to do, and she has avoided the S-word. (She used to be a Republican, but she saw the light in the 1990s when she realized the “free market” wasn’t doing much good for working people. And some people apparently can’t get over the fact that she is a smart, assertive woman with Native American blood.) But Sanders has the movement, and he should declare that he is no more of a radical than FDR, the nation’s only four-term president, who beat the Depression and the Nazis but was written off as a “communist” by the economic royalists of his day. FDR’s protégés were Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, all of whom envisioned something like Medicare for All — and when LBJ got the original Medicare enacted in 1965, Ronald Reagan memorably attacked it as “socialist.”
The generation that grew up with the New Deal and fought World War II is dying out, but their children, the Boomers, are now relying on “socialist” programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, to carry them through their retirement years — particularly after Reagan allowed corporate predators in the 1980s to siphon assets from their pensions.
Boomers might find they like the socialism in the Democratic plans to expand Medicare and Social Security benefits, and Democrats should not be shy about noting that Trump has indicated if he is re-elected he will cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in an attempt to make room for more tax breaks for billionaires. Trump’s Department of Justice also has joined a Republican effort to overturn what remains of the Affordable Care Act, because they just can’t stand that insurance companies are limited in any way from making profits.
If Republicans are going to portray Sanders as a communist, Democrats should portray Trump as a would-be Mussolini who has remade the Republican Party into a fascist cult. Trump seems to be working with another fascist leader — actual former communist Vladimir Putin — to undermine US democratic institutions. Trump even purged his acting director of national intelligence after a member of his staff briefed members of Congress on Russia’s plans to interfere in the US election on behalf of Trump. When Trump found out, he replaced Joseph Maguire, a retired Navy admiral, with Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist with little intelligence experience.
While a majority of Americans (53%) told a Gallup poll they would not vote for a socialist, that bias has not been reflected in matchup polls so far. CBS News/YouGov poll released Feb. 23 showed Sanders narrowly leading Trump, 47% to 44% in a national poll. Biden led Trump 47-45, Warren narrowly led Trump 46-45, Buttigieg was tied with Trump at 44, Klobuchar was down by one point, 44-45 and Bloomberg was down three, 42-45.
Sanders and the other leading Democratic contenders also show up strong in polls of the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which furnished Trump a narrow victory in the Electoral College, but polls in those states have shown net disapproval for Trump.
Sanders led Trump in Michigan by seven points, 48-41, in a University of Wisconsin/Wisconsin State Journal poll released Feb. 23. (All the top Dems were beating Trump in Michigan in that poll.) Sanders led Trump in Wisconsin by two points, 46-44, in the UW/State Journal poll that showed the Democratic contenders within the margin of error. The same poll showed Sanders leading Trump in Pennsylvania by two points, 47-45, Biden ahead by one and Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar tied with Trump.
Sanders also was tied with Trump in Florida in a University of North Florida poll released Feb. 20, which also showed Bloomberg leading Trump by six, Biden leading Trump by one and Warren tied with Trump.
It isn’t as if there aren’t plenty of troublesome episodes in Trump’s history that Democrats can remind voters before the election.
Trump is a con man who sold himself for the presidency based on his mythic status as a wheeler dealer and “self-made” billionaire, but the New York Times in October 2018 revealed a pattern of “suspect tax schemes” during the 1990s, “including instances of outright fraud that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents.”
Another Times investigation in May 2019 reported from 1985 to 1994, the president reported more than $1 billion in business losses, and observers suspect he is financially entangled with Russian or Eastern European oligarchs, the Russian government and other shady characters, and that may be why Trump has fought Congress’ demands and subpoenas for his tax returns.
Trump also has loose morals at best. He is known to have cheated on each of his three wives and at least 25 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s. And, of course, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker unit counted 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years as president. And that doesn’t even include the 31 lies he told in his State of the Union speech.
Whoever emerges from the struggle at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee will lbe better than Trump. Fight for your favorite until then, but resolve to vote blue, no matter who. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2020
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