2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumThe Nation - What’s Wrong With Bernie Sanders’s Strategy?
Interesting article from the Nation. It does suggest that Bernie's team could adjust for the general election by trying to be more proactive about reaching out to minority communities, which have been a growing constituency of the Democratic party, particularly as the GOP has been going out of its way to alienate people of color during this election cycle.
http://www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-with-bernie-sanderss-strategy/
In the 2008 presidential primary, Democrats chose between a black candidate and a white candidate. Yes, that described the race of the two leading rivals, but also their constituencies: Barack Obama won 82 percent of African-American votes, while Hillary Clinton won most whites, including 62 percent of whites without a college degree.
In 2016, once again, throughout most of the primary campaign, theres been a black candidate and a white candidatewhen it comes to their supporters, anyway. Only this time, its Clinton whos racking up the black vote, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who has been leading among whites, especially the white working class, while losing roughly 41 among the African-American voters who are the bedrock of the Democratic Party. In states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Michigan, Sanders beat Clinton among whites without a college degree. And this time, its Sanders who is making the political case for the importance of winning back white voters, particularly working-class whites, to the Democratic Party, as Clinton did eight years ago.
And as I did, too. I began the 2008 primary season thinking Clintons support from white working-class voters was a sign that Democrats could make inroads there, and win back so-called Reagan Democrats to the party of FDR. I ended the 2008 contests in despair, seeing Clintons attempt to win white votes devolve into her using her support from hard-working Americans, white Americans against Obama in a way that rightly repelled African Americans, and me too. By 2012, I no longer saw a way for Democrats to win back vast numbers of whites that didnt involve somehow negating the power, influence, and interests of African Americans, who have become the most reliable Democratic voters. Negating that influence would be politically stupid as well as morally wrong.
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Sanderss avid supporters havent helped him on this score. The sexism of the so-called BernieBro phenomenon has gotten most of the attention, but the racial cluelessness of the Bros has been pretty remarkable too. Many ooze condescension, dismissing Southern blacks as low-information voters. As the race moved north, many continued to lament that African Americans dont seem to know whats best for them as they vote for Clinton. The Sanders-supporting Progressive Democrats of America dismissed Clintons Southern victories as confined to the Confederacy, ignoring the fact that descendants of people enslaved by the Confederacy were the ones propelling big Clinton wins. To its credit, the group apologized. But Sanders himself continues to minimize Clintons Southern wins, because Democrats are not going to win those states in the general election. Media analyst Clay Shirky dubbed Sanderss frequent racial flubs the kettledrum effect, an inverse dog whistle in which African Americans hear slights, insensitivities, and gaffes that voters who arent black may not.
Califonz
(465 posts)unless telling the truth is a horrible political strategy.
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. -- H.L. Mencken, who didn't foresee a woman running for president of a major party.
anotherproletariat
(1,446 posts)If there is a problem, it is that he started out with little name recognition (DUers excepted, of course).
JonLeibowitz
(6,282 posts)as some evidence that his strategy is inherently racist. She does this by drawing comparisons to Hillary Clinton's actually racist campaign and hoping that the conflation of the two campaigns confuses the reader. You can't assign whose campaign is racist ex post facto based on how demographics chose to vote.
Anyway, their campaigns are vastly different.
The top comment on The Nation's website is also on point, as is the following one by commenter Gregory Dennis: