Super Tuesday: Sanders Defeats Debs

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/03/super-tuesday-sanders-defeats-debs

Every American on the left knows that when labor leader Eugene Debs ran for President in 1920 as a socialist, he got a million votes.

I don't know if Howard Zinn would approve this message, but by this standard, Team Sanders is arguably kicking Debs' butt. Bernie Sanders has more than a million campaign contributors. A campaign contribution, for an ordinary person of modest means, is like a vote with a little bit of extra blood on it. You mean business. It costs you something. You have skin in the game.

<snip>

I went to a Sanders appearance at the Minneapolis Convention Center the day before the caucus. The "warm-up acts" were as impressive as the main speaker. Lisa Bender, a member of the Minneapolis City Council, talked about local issues. Winona LaDuke talked about protecting our environment from corporate greed. Keystone XL isn't the only oil pipeline we need to stop, she said; we need a government that will build infrastructure for people, not oil companies. Keith Ellison talked about the right to tuition-free public college. If the UK can do it, if Denmark can do it, we can do it too, Ellison said. More than talking about Bernie Sanders, each was giving their own version of The Speech.

Regardless of what happens at the Democratic convention, Lisa Bender, Winona LaDuke and Keith Ellison will still be with us, and this will be Sanders' lasting legacy, helping to mobilize a wave of progressive activists to engagement and challenge in the political system, and establishing a culture of primary challenges to the establishment on the left like the one that which now exists on the right. The right has more influence in the Republican Party than the left has in the Democratic Party because the right has mastered the weapon of the primary challenge. When the left masters the primary challenge weapon, the left will have more influence.

The establishment hates contested primaries because they hate competition. In the establishment's ideal election, the establishment would anoint the candidate and everyone else would accept without question the establishment's choice. But making the establishment happy by avoiding contested primaries is terrible for democracy, and terrible for people who want to talk about issues that the establishment doesn't want to talk about.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Nitpick...

The population of the US in 1920 was 106.5 million, basically 1/3 of what it is now, so proportionately, Debs would have gotten 3 million votes today.

Bernie will stomp all over that by the time the convention rolls around, even with DWS' efforts to depress the primary vote.

[RoccoR5955]

2. I think that today

Debs would get more than 10 million votes.
Who knows, Clinton could get that many votes while in jail if these investigations pan out.