I don’t see how you can do a “post-mortem” that just focuses almost exclusively on the internal factors while completely dismissing nearly every external factor, namely the establishment and the media.
The Establishment
You put “establishment” in scare quotes as if it’s some bogeyman that doesn’t even exist. You refer to it as a “Deep State-esque” conspiracy theory, drawing comparisons to Trump.
The fact remains that there is an establishment made up of party leaders, mega-donors, pundits, elected officials, think tanks etc. It exists and it has been very vocal about trying to stop Bernie Sanders.
The establishment includes all those people who met in April 2019 at a closed-door “Stop sanders” meeting, which featured Pelosi, Schumer, Buttigieg and dozens of big-dollar donors.
The establishment includes the 93 superdelegates the New York Times interviewed back when it seemed like Sanders would be going into the convention with a strong plurality. They talked openly of just handing the nomination in the second round to someone like Sherrod Brown or Nancy Pelosi or Michelle Obama or just some random Democrat no one has ever heard of—outside the establishment.
The establishment includes state-level kingmakers like Jim Clyburn who almost single-handedly revived Joe Biden’s campaign. Five days before the South Carolina primary Bernie had overtaken Biden nationally 35–30 among black voters. His campaign was almost broke. It had only raised 69 million. Every time Biden interacted with voters he had one of his “gaffes”—you know the ones that seem to happen more often “later in the day” for some reason.
Clyburn’s endorsement had a huge effect. One-in-four voters said it was the most decisive factor. Half rated it as important.
South Carolina had 16 percent turnout. When the turnout is that low (and it was actually high relative to previous years), one-in-four voters flipping sides at the last minute can create a huge swing. That swing can turn into a powerful narrative in the hands of a friendly media about how the “black vote,” which is the “backbone of the party” has spoken and rejected Sanders. In actuality, it was a segment of the black vote (older, more conservative) in a state with low voter turnout and high electoral capture.
The process is staggered like this by design so that the party can exert its influence at different stages, and create these
I don’t see how you can, with a straight face, state that Buttigieg and Klobuchar just dropped out on their own without any enticement or negotiation behind the scenes—especially given what I already stated about Mayor Pete’s attendance at the meeting of that non-existent “establishment” that didn’t have a meeting where they didn’t discuss how to stop Bernie Sanders.
After a narrative about “Joementum” was manufactured, all they had to do was keep Biden largely out of sight for two weeks straight, which is absolutely unheard of in a contentious primary where he was only 100 delegates ahead.
He spoke in Missouri for all of 7 minutes at two stops on the same day that Bernie did three stops and spoke for 45 minutes each. In Michigan, he had a disastrous run-in where he told a factory worker he was “full of shit” and “I oughta slap you in the face.” On his way out, he made a nonsensical statement about the encounter to reporters. I’m paraphrasing here but it was something to the effect of “I guess Bernie is working with Trump.”
The more relevant question isn’t “How is Sanders losing?”—it’s “How is Joe Biden winning?”
The Media
At the risk of sounding “Trump-like,” the media—namely cable news outlets like MSNBC and CNN but also the New York Times (their main campaign reporter is a former Dealbook writer and the daughter-in-law of a hedge fund manager)—is heavily biased against Bernie.
Bernie’s victories got three times as much negative coverage as Biden’s. When Bernie won Nevada, Chris Matthews compared it to the Nazis overrunning France. James Carville called it a “victory for Putin” reinforcing a narrative established by a story leaked to the Washington Post by anonymous intelligence sources the day before the caucus about a confidential briefing that stated Russia was trying to help Sanders win.
The media helped push the “Bernie Bros” narrative, which you are now parroting. A Harvard data scientist analyzed 6.8 million tweets from 280,000 and found that there was a roughly consistent amount of toxic language used by supporters of all candidates. It’s about 3 percent of all candidates’ supporters would qualify as toxic. Bernie has more young supporters who are more online, so it gives the impression that it’s more of a problem with his campaign.
Then there are also reports of “harassment,” which amount to someone saying something dumb or provocative and getting dogpiled for it. For example, in the New York Times story on “Bernie Bros” they interviewed a troll named Candace Aiston who has been suspended from Twitter multiple times. She’d say stuff like “Bernie Bros have little dicks,” and then she’d play the victim.
I’m not going to rehash all this stuff, but it’s hack politics. It’s the kind of thing a racist billionaire oligarch would use to craft an attack ad to deflect from his atrocious sexual harassment record and the fact that he oversaw a neo-Apartheid police state.
Bernie wags his finger and CNN says he’s “grumpy” “unlikable” and “unpresidential.” Joe Biden curses out a union worker in a swing state and Chris Cillizza says “It’s hard for me to see this as anything but good for Biden”
At almost every debate, moderators have harped on Bernie’s heart troubles, but rarely do they discuss the mental acuity of a guy who had surgery for a brain aneurysm and keeps forgetting Obama’s name and the words to the Declaration of Independence and whether or not he got arrested in South Africa while visiting Nelson Mandela. They keep pushing for more medical records from Bernie but never once have they asked why Biden’s doctors didn’t perform a cognitive function test.
If Bernie had done one-tenth of the stuff Biden has done, do you think he’d be in the race right now?
So if you want to do a “post mortem,” fine, but if you’re a serious student of political science, like your bio says, then you need to take into account the totality of circumstances. There are plenty of things I would criticize about the campaign—not any of the stuff you mentioned—but all in all, they did pretty much everything right.
The strategy was to gain early momentum with big wins in the early states. They did that. They expected to lose South Carolina—though not by as much. They had a big fund raising haul before Super Tuesday ($46.5 million, which is double what Biden raked in).
Their biggest flaw was underestimating how fast the centrists would consolidate and the extent to which a fundamentally weak candidate like Joe Biden could win with no money or organization.
So the analysis shouldn’t be “Bernie’s campaign wasn’t strong enough” but “Bernie’s campaign wasn’t strong enough to overcome the overwhelming force of the establishment.”
And as an aside, I personally don’t take at face value that you support Bernie because I can’t imagine anyone in good faith would honestly make the absurd case you’ve made here—unless of course they were absolutely clueless about the nature of this political reality (and I guess I can’t rule that out, either?)
