As someone who has worked on two national campaigns and helped a local democrat flip a California seat in 2016 that was held by a Republican for 26 years, I can tell you Bernie is running one of the best campaigns I have ever seen a candidate run in the modern political era He has taken the best of the Obama organizing strategies and improved upon it. If you watched his post win victory rally Saturday from Texas (that was brilliant, use the Latino support in NV messaging in a state that will require that minority’s support to win), Sanders gave a textbook speech on how to sear one’s policies in to the mind of the electorate. I was impressed with the messaging discipline. He is building an expansive coalition of first time and minority voters that haven’t been cultivated as effectively before. An example is his use of Hispanic community organizers in Western states.
The best argument for electability is to win. If you can’t win the primaries there is no substance to back the argument that you can win the general. That is a fool’s logic. Obama faced similar skepticism at this point in his first primary run. Conventional wisdom at the time no one could beat Hillary for the nomination, a black man can’t win. People forget Obama ran on a similar progressive policy platform as Bernie. I went to work on his campaign as an organization lead in California. They called Obama a socialist too. I have seen this script before.
It is true that a substantial number of voters don’t know the difference between Soviet style socialism and European Democratic Socialism, similar to what we have in America by the way. The Sanders campaign is aware of this. I am not in any way associated his campaign, but I am told by people who have access that there is a strategy being kicked around to help educate the public on this and compare his fight as similar to that of FDR to get Social Security and Medicare. Television ads that include this information for the general election would do great service to the public’s understanding.
I would advise including audio and video examples depicting the history of Republicans making similar claims with their apocalyptic warnings about Socialism.
He surely understands that making this distinction is important.
We are going to have conversations that have been long overdue.
