As Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have dropped out of the presidential race, and only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are polling well enough to have a realistic chance at the nomination, we need to think about what nominating one or the other of them would mean for the future of the Democratic Party.
Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, a day when more than one-third of the total number of pledged delegates will be chosen by the voters.
Regardless of our feelings about Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as human beings, and regardless of our thoughts about their policies, it is important that we consider which of them can lead our party into a successful future.
Ironically, both Biden and Sanders are very old men, in their late 70s. But only one of them is beloved by younger generations of Democrats — and the other one definitely is not. In an article on FiveThirtyEight called “Why Younger Democrats Are Overwhelmingly Rejecting Biden,” we learn from hard data that voters under 45 years old prefer Sanders by large margins, while only a very small percentage of these voters are choosing Biden as their preferred candidate.
Like it or not, these pro-Sanders voters are going to be dominating the Democratic Party in the coming decades — unless, of course, young progressives become so frustrated that they decide to leave the party, or become cynical and apolitical, joining the ranks of non-voters that Democratic politicians don’t try hard enough to reach. Let’s all hope that neither of those things happens!
Millennials, the oldest of whom are already 40 years old, have not yet shown any signs of becoming more conservative as they age, so I wouldn’t count on this generation abandoning their Sanders-inspired political philosophy. It is important to keep in mind that for most people in their 20s and 30s today, their political consciousness has been greatly influenced by the rise of Bernie Sanders, his movement and ideals. Like him or not, Bernie is a beloved figure among young Democrats — and as the FiveThirtyEight article points out, “Younger Democrats don’t want to repeat the Obama presidency.”
Barack Obama is generally seen by this generation as a president who didn’t go anywhere near far enough toward solving the big challenges of our time. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why Joe Biden, having been Obama’s vice president, is so unpopular among the young.
I happen to like both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as human beings. I think they are both good and honorable men. I will vote for either of them, without a doubt, in the general election.
But in terms of which one of these candidates represents the future of the Democratic Party and which one represents the past, there is no question: Joe Biden is the candidate of nostalgia for the Obama years. Bernie Sanders is the candidate who says we need bold progressive change — the kind of change that Barack Obama did not fight for and deliver — and Bernie will fight very hard, with passion, for the change America needs. Bernie Sanders is inspiring a movement to fight for:
- Truly universal and affordable health care for all Americans.
- Debt-free higher education for all of America’s young people.
- A major, transformative commitment to mitigating the crisis of climate change through FDR-style investments in a Green New Deal.
This is what Millennials and Generation Z expect the Democratic Party to fight for. And when our politicians instead offer cautious moderation, these younger generations who will soon be the majority of the American people are bound to become discouraged and apathetic about their political participation.
So in conclusion, on the eve of Super Tuesday, I offer these thoughts:
If you want to cast a vote for a Democratic candidate for president whose philosophy and policy goals are more like the future of the Democratic Party than the past, vote for Bernie Sanders.
And perhaps just as importantly: If you support Joe Biden, please do not do so in a way that will alienate the younger generations. Even if Biden wins the nomination in 2020, and goes on to win the White House, his moderate and conciliatory philosophy of a “return to normalcy” after Donald Trump will only delay the truly major changes that are needed in this country.
In the end, perhaps four or eight years later, or sometime in the next decade, the Democratic establishment will be overthrown by the Democrats who loved Bernie Sanders. They will be older and hopefully somewhat wiser, and perhaps less extreme in their verbal sparring, but they will still remember how much they loved Bernie, and how much it hurt them and their country when he was denied the Democratic nomination in two close-fought contests in 2016 and 2020, when the entire establishment of the Democratic Party did everything in their power to prevent him from winning.
And in the meantime, the big problems in America will have gotten worse, because of insufficient vision and fighting spirit among our party’s dominant political leaders. And the next generations will have a mess of severe proportions on our hands.
Please don’t let this happen. Please vote for the future today.
Or, if you do believe a more moderate placeholder is needed and you vote for Joe Biden, please be kind to those of us who may be in mourning of a great political hero. For whether you like him or not, Bernie Sanders is destined to be remembered as a man who reshaped what the Democratic Party would become, whether in victory or in defeat, whether he wins this or election or whether it’s his last hurrah.