Today is a tough day for Bernie Sanders, and the people in the Sanders campaign. They need to grieve the death of the dream; the dream of Bernie Sanders taking the oath of office on January 20, 2021 as President of the United States. They fought hard against the establishment, and like many anti-establishment folks, they hoped to shake this Etch-a-Sketch hard and start over. I can imagine that (for some of them) the thought of rallying behind Joe Biden is kinda repulsive. They wanted a revolution, and now they’re being asked to join in the fight to continue the Obama/Biden legacy of incremental reform and sane government.
Let’s be clear: Joe Biden doesn't deserve the votes and the passionate support of Bernie Sanders' supporters. I expect that Joe Biden will earn it, but he's got a lot of work to do. More below….
Back in 2016, I voted for Clinton (even in the primary). I hesitated a bit, because I saw the passion of Bernie Sanders, and his campaign platform made sense to me. I appreciated his no-bullshit demeanor, and worried that we might have picked the wrong nominee. Still, after seeing Ezra Klein’s excellent interview of Hillary Clinton, I became convinced we made the right choice.
Many Democrats were eager to declare victory before November 7, and many people openly complained about "Bernie Bros". Even though I had slowly moved from hesitation about Clinton to much more enthusiastic support, I always recoiled when someone would trot out the “Bernie Bro” slur. Then I saw the debates, and the Access Hollywood story, and convinced myself she would win. But I kept watching FiveThirtyEight, and kept trying to convince my Californian friends that we seemed to be playing Russian roulette.
Then, in the week or two before the November 2016 election, I travelled from California to Missouri to deal with some family business. I met a family friend at a farm supply store. Afterward, I asked for some advice here on Daily Kos after that discussion (“Dear LazyWeb: best case against Trump for 2nd Amendment absolutists?”). When I was driving between Jefferson City and Rolla (in Missouri), and saw all of the Trump yard signs and yard billboards (I'm not exaggerating...), it became clear: “Toto, we’re not in California anymore”. The casual conversations I had with folks out there didn’t reassure me. I became scared with how the election was likely to go. My fears from January 2016 were rekindled.
We all know what happened next. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. That victory and $5 was enough to buy her a cup of coffee at Starbucks. All of us spent the next several years on the postmortem of that election, and Hillary Clinton wrote an excellent book on the subject. And several women competed for the nomination in 2020. Several really smart and highly qualified women. So many of us thought: “ok, this time we’ll nominate a woman who can win in a landslide.” I thought (and think!) Elizabeth Warren is amazing, and voted for her on Super Tuesday.
Today, I re-watched the “Elizabeth Warren Ends Her Campaign But Continues the Fight” video, which she released shortly after her March 5 announcement that she was suspending her campaign. It was a reminder of not only how hard she worked, but how hard everyone in her campaign worked, and how much it almost certainly mattered to them. She was clearly having a rough week. (oh, hey, remember the days before social distancing? I do!)
The end of Warren’s campaign mattered a lot to me, too, but I initially took it the same way I took it when my favorite sportsball team lost. The evening of Super Tuesday, I had a long conversation with one of my friends. To me, Warren's disappointing showing kinda sucked, but my mood was more like when my favorite sportsball team lost. Moreover, I was in denial; I thought Warren still had a chance. In retrospect, I realize that my friend saw the writing on the wall, and she was devastated by the results that night.
That following Thursday morning (March 5), Warren withdrew. That reshaped how I thought about the race, and I was in a shitty mood that morning. I remember when a different friend of mine (who supported Bernie Sanders) eagerly shared a USA Today piece (“Warren has the chance to unite the left by endorsing Sanders. She should take it.”) with all of his friends on a certain social network: After a short back-and-forth where I tried to respectfully disagree, I replied with this:
"To many of my women friends, witnessing the last woman drop out of the Democratic nomination process looks like it's a replay of November 2016. Many women I know were devastated, and it took a month or so for them to come out from their ball on the couch, eating ice cream and posting apocalyptic Trump thinkpieces on Facebook. They had a dream of a woman finally getting elected, and they were crushed. It was like their spouse died. Now, with Elizabeth Warren dropping out, it's like someone they were dating just died too. I'd recommend waiting until after the funeral before you start hitting on her. She may not be into you."
My "widow/dating" metaphor was perhaps a little sexist. Statistically, it probably fails the Bechdel test, but only if you assume that the widow's spouse was a dude. Morever, this election fails the Bechdel test. Regardless of metaphor quality, I strongly suspect that many women took Warren's loss much harder than I did. That Bernie-supporter friend of mine didn't get it. He replied: "taking time to grieve will only hinder us".
Fast forward to today: one of my friends tried to provide a snarky misreading of the golden rule, suggesting that allowing Sanders supporters the time to grieve the death of their dream wouldn’t be fitting. After all, they demonstrated how they wanted to be treated. But I think we need to show more grace and respect. We need to be grown-ups to win in November.
We should probably hold off on actively courting Sanders supporters for a couple days. Let’s give Sanders and his team need time to grieve. While we wait to engage with spirited debates with our allies in the Sanders camp, let’s think about what we can do to earn their vote, and earn their passionate support. Empathize with them this week (and every week), and demonstrate empathy in our writing.
For the Warren supporters out there (like me), let's all try to remember what it was like when the writing was on the wall leading up to Super Tuesday, and folks were prematurely calling for us to change allegiances. I encourage you to watch this video from when Elizabeth Warren dropped out, and think about that feeling. It's gotta be a tough day for Bernie Sanders supporters today. Let's give them some time to process this, and give Sanders some time to process this personally himself. Let’s make sure that Biden steps up.
The Democratic Party got its ass kicked in 2016 in no small part because of its inability to unite the left. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson won a lot of votes that the Democratic party squandered the opportunity to earn.
Biden can do this. He may not be as quick on his feet as he used to be, and he’s always been a gaffe-o-matic, but he’s a brilliant retail politician. Earlier this week, Kos suggested that Biden may be contemplating Warren. I don't think he's right, but she may be the only "establishment" choice that can earn the trust of Bernie supporters. A Biden/Warren ticket would be a fantastic interregnum between now and 2024, when both Biden and Warren can spend the next four years fixing everything that Trump broke (or at least, some of it), and then a solid progressive can run in 2024 with the full support of the White House.
First things first; let’s win in 2020!