Bernie Sanders has long believed that if you want to convince people to support progressive policy ideas, you have to get out of Washington and talk to them face to face. In Vermont, he’s spoken at countless town halls over the years, most recently five meetings across the state this past Labor Day weekend to discuss the transformative “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill.
Vermont was not a reliably blue state when Sanders began his political career. The first year he ran for office (1972), Vermont, for the second time, chose Richard Nixon for president. The second year he ran for office (1976), Vermont picked Jerry Ford over Jimmy Carter. During the ‘80s, while Sanders was proving his political and managerial chops as Burlington’s mayor, Vermont twice cast its electoral college votes for Ronald Reagan and then gave the nod to George H.W. Bush, who was president when Sanders won his first statewide race in 1990, landing him a seat in Congress.
So it’s ingrained in Sanders to pitch progressive ideas to people across the political spectrum, because he’s been doing that in his home state ever since he started running for office five decades ago.
Last month he was in the news for his trips to red districts in Iowa and Indiana to explain the very practical and positive benefits of the reconciliation legislation and why it’s important to make extremely wealthy people and corporations start paying their fair share. Speaking to a New York Times reporter at one of his events in Cedar Rapids, he said:
“This is way outside of what normal budget committees do, but on the other hand, I feel very fortunate to be in this position at this moment,” Mr. Sanders said, drinking iced tea on the patio of Midtown Station, a restaurant near the fire station, after his question-and-answer session. “In fact, if I weren’t so preoccupied with the reconciliation package and having to deal with members of Congress, etc., etc., I would probably take the Budget Committee on the road all over this country.
One might dismiss his outside-the-beltway advocacy efforts as naïve and hardly likely to make a difference. But the fact that an independent democratic socialist from Vermont could become chair of the United States Senate Budget Committee, a key leader in the effort to draft the broadest, most ambitious legislation since the Johnson administration, just goes to show how old-fashioned persistence can make a difference. His prominence in American politics is testament to his belief in continually and clearly making the case for progressive policies — and of course it’s testament also to his boundless energy and the legislative acumen he’s demonstrated time and again.
It seems to me that unless we’re very satisfied with the number of people who currently support progressive ideas, we should try to bring on board more people who tend to resist progressive policies (and politicians) but might be persuaded that these are worthwhile, sensible ideas. By analogy, unless we’re very satisfied with the number of people who currently favor getting vaccinated, we should try to persuade more people who are reluctant to. By further analogy, the most significant social policy change of our times was the result of a concerted and successful effort to open hearts and change minds of citizens, legislators, and judges all across the country. Vermont’s own marriage equality bill was enacted by overriding the veto of Republican Gov. Jim Douglas and that could not have happened without the votes of several Republican legislators, not to mention plenty of Democrats who didn’t start out as marriage equality supporters.
Political victories in our country are often won on the narrowest of margins, so the difference between winning and losing may hinge on pulling more folks into our corner who haven’t always been there.
At Midtown Station, Tim Barcz, 41, initially joined the discussion with Mr. Sanders because he wondered what the senator was doing in his town, but the back-and-forth piqued his interest when it turned to free college, an issue newly relevant with his oldest son just entering high school.
Normally, visits from politicians are “just shaking hands and kissing babies, but when you hear Bernie talking about policy, that’s important,” said Mr. Barcz, an independent who said he had reluctantly voted for Donald J. Trump. “But will you change hearts and minds this way? That’s what I don’t know.”
Barcz surely isn’t alone in wondering whether Bernie Sanders’s advocacy in conservative parts of the country and his op-eds in conservative organs will be effective, but I do think the senator is setting a good example. Barcz himself acknowledges that he thinks it’s important that Sanders showed up to discuss these policies and that the discussion interested him because it was relevant to his own family’s situation. Many people who are accustomed to voting Republican, like Barcz, may be reachable, if we make the effort.