Democratically Disconnected Democrats: An Editorial (Updated Below)

In August, I wrote "'Electability' & Its Discontents," a brief commentary in reaction to a Democratic presidential primary poll of New Hampshire that found

"[Bernie] Sanders is more liked than [Joe] Biden, voters think he's better on their top issues than Biden and more than twice as many respondents said they would never vote for Biden as Sanders, yet Biden leads the race, and when asked which candidate they think has the best chance to win the 2020 general election, the biggest portion of respondents--45%--chose Joe Biden. Only 16% chose Sanders."

Though only one poll of a single state at a single point in time, this echoed many from 2016, when the Clinton campaign deployed the "electability" argument against Sanders, the notion that a progressive is too far to the left, simply can't win a general and that only a more conservative candidate like Hillary Clinton could pull it off. This is standard Clintonite triangulation--throwing one's own base under the bus in order to present "both sides" as "extreme" and position oneself as an artificially manufactured "sensible center." Clinton was a very problematic candidate right from the beginning, perpetually scandal-plagued, secrecy-obsessed and already disliked by more than liked her on the day she entered the race. She brought along decades of negative baggage, corruption as a way of doing business, an absolutely disgraceful performance in the 2008 primaries and represented a politics that voters thought they'd rejected years earlier. Sanders drew massive, screaming crowds everywhere he went; Clinton could barely fill high-school gymnasiums and often had more press than supporters attend her campaign events. In the polling, significant majorities of respondents would say they thought Clinton was more electable but those same polls would also refute this, showing Sanders performing better. In the "electability" narrative pushed by the Democratic Establishment and the corporate press, people had been sold a bill of goods. Ultimately, it helped bring about the Trump presidency.[1] When, last year, this turned up in that New Hampshire poll, during a campaign wherein Joe Biden and his press allies have much more forcefully pushed the "electability" argument, I didn't like the look of it. Now, something like it has turned up again and it's pointing to some serious problems presently confronting both Democrats and the American version of liberal democracy itself.

The endless polling to which Americans are subjected makes it very clear that most support the headline items in the progressive agenda advanced by Sanders, often by overwhelming margins,[2] but in a media environment that too often resembles some futuristic dystopian nightmare, these are the very items that are treated by the press as rendering Sanders unelectable. In the present cycle, the notion that Joe Biden is more "electable" than Sanders is treated as an article of faith in national news media. It's never interrogated, and it is, on a daily basis, relentlessly propagated on the major networks' news operations, by all the major newspapers and 24 hours a day on the cable news networks. This is done both directly and, more often, by implication, as Sanders is very aggressively presented as unelectable, someone who will lose and cost Democrats the congress. Perhaps recognizing the popularity of Sanders' issues, news media have, throughout the campaign, ubiquitously engaged in unethical push-polling--"polling" intended to drive public opinion in a particular direction rather than gauge it--by regularly commissioning polls in which respondents are asked  if they prefer a candidate who agrees with them on the issues or one who can beat Donald Trump, as if the two are self-evidently irreconcilable polar opposites. Such questions are also a demand by the free press and a significant faction of the political elite for a substance-free politics that should make every dogmatist of the liberal democracy shudder.[3]

A new CNN poll released on Monday is another to add to that particular pile. It asked respondents, "Which is more important to you personally, that the Democratic party nominate a presidential candidate with a strong chance of beating Donald Trump, or that the Democratic party nominate a presidential candidate who shares your positions on major issues?" An overwhelming 65% chose the candidate who can beat Trump vs. only 29% who chose a candidate who shares your positions.

This leads in to another question in the same poll, "Regardless of who you support, which Democratic candidate for president do you think has the best chance to beat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election?" An overwhelming 66% picked Joe Biden. vs. only 26% for Sanders. That's what 11 months of press propaganda on this subject has drilled into Democrats' heads.

But is it true? Here's the payoff, asked of a sample of registered voters:

These responses have a 3.5% margin of error. While a huge majority of Democrats have been convinced to think Biden obviously has the best chance of beating Trump, the poll shows that both Biden and Sanders are beating Trump and by exactly the same margin. Biden's greater "electability" appears to be nothing more than a press-generated phantom.

Worse, it's a phantom propped up by the refusal of the press to cover Biden's long and terrible record and, perhaps most damaging, his obvious cognitive decline.

From abortion to desegregation to trade to criminal justice issues to putting the screws to creditors on behalf of the financial services industry, Biden has, at some point in his career, been on the wrong side of nearly every major issue near and dear to the progressive base of the Democratic party. He is, for those seeking--or desperate for--policy substance, essentially a blank, someone who publicly disdains policy, who, historically, blows with the wind and who, in the present campaign, offers for policy only a string of thin, half-baked and generally very bad ideas slapped together by his underlings that he may say he has something and that are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else. He is a half-wit, profoundly corrupt, a congenital liar whose big idea for ingratiating himself with black voters in South Carolina was to fabricate a personal history wherein he attended an historically black college (he never did), was involved with the civil rights movement (he wasn't) and claim he was arrested in the '70s while trying to see the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela in Apartheid South Africa (he wasn't). He has, for both his own self-advancement and for the big checks given to him over the decades by his well-heeled donors, spent his entire career pushing government actions that harm wide swathes of his fellow Americans, from gleefully helping generate the mass-incarceration epidemic to helping create the student debt crisis to pimping Bush's Iraq war. At the moment, he's suffering what appears to be significant cognitive impairment. At his worst, he can barely form coherent words, can barely marshal the words he can manage into coherent sentences and doesn't even seem to know where he is. He can talk for extended periods without it being at all clear what he's trying to say or even what he's even talking about. He's thin-skinned and ill-tempered; in at least half a dozen incidents in the last few months, he's blown his top in conversations with voters, becoming instantly dismissive of their concerns, telling them to vote for someone else, even physically invading their space and putting hands on them. Earlier this week, he got into a confrontation with a Detroit auto-worker; while visiting the man's place of employment, Biden said he was "full of shit," a "horse's ass" and threatened to "go outside with your ass." Democratic voters haven't even been informed of most of this.[4] Neither has most of the wider public. Biden's record has plenty to turn off wide swathes of the Democratic coalition, while, in a general, he'd be taking on an incumbent president who has the fanatical support of his own base. His policy-free campaign that merely opposes most of the major items in the progressive agenda leaves him without anything Democrats can positively support. At the same time, he nullifies most of the big weapons Democrats could use against Trump; Joe Biden certainly isn't someone who can trash Trump as a compulsive liar, a dimwit, an authoritarian or a hundred other things policy-related and otherwise. His cognitive impairment could potentially convince millions of people who would ordinarily never consider voting for Trump that Trump was the safer, even more responsible choice. And if he becomes the Democratic nominee, it's safe to assume Trump and the Republicans will make sure all of it gets an extended airing.

For those who follow these matters, these claims of Biden's self-evident electability seem extremely questionable, at best, and utterly ludicrous in general.

There isn't a lot of polling about what the public has actually learned about the Democratic candidates but there are bleak hints. For example...

Bernie Sanders has made big structural changes a key issue in his campaign. Joe Biden has made returning to the "normalcy" of the Obama administration a cornerstone of his own, a sort of Make America Great Again for Democrats. In an incident in June, in fact, Joe Biden explained to a group of oligarchs at one of his endless big-money fundraisers that, under his administration, "nothing would fundamentally change." In a political environment in which people are screaming for major change, this was one of the 10,000 potentially campaign-ending things Biden has said or done but while it caused a furor on social media, it was--as usual--barely covered by the regular press and certainly not treated as a scandal. That CNN poll asked those same Democrats and Democratic leaners about this:

"Major changes" was backed by 69% of Democrats and 78% of Democratic-leaning independents.[5] It was supported by 90% of those who backed Sanders and 58% of those who backed Biden. And yes, these are the same voters who overwhelmingly say Biden is more electable and more numerously support him.

It gets better.

Questions like this have been included in some of the exit-polls from the already-concluded state contests. South Carolina turned around the race for Biden. Pollsters asked South Carolina Democrats who participated in their primary, "Do you think the economic system in the United States works well enough as is, needs minor changes or needs a complete overhaul?" Even in uber-conservative South Carolina, the bulk of voters--53%--told pollsters they thought the economic system needs a complete overhaul but this is how they voted:

Among an informed electorate, Biden's "nothing would fundamentally change" would loom large over this question--only 8% of South Carolina voters agree with it--but Biden gets the bulk of the majority of voters who say it needs a complete overhaul--over twice as many of those votes as Sanders. That group alone represents nearly 26% of the total SC electorate; if it had gone to Sanders instead of Biden, Sanders would have won the state.

It is, of course, possible that voters who wanted fundamental change simply chose not to prioritize this when voting but given the strength of the view itself--"needs a complete overhaul"--that seems remarkably counterintuitive.

The exit-polling in this campaign season has been rather poor; most of it is just basic stuff, with very few questions about actual issues, but all of them have asked about healthcare and one often finds those same bleak hints there.

Bernie Sanders has made Medicare For All one of his trademark issues. His support for it spans decades. His advocacy of it during the 2016 Democratic primaries convinced congressional Democrats--always far more conservative than the Democratic base--that it was a winning issue.[5] Of the other Democratic presidential contenders, only Elizabeth Warren, who has now left the race, supports Medicare For All, though even she backed away from the proposal months ago. Joe Biden has offered the strongest opposition to the policy; echoing the anti-M4A rhetoric of Donald Trump, he's spent most of the present campaign trying to undermine the strong Democratic support for it.[6]

Despite the combined efforts of Biden, most of the other Democratic presidential candidates, the insurance industry and Trump, Democrats, when polled properly, overwhelming back M4A. The standard exit-poll question on the matter has been, "How do you feel about replacing all private health insurance with a single government plan for everyone?" That's not an example of a proper poll on the issue. It adopts the conservative framing of M4A as taking away, rather than extending, coverage, misrepresents the policy (M4A eliminates duplicative insurance coverage, not all private health insurance) and doesn't include any of its benefits--the fact that it's cheaper, that it will allow people to keep their physicians, etc. It isn't the worst way to ask the question--the worst is to use this same framing plus present M4A as merely an expense, something that will raise taxes--but it is an effort by the pollsters to drive down the indicated support for it.[7]

What's surprising is that, even with this very bad framing, M4A has had majority or plurality support among Democrats in every state that has so far voted and in which exit-polls have been conducted.

To return to South Carolina, 49% of Democratic voters in even this deep-red conservative state supported it vs. only 46% opposed. But here's how they voted:

Head hurting yet? A whopping 62% of Medicare For All supporters voted for candidates who oppose Medicare For All. The bulk of these votes went to Joe Biden, the candidate who has been the most vehemently opposed to the policy. On the other side, 16% of those who opposed M4A voted for Sanders or Warren--a much lower figure but indicative of the same problem.

Follow this: Those who support M4A but voted for Biden are more than 25% of the total state electorate.

If they'd gone to Sanders instead of Biden, Sanders would have won.

Even if that faction--M4A supporters who voted for Biden--had split down the middle, with Sanders and Warren each taking half (and Warren wouldn't have gotten that much, given her proportion of the vote), Sanders would have won.

Even if, under either of these scenarios, one deducts from Sanders the voters who oppose M4A but still voted for him--5.5% of total voters--Sanders still wins.

Perhaps voters just didn't prioritize this, right? Well, when asked by the exit-pollsters which issue was most important to them, the plurality--41%--said "health care. The 2nd-most cited issue, income inequality, was chosen as most important by only half as many (and is, itself, another Sanders specialty on which Biden offers nothing but on which Biden gets the lion's share of the vote of those citing it). Maybe those who said healthcare was their most important issue were the ones who opposed M4A. Given the uphill fight that awaits any effort to pass M4A and its popularity among Democrats, that doesn't seem very likely. Maybe this is just a manifestation of the same low-information voters who have always been a critical part of Biden's coalition.

Evidence for a heavy presence of the latter is also found in a poll question regarding when voters decided on the candidate for whom they intended to cast their votes. Results:

The campaign had, by this time, been ongoing for over a year. Only deciding which candidate to support a few days before the primary suggests an extreme detachment from public affairs. The South Carolina results were also driven by a massive turnout of older voters, 71% over the age of 45. These are the contingents most susceptible to things like the three-week legacy-media gang-rape of Sanders leading into South Carolina, when Sanders led the race and the efforts by the press to obliterate him were at their height.[8] After his South Carolina win, by contrast, Biden was treated to a 3-day Triumph by the press; he became the conquering hero, regaled in those 3 days with over $100 million in free positive press coverage, leading directly into--and to--his Super Tuesday wins and continuing right to the present. That dollar-figure would probably be in the hundreds of millions now, and that fawning coverage has meant late-deciders are both plentiful and disproportionately breaking for Biden.

But before we entirely leave South Carolina, it should be noted that voters there were also asked one of those obnoxious push-poll questions that voters have been asked throughout the campaign season. "Would you rather nominate a candidate who agrees with you on major issues or can beat Donald Trump?" Results:

What I've cited here are trends across the many states that have voted and for which there is exit-polling data.

In Maine, a state Biden won by 1.1%, wholly 47% of voters were late deciders, the vast bulk of them going to Biden; 69% supported M4A but 24% of that--16.6% of the total state vote--went to Biden. In Massachusetts, 11.5% of total voters supported M4A yet voted for Biden; Biden won the state by a hair under 7%. M4A had the support of 62% of Minnesota Democrats but 16.2% of total voters supported it but cast their ballots for Biden; he won there by a little over 8%. In Tennessee, 53% supported M4A; 17% of the state's voters supported M4A but voted for Biden; 17.04% were late-deciders who voted for Biden; Biden won by just under 17%. In Michigan, just under 21% supported M4A but voted for Biden; 18.5% thought the economic system needed a complete overhaul but voted for Biden; Biden won the state by 16%. In Texas, 53% said they'd only decided for whom to vote in the past month and the largest chunk of those went to Biden; 63% said they supported M4A but just under a quarter of those--15% of total voters--voted Biden; Biden won the state by 4.5% of the vote. Turnout by older voters and particularly the elderly up everywhere. And so on. This has been the case across the Democratic contests, wherein healthcare has been cited as the top issue. Nearly all of the push-poll questions have found majorities favoring defeating Trump over a candidate with whose policies they agree.[see Update below]

At present, phantoms are conducting the train. They can do so in primaries, wherein attendance is a fraction of a general, but should Biden become the nominee, they won't be able to continue into that general. Biden's wins are being artificially driven by fawning and entirely uncritical press coverage that posits a narrative of him as the only hope against Trump, buries his record, conceals his flaws and attacks his opponent at every turn but this is a mask behind which is building to the potential coronation of a candidate who is more flawed than even Hillary Clinton, is contemptuous of the core animating issues of the activist Democratic base,[9] who offers no one any real, affirmative reason to support him. He's the Not Trump. And that's all. Fun fact: Sanders has already defeated Biden among independents in 16 of the 20 contests to date. The public will learn these things. How they'll be received, after it's too late to do anything about it, remains to be seen but their generating any real optimism for Biden seems the least likely scenario.[10]

There are other related matters I'd like to cover here--it seems a fairly obvious shortcoming that I haven't addressed how the Biden campaign is essentially a war by the elderly against their own children and grandchildren--but I'll put them aside for now.[11]

Where does all of this point? At a time when people are angry, frustrated, desperate for change, Democrats are being lulled by their party elites and the press into a politics almost entirely divorced from substance, one not only entirely incapable of confronting the problems that face so much of the population but entirely uninterested in doing so, one that is unworthy of winning, one that will, if allowed to succeed, almost certainly reelect Trump and make things much, much worse and one that has already said it won't make things any better even in the unlikely event that it does win the presidency.[12] We're already living through an effort to run the most powerful government on the planet through ignorance and fantasy. That isn't an approach an alleged opposition party should emulate.

--j.

---

 [1] A privately-commission poll conducted immediately prior to election day showed Sanders beating Trump by double digits.

 [2] The link there is to an article compiled in January 2016. It is, admittedly, hopelessly out-of-date but Americans have only gotten more progressive in the meantime.

 [3] It should be noted that neither that free press nor, most especially, that political elite believe in that substance-free politics. They offer it to the rank-and-file that they might continue to operate behind it in pursuit of their own agendas.

 [4] The confrontation with the auto-worker got some play but Biden was as celebrated for it as criticized. Something like that would have ended nearly any other campaign.

 [5] In 2015, Michigan Rep. John Conyers' Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act managed to draw 49 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. Its post-2016 successor, the Medicare For All Act--the House version of Sanders' current bill--now has 118 co-sponsors--a majority of the House Democratic caucus. Sanders' current Senate version has 14 co-sponsors out of the 45 Democrats in the body. The number of Senate supporters for his previous 2013 plan: 1. Sanders himself.

 [6] From "Give Me A Break: The Sad, Sorry Spectacle of Joe Biden," from 11 August, 2019:

[O]ne of the top Democratic priorities at the moment is creating a Medicare For All single-payer healthcare system, a policy Biden vehemently opposes. A few weeks ago, Biden launched a crusade of lies intended to discredit and defeat M4A, employing many of the same "arguments" against it being advanced by Donald Trump. At an AARP forum in Iowa, Biden said that under M4A, "Medicare goes away as you know it. All the Medicare you have is gone." This is, of course, entirely false--M4A, as the name implies, just significantly expands the existing Medicare program--but it also mirrors what Trump wrote in an op-ed back in October devoted, in part, to attacking the policy. According to Trump, "so-called Medicare for All would really be Medicare for None. Under the Democrats' plan, today's Medicare would be forced to die." Biden has repeatedly employed Trump's Orwellian characterization of M4A as taking away health coverage, rather than expanding it. "[T]he Democrats would eliminate every American's private and employer-based health plan," wrote Trump. Biden:

"How many of you like your employer based healthcare? Do you think it was adequate? Now if I come along and say you’re finished, you can’t have it anymore, well that’s what Medicare for All does. You cannot have it. Period."

Trump appeals to the absolute worst, most selfish "got-mine" entitlement psychology. "[Medicare For All] means that after a life of hard work and sacrifice," he wrote, "seniors would no longer be able to depend on the benefits they were promised." Biden incorporates all of this--without attribution, of course--into his own recent anti-Medicare For All ad.

 [7] Something probably worth keeping in mind when reading this. Democratic support for M4A is a lot stronger than even the exit-polling suggests.

 [8] I described this press environment in an article last week:

"While Sanders was winning contests, his lack of 'electability' and the idea that he would cost Democrats the congress were presented, hour after hour across national media outlets, as givens. Major media figures felt entirely comfortable repeatedly comparing the Jewish candidate to the rise of Nazism. Then, with no sense of self-awareness, they also compared him to plagues, disasters, etc. A major theme was to portray Sanders as an apologist for Marxist dictatorships, particularly the former Castro regime in Cuba. It was suggested that if Sanders the socialist won, there may be executions of dissidents in New York's Central Park. And so on. This endless campaign of defamation was the dominant news media narrative for three weeks..."

 [9] Biden recently submitted to a rare interview with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC and was asked a hypothetical question; if he was elected and Bernie Sanders managed to pass Medicare For All through congress, would he sign it into law? Passing M4A would be, in the words of Walker Bragman, "one of the greatest legislative accomplishments in American history," but even during a growing coronavirus pandemic, wherein the U.S. is severely disadvantaged because of its lack of a M4A system--and even after even a conservative framing of M4A has drawn majority or plurality support among Democratic voters in every primary state that has so far happened--Biden suggested he would veto it. Much of the press barely mentioned this.

[10] Democratic elites aren't saying it but they seem to be depending on a recession, for which the U.S. is due, to finish off Trump, thinking that when the economy goes South, the public will support whoever they nominate. It's not an entirely unwarranted notion either--election-year economic downturns have a habit of washing away incumbent regimes--but this cynical gambit would seem a dangerous gamble for those most vulnerable to Trump's rule, particularly given the demoralization of the activist base that will follow if their will is--again--thwarted by the shady means presently being used to foist Biden on them. The Clintonite right that runs the official organs of the party correctly sees a Trump reelection as much less of a risk to themselves than the election of a progressive, which would mean the end of their own gravy-train.

[11] ...except for perhaps this footnote. Biden's support is mostly over 50 and heavily concentrated in the elderly, while, for the second presidential primary contest in a row, Sanders has the under-50s and is utterly dominant among the under-30s, groups to which Biden is utterly off-putting. Look at the age-split from Michigan:

The youth vote is an incredibly important constituency for the Democratic party--literally the future--but Democrats seem to have gotten it in their heads that they can win without it, which not only proves to be untrue (see 2016) but, given the illicit means by which the youth vote has been thwarted once and is on the verge of being thwarted again, can't help but lead to alienation and disinterest among young voters.

To tie those Michigan numbers into the commentary in the rest of this article, here are the Michigan general-election numbers going into that primary:

In the Michigan exit-polling, 57% of Democratic voters said they prefer a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump, but in the general election, Sanders beats Trump in the state while Biden only manages a tie.

[12] And, indeed, a Biden success in November would have extremely negative long-term consequences. It would close the door on any hope for progressive solutions to anything for at least the next 8 years. If a Biden-led ticket didn't cost Democrats the congress this year, he would certainly do so by the 2022 midterms--parties in the White House always lose seats in the first midterm. He'd then insist on running for reelection in 2024 and Democrats would insist on renominating him. Whether he won or lost a reelection bid, there would be no progressive in the White House until at least 2028.

---

UPDATE (Fri., 20 March, 2020) - Even with the growing coronavirus pandemic, three states still held their primaries on 17 March--states where the responsible officials should probably be prosecuted. Joe Biden, whose support is concentrated in the elderly, who are particularly at risk from the virus, encouraged people to go to the polls! Biden tweeted: "If you are feeling healthy, not showing symptoms, and not at risk of being exposed to COVID-19: please vote on Tuesday." But, of course, one of the hallmarks of the coronavirus is that people can be asymptomatic for extended periods but still be contagious, and anyone taking part in large gatherings of people--like at voting precincts--are, by definition, at risk for contracting it.

President Biden, indeed.

The result, as could be expected, was chaos. More to the point for our purposes here, the exit-polls, with somewhat different questions, still showed the same disconnect as documented above.

ILLINOIS
--76% of voters said they favor "legalizing the recreational use of marijuana nationwide," but 55% of those voters went to Biden, who doesn't favor such an approach, vs. only 39% to Sanders, who does (Biden has rejected legalization, putting forth, instead, a weak decriminalization, and even on that, he's waffled with time). The 47% of voters who "strongly favor" legalization split 47%-47% between Sanders and Biden.

--The exit pollsters changed the wording of the Medicare For All question in this round of primaries, asking the still-imperfect but improved, "Do you favor or oppose changing the health care system so that all Americans get their health insurance from a single government plan instead of private health insurance?" A huge 70% of Illinois Dems favored M4A. Unfortunately, 52% of those voters went to anti-M4A Biden vs. only 42% for pro-M4A Sanders.

--Voters were asked, "Do you favor or oppose the government canceling student loan debt for most people?" 72% of voters favored doing so but 53% of them voted for Biden, who opposes this policy, vs. only 41% for Sanders, who not only supports it but is the one who proposed it.

--As what I suppose one could interpret, given such responses, as a bit of pollster humor, voters were asked about qualities they thought were important in a Democratic nominee. Asked if it was important if the nominee "has the best policy ideas," 96% said it was important but 57% of those went to Biden vs. only 36% to Sanders.

Yeah.

Asked how important it was that the candidate "can beat Donald Trump," 93% said that was important but 60% of those went to Biden vs. only 35% to Sanders.


FLORIDA
--Asked the marijuana question, 75% of respondents said they favored legalization but 60% of those votes went to Biden vs. only 26% for Sanders.

--On Medicare For All, 72% of voters supported the policy but 58% of those voted Biden vs. only 29% for Sanders.

--74% favored cancelling student loan debt and Biden got 60% of those voters, Sanders only 27%.

--And yes, 97% said it was important that the Dem nominee have the best policies, and 62% of those went to Biden vs. only 23% to Sanders.

--94% said it was important that the Dem nominee be able to beat Trump; Biden scooped up 63% of them to Sanders' 23%


ARIZONA
--78% of voters favored legalizing marijuana; 41% of them voted for Biden vs. 35% for Sanders.

--78% favored Medicare For All; Sanders and Biden split those voters 38% to 39%.

--76% favored cancelling student loan debt; of those, Biden got 39% and Sanders 38%.

--96% said it was important for the Dem nominee to have the best policy ideas; Biden got 42% of those voters to Sanders' 32%.

--96% said it was important that the Dem nominee can beat Trump; Biden got 44% of those voters vs. Sanders' 32%.

Bernie Sanders, Guns & the NRA: The Facts

In a sense, this author is an odd choice to write an article about Bernie Sanders and the National Rifle Association. While finding the NRA itself a reactionary grotesquerie worthy only of scorn and contempt, I'm not in any way a supporter of gun-control legislation. My views are radical in general and, in this matter, don't really lend themselves well to the kind of discussions of gun rights vs. gun control one usually finds within the context of the liberal democracy. At the same time though, a recurring--indeed, routine--theme of my writings on public affairs in the last few years has been correcting misinformation about Sanders, so perhaps I'm not so odd a choice for this after all. What I’m going to do here is mostly just whip into article-shape a cache of notes I’ve compiled from researching the subject over the years.

In Clinton cult mythology, it's an article of faith that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is subservient to the National Rifle Association; pro-NRA, in bed with the NRA, owned by the NRA, supports the legislative agenda of the NRA. It's a notion repeated, in a seeming infinity of variations, hundreds--perhaps thousands--of times a day, every day across social media, anywhere internet discussions of public affairs occur. In the 2016 Democratic primary race, Hillary Clinton, finding herself outflanked on the left by Sanders on every real issue, tried to use Sanders' past opposition to a handful of gun-control measures as a wedge against him. She began attacking him on guns at least as early as August 2015, attacks that continued throughout that year and never abated until the primary season was over. Clinton's attacks were sometimes incredibly savage; at perhaps the lowest point in her campaign, she mobilized a group of survivors and family members of victims of the horrific Sandy Hook massacre and used them as props to suggest Sanders was responsible for the massacre and owed the survivors an apology. Sanders had supported legislation that immunized legal gun-dealers from lawsuits over such shootings--shooting over which those dealers had absolutely no control. Clinton herself went on television to demagogue this "issue," raving that "one of my biggest contrasts with Sen. Sanders is that he would place gun manufacturers rights and immunity from liability against the parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook is just unimaginable!" The sincerity of Clinton's passion on this issue can be gauged by recalling that she ran as an anti-gun-control candidate in 2008 and attacked Barack Obama for his support of gun-control policies but this kind of rank demagoguery during that campaign--aided and abetted by a string of articles in the press that badly distort Sanders' record--established the myth of Sanders as some kind of toady for the gun lobby.

The facts tell a very different story.


SANDERS' RECORD

Sanders has, over the years, voted against a handful of gun-control measures. Decades ago, for example, he voted against the Brady Bill, arguing that its waiting-period for handgun purchases was, more properly speaking, a matter to be handled by states and localities.[1] That's one of the two examples most frequently cited by Sanders' detractors, who inevitably point out that Sanders voted against the bill "five times," as if opposition to a single bill at different stages of its development can be turned into opposition to five. There is, of course, a good reason for this; anyone trying to present Sanders as anti-gun-control has almost nothing in his record with which to work. The other example always cited is the one Clinton demagogued so badly, Sanders' 2005 vote for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (the PLCAA), the law that shielded gun manufacturers and dealers from liability lawsuits. Sanders explained:

“Now, the issues that you’re talking about is, if somebody has a gun and it falls into the hands of a murderer, and that murderer kills somebody with the gun, do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible? Not anymore than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beat somebody over the head with a hammer. That is not what a lawsuit should be about."

While his louder critics have presented this vote as some kind of unconscionable thing, all the law actually did was reaffirm a well-established legal principle. As Adam Winkler of the UCLA School of Law told Vox, even before passage of the PLCAA, suits against gun manufacturers and dealers inevitably failed, since "the law generally doesn't hold people liable for other people's criminal behaviors." Vox notes that "none of the lawsuits leading up to the PLCAA's passage actually succeeded. Time and time again, courts dismissed the challenges, or juries rejected them... [L]itigation against gun makers and sellers consistently failed in court. In the book Suing the Gun Industry, Wendy Wagner of Texas Law wrote that 'gun litigation has been an utter failure'..."

Starting in 2015, Sanders has expressed his willingness to revisit the question of liability:

"If you were a gun shop owner in Vermont, and you sell somebody a gun, and that person flips out and then kills somebody, I don't think it's really fair to hold the [gun shop owner] responsible... On the other hand, where there is a problem is there is evidence that gun manufacturers do know that they're selling a whole lot of guns in an area that really should not be buying that many guns--that many of those guns are going to other areas, probably for criminal purposes. So can we take another look at that liability issue? Yes."

Sanders threw his support behind an effort to amend the law.

"He proposed an amendment that would protect small, 'non-negligent,' 'mom and pop' gun shops. 'I do want to make sure that this legislation does not negatively impact small gun stores in rural America that serve the hunting community,' said Sanders, who represents Vermont in the Senate."

Sanders' detractors use these few examples to make all kinds of extravagant claims--Paul Heintz, writing in Alternet in 2019, ludicrously asserted that "during his first two decades in Congress, Sanders supported much of the NRA’s legislative agenda"--but Sanders' actual record is very different. Beyond a handful of exceptions (that are cited into infinity), Sanders has always supported tougher gun-control measures. He has, with the kind of consistency that has endeared him to many of his supporters, backed a ban on "assault weapons" from his first unsuccessful campaign for the House in 1988. In what would be the first of many efforts, he supported the 1994 ban. He opposed the 1996 effort to repeal it. The PLCAA itself expanded a ban on armor-piercing ammunition and provided for child safety locks on guns. In 1993, Sanders voted against a measure that would have eliminated state-based waiting-periods for gun purchases. Sanders cosponsored legislation to ban the distribution of files enabling 3D printers to create guns. He has sponsored legislation to block domestic abusers from acquiring firearms. He cosponsored legislation to block suspected terrorists from being able to buy a gun and, in an earlier bill, from being issued a license to own a gun or explosives. In 2009 and 2013, he opposed an effort to make concealed carry permits binding across state lines. He co-sponsored the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act, which supported local "red flag" laws that denied firearms to those deemed a danger to themselves or others. In 2013, he supported legislation that required background checks for gun sales between unlicensed sellers at gun shows and on the internet. That same year, he voted for several amendments to expand background checks through Harry Reid's Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act. In 1998, he supported legislation to increase criminal penalties for crimes committed with guns.

The pro-Sanders site FeeltheBern.org offers a rundown of Sanders views and record on gun policy:

"Bernie has voted in favor of a nationwide ban on military-style assault weapons, a nationwide ban on high-capacity magazines of over ten rounds, and nationwide expanded background checks that address unsafe loopholes... 

"When a standard gunstock is replaced with a bump stock, a semiautomatic firearm can fire more quickly. The Route 91 Harvest Music Festival shooter used a bump stock. This tragic mass shooting resulted in fifty-eight deaths and hundreds of injuries. 

"Bernie supported the ban on bump stocks, noting that they 'provide an effective workaround to convert a legal weapon into an illegal one.' ... Federal law currently stipulates that only licensed firearms dealers are required to conduct background checks. Bernie supports closing the gun show loophole, which allows private sellers to sell firearms to private buyers without background checks... Bernie has voted in favor of expanded background checks for all commercial sales with an exemption for sales between 'family, friends, and neighbors.' Bernie has also voted in favor of a national instant background check system...

"Given that 23 percent of the perpetrators of mass shootings have been found to suffer from mental health issues, Bernie believes that expanding access to mental healthcare can address some of the root causes of gun-related violent crime... One of the ACA provisions he successfully got added dramatically increased support for community health centers, which provide affordable primary care and mental health counseling to the underserved. The law authorized $11 billion to improve and expand community health centers over a five-year period. Mental healthcare is as important, if not more important, than physical healthcare in order to save the lives of others and not just the lives of the individuals with mental health issues... Bernie’s Medicare For All plan includes mental health services."

The few times Sanders opposed gun-control measures are disingenuously cited--and cited and cited and cited--by his Clintonite critics as representative of his history on gun policy, but this is Sanders' actual record.


SANDERS "IN THE POCKET" OF THE NRA?

In 2017, a MarketWatch story, citing the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets, asserted that Sanders had, in that cycle, gotten over $11,000 from the gun-rights lobby. The article has been shared all over the internet for years now. When this article is published and circulated, I expect that story will be cited everywhere it goes to counter it. Zipping over to OpenSecrets, though, one finds a very different story. Here's the list of federal pols who received NRA money in 2016. It's 3 pages long and Sanders isn't on it. Here's the site's list of all senators who received money from all gun-rights orgs in the 2016 cycle. It's a relatively long list for one page but, again, Sanders hasn't gotten a penny. As the Las Vegas Sun reported in 2018, Sanders has never gotten any money from the NRA.

Looking at it even more broadly, Sanders has, in fact, never gotten any money from any gun-rights group. Here's OpenSecrets' list of donations to current senators over their entire careers. Again, Sanders ain't on it.

The NRA issues legislative ratings on congressmen up for reelection--just like in school, "A" ratings for those who support the org's legislative agenda, "F" ratings for those who don't. When skimming through Twitter or Facebook, it's routine to see Clintonites claim Sanders has an "A" rating. Here are his actual NRA ratings[2] for the whole of his tenure in the federal government:

The NRA isn't a fan of Bernie Sanders.[3]


BERNIE SANDERS & THE NRA: A BRIEF POLITICAL HISTORY

In 1988, Sanders made his first run for the U.S. House of Representatives and came out in support of a ban on "assault-weapons." It was a three-way race, Sanders running as an independent taking on Democrat Paul Poirier and Republican Peter Smith. The NRA endorsed Smith but both Smith and Poirier signed the NRA's pledge not to support further gun-control legislation. Sanders refused. In 2016, the Washington Post recorded what happened next:

"John McClaughry, founder of public policy think tank Ethan Allen Institute in Vermont who was an NRA member at the time, recalled the NRA sending postcards and setting up a phone bank urging voters to support Smith. McClaughry said NRA 'went all out at Peter Smith’s urging the last week of the campaign,' tipping the votes to Smith’s favor.

"'Bernie was clearly the outsider from the NRA and the hunting clubs' [perspective],' Poirier, now a Sanders supporter, told The Fact Checker. 'They said, "Don’t vote for him. Paul Smith is our candidate. Paul Poirier is acceptable." ... [Sanders] did have the NRA, through the different associations in Vermont, actively working to make sure that nobody voted for him. That's an accurate statement [by Sanders]. I don’t know why people are questioning that."

Sanders went on to lose the race by a slim 3.5% of the vote. Over the years, Sanders has often expressed the opinion that he may have lost that race because of his support for gun-control measures. There's probably no way to ever know though.

While in congress, Smith flip-flopped and came out in support of an "assault weapons" ban, which infuriated the NRA. In 1990, the org set out to unseat him. Sanders was again running for the seat and again supporting an "assault weapons" ban. The NRA didn't endorse him but it did firmly endorse removing Smith, which may have benefited Sanders to some extent. In 2015, Judy Shailor, who was Smith's 1990 campaign manager, recalled:

"'The gun groups would say to me, "We are going to put him in office for one term and teach Peter Smith a lesson. Then we’re going to vote [Sanders] out,"' Shailor said. 'I said, "You won’t get him out.". . . He's one of the best master politicians I’ve ever come across.'"

The NRA distributed a mailer to its 12,000 members in Vermont, saying Sanders was a more "honorable" choice than Smith, by way of saying Smith lacked honor:

"'We don’t like everything that Mr. Sanders has to say about firearms,' NRA lobbyist James Baker told the Rutland Herald in 1990. 'But he's been upfront about it.'"

This is reinforced in a 1990 letter written by NRA lobbyist Mary Kaaren Jolly, explaining what the NRA did as strictly negative, a revenge move against Smith. "...the NRA did not endorse Bernie Sanders, he was viewed as the lesser of two evils. And yes, a vote for Sanders would be a clear protest vote against Peter Smith... Bernie Sanders was not our choice. We had hoped that a better democratic candidate would have been available. Yet, all the Vermont sportsmen's groups opposed Peter Smith and wanted the NRA to oppose him too." Smith "bragged, both in Vermont and in the District of Columbia, that he was using his reelection campaign to teach the NRA a lesson." He "told you and he told us he would protect and defend our gun rights. But the instant he had a chance, he voted against our gun rights. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders was upfront with us."[4]

On election day, Sanders destroyed Smith in a 17-point blowout.

Sanders' Clintonite detractors often mischaracterize this race rather badly to craft a phantom of a Sanders/NRA tag-team but the NRA's point, made very plain at the time, was to punish Smith for his heresy, not to support Sanders. If this helped Sanders, it's only because he was incidentally Smith's major opponent. The occasional wild claim to the contrary notwithstanding, the effects of the NRA's actions on the race, if it had any real impact, appear to have been negligible. Sanders picked up almost exactly the same percentage of the vote--56%--that he and the Democrat Poirier had split in 1988--56.4% (the official Democratic candidate in 1990, Delores Sandoval, was a non-factor, drawing barely 3%). Sanders would go on to repeat that percentage in his 1992 reelection campaign (57.78%), in which the NRA backed his opponent. It would, in any event, be absurd to make a fuss about the fact that the NRA came out against a sitting Republican, thus maybe helping elect the fellow who became the most progressive politician in congress.

Initially, I could find no record of the NRA supporting Tim Philbin, Sanders' Republican opponent in 1992 but I've since found a tweet from last year from a Twitter user named Davis Tom that reproduced a scan of an article by Jack Hoffman from the 28 August, 1994 edition of the Rutland Daily Herald. Hoffman writes, "In 1992, [the NRA] supported Sanders Republican opponent Timothy Philbin."[5] In 1994, the NRA endorsed Republican John Carroll in his efforts to take down Sanders:

"Sanders, a socialist seeking a third term, faces his toughest reelection challenge yet from Republican John Carroll, a businessman and majority leader of the state Senate... Besides what he calls a 'very strong' opponent, Sanders has to fight off opposition from the National Rifle Association and sporting groups, which have targeted him because he voted for an assault weapons ban earlier this year. Four years ago, the NRA helped the former Burlington mayor unseat Rep. Peter Smith, a moderate Republican who voted for a similar ban. This year, the NRA's bumper stickers read 'Bye, Bye Bernie,' instead of 'Dump Peter Smith.'"

In his 1997 memoir "Outsider in the House," Sanders himself recounted:

"During the 1994 campaign the National Rifle Association (NRA) had played a very forceful role against me. They distributed widely a 'Bye, Bye, Bernie' bumper sticker, held press conferences and public meetings, placed radio ads, made phone calls--and it was effective. There is no question that we lost many working-class men in that election because we handled the gun issue badly."

 In 1996, Susan Sweetser was the NRA's choice, and the slogan was "Get B.S. Out Of Washington."[6] In 1998, it was Republican Mark Candon.

I could find no record of the NRA officially endorsing Sanders' 2000 opponent Karen Kerin--a longtime member of Gun Owners of Vermont--but it gave her an "A" rating and Sanders an "F." Ditto for Bill Meub in 2002, Greg Parke in 2004 and, when Sanders first ran for the Senate in 2008, Richard Tarrant.

In 2012, the NRA (and Gun Owners of America) endorsed Republican John MacGovern in his ultimately unsuccessful effort to unseat Sanders.

I could find no record of the NRA endorsing Sanders' 2018 opponent Lawrence Zupan.

The notion of Bernie Sanders as a servile toady of the gun-rights lobby is rather violently at odds with the facts. The reality is that Sanders has always been a supporter of tougher gun control measures (though not all proposed measures of that genre), has never been endorsed by the NRA, has never gotten a penny from the NRA or any other gun-rights group and, in fact, the NRA and other gun-rights groups have, throughout his time in congress, repeatedly tried to unseat Sanders. The leadership of the NRA has never shared the confusion of Sanders' Clintonite detractors on where he stands on these issues or where they stand on him.

--j.

---

[1] Gun control is always best understood as a city/country dispute, not, as some try to understand it, a liberal/conservative one, and Sanders has always stressed that rural areas, where people grow up with guns, have a different culture than urbanized ones.

[2] The 1992-2012 ratings are as recorded by from Politifact, the 2018 rating courtesy of the Trace.

[3] At the other end of the spectrum, Sanders has enjoyed a 100% rating from the pro-gun control Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence since at least 2013. If older ratings from the org exist, I've been unable to find them, which is why I'm putting this in a footnote instead of in the article proper.

[4] The letter:

[5] From the Rutland Herald, 28 Aug., 1994:

[6] That 1996 campaign, around which Sanders wrote "Outsider in the House," saw a major push by the Republicans and right-wing interest-groups to remove Sanders. In the book, Sanders recalls:

"Newt Gingrich and the House Republican leadership had 'targeted' this election, and spent a huge sum of money trying to defeat me. Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country came to Vermont to campaign for Sweetser, including Majority Leader Dick Armey, Republican national chairman Haley Barbour, presidential candidate Steve Forbes, House Budget chairman John Kasich, and Republican convention keynote speaker Susan Molinari. As chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, a democratic socialist, and a leading opponent of their 'Contract with America,' I've been a thorn in their side for some time. They wanted me out—badly.

"My campaign was also targeted by corporate America. A group of major corporations organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Federation of Independent Businesses put me at the top of their 'hit list' and poured tens of thousands of dollars into the state to sponsor negative and dishonest TV ads, as well as a statewide mailing. By the end of the campaign Vermonters were watching four different TV ads attacking me.

"The wealthiest people in Vermont went deep into their pockets for my Republican opponent. They wrote out dozens of $1,000 checks (the legal maximum) and attended $500-a-plate functions. We also took on the National Rifle Association (NRA), the National Right to Work Organization, and other right-wing and big money organizations. Never before had the ruling class of Vermont and the nation paid quite so much attention to a congressional race in the small state of Vermont—a state with just one representative."

Update (Fri., 21 Feb., 2020) - The original version of this article had no information about the NRA's endorsement of Sanders 1992 opponent Tim Philbin. As that information has become available; the article has been updated to include it.]

An Affluence of Activism: Bernie Sanders' Work For the Democratic Party

INTRODUCTION

On 21 Jan., the Hollywood Reporter reported that Hillary Clinton had created a flattering 4-part docu-series about her favorite subject: herself. In the accompanying interview, it was revealed that, in the doc, Clinton had hurled venom at her 2016 Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders:

"He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it."

Sanders supporters were quick to respond, pointing out polling showing that Sanders was actually the most popular U.S. Senator, setting the hashtag #IlikeBernie to trending on Twitter, pointing out the hilarious lack of self-awareness in Hillary Clinton criticizing anyone as a "career politician" who "got nothing done." For all the years of self-righteous preaching by Clinton and her followers about "party unity," Clinton refused to say she would endorse and campaign for Sanders if he became the nominee and went on to conjure up an absurdist fantasy wherein Sanders is a horrible sexist surrounded by horrible people who, in Clinton's fevered imagination, relish attacking women.

Part of Clinton's attack wasn't really new. In her godawful 2017 book "What Happened," Clinton had advanced, as this author wrote at the time,

"the notion that Sanders' entire campaign was illegitimate, a fraud, nothing more than a scam launched and carried out with ignoble motives that succeeded only in causing a lot of damage for no good reason. In her telling, Sanders wasn't honorably representing the views of a legitimate constituency. Instead, she insists she and Sanders had few real policy differences and he was just following her around like some malevolent imp peddling those bigger-and-louder 'magic abs' copies of her own proposals and helping Republicans win. '[H]e isn’t a Democrat,' she writes, offering up a tired, terminally out-of-touch line she's had her followers spewing for two years. 'He didn't get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party.'"

The new doc was set to debut at the Sundance Film Festival only days before the Iowa Caucus.

This came a few weeks after Clinton, appearing on the Howard Stern show, had attacked Sanders and within a few days of the Hollywood Reporter interview, she was at it again. Appearing on the podcast "Your Primary Playlist," Clinton was asked what Sanders could do to unite Democrats against Donald Trump: "Well, he can do it, for one. That's not our experience from 2016." She whined that Sanders' "campaign and his principal supporters were just very difficult and really constantly not just attacking me but my supporters... It was very distressing and such a contrast between what we did to unite in '08. All the way up until the end, a lot of people highly identified with (Sanders’) campaign, were urging people to vote third party, urging people not to vote--it had an impact."

In reality, of course, the overwhelming majority of Sanders' supporters went on to vote for Clinton in the general--a subject about which this writer recently wrote a substantial article. Without their support, Clinton would have finished with a 6.6 million to 7.6 million or more popular-vote deficit with Trump and would have lost three additional states and probably a 4th. Sanders' efforts to rally support behind Clinton were more successful than her own tepid 2008 efforts to rally her supporters behind Obama. By more than one estimate, up to 1/4 of her primary supporters that year went on to vote for John McCain in the general election. Even one polling estimate that is kinder to Clinton only has her matching Sanders' performance in rallying his supporters.

The myth Clinton is feeding here is one propagated by the Clinton cult since 2016, that after Clinton secured the Democratic nomination, Sanders did little or nothing to get his supporters to unify behind her campaign. The gall in this is as unmitigated as bile gets. After the way Clinton and the DNC--which, it ultimately turned out, were really the same thing--did everything they could to tilt the primary/caucus process in Clinton's favor, anyone with any conscience at all would be abjectly grateful that Sanders ever offered so much as a single kind word toward the prospect of electing her.

But we're talking about Hillary Clinton here, a woman who has, herself, fed this lie to the public. Clinton from Sept. 2017:

"...when I lost to Barack Obama, I immediately turned around, I endorsed him, I worked for him, I convinced my supporters to vote for him. I didn't get the same respect from my primary opponent."

Clinton on Anderson Cooper's CNN show:

"...in '08, we ran a much closer, tougher primary contest between President Obama and myself. It was really close. And I immediately endorsed him, and I went to work for him. I spent countless hours, Anderson, convincing my supporters who felt equally aggrieved that they had to support Barack Obama... I didn't get that same, you know, respect and reciprocity from Senator Sanders or from his supporters."

And from that podcast--the one in which Clinton suggests Sanders didn't unify the party in 2016:

"I know what it's like to lose a hard-fought primary. Y'know, I got more votes than Barack Obama but fewer delegates. I immediately ended my campaign, I endorsed him, I appeared with him, I went to the convention, where my delegates really wanted to cast their votes for me because they'd worked really hard for me, and I said 'no, I'm gonna' go to the floor of the convention, I'm gonna' move his nomination by acclimation,' then I did 100 events for him, ok. Contrast that to what did not happen in 2016. And that cannot happen again."

For the record, almost none of that is true.[1] Clinton didn't do "100 events" for Obama in 2008 (or a fraction of that), and Sanders did more work for her--everything her campaign asked of him, more than 40 appearances in support of her candidacy, at a pace that was remarkable for someone his age.

That list, created and circulated to refute Clinton cult smears, isn't complete. In researching the matter, Matt Binder, an enterprising Twitterer, managed to find even more. He put them into a compact, effective video that should be the final word on that particular subject. Sanders worked his ass off to try to elect Clinton, when he could have--and maybe should have--just given her the "oh, piss off" she so richly deserved. Years worth of ugly barbs and insufferably entitled ingratitude from Clinton and her cult are the thanks he's gotten.

Despite the grave offense Clinton's unconscionable attacks give to anyone with any functional sense of decency, it's Clinton who is treated respectfully by the Democratic party Establishment and the press, Clinton who is made the subject of a mammoth 4-part docu-series monument to her own malignant narcissism, and when Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Sanders supporter, boos Clinton at a public event in reaction to Clinton's attacks, it is Tlaib who is pressured into apologizing. Most Americans hate Clinton[2] but this isn't reflected in the version of political discourse Americans receive from their institutions.

That version is, among other things, anti-Sanders and anti-progressive to such a degree that it often resembles satire. Sanders is relentlessly tone-policed by the Clintonite right and its press lackeys. Joe Biden can spend months attacking Medicare For All using the anti-M4A talking-points of entrenched industry and of even Donald Trump[3] and his attacks are amplified by a sympathetic press but when Sanders offers even the mildest criticism of Joe Biden's support for the Iraq war--even while Biden was doling out Trump-level lies aimed at covering up his record--he's being "divisive." Sanders supporter Zephyr Teachout wrote an editorial about Biden's corruption problem but though Teachout doesn't actually work for Sanders or his campaign and nothing she wrote was at all inaccurate, Sanders was pressured into apologizing for the piece. Biden expressed his gratitude by firing off an attack-ad falsely claiming Sanders was lying about his dismal record on Social Security. When Elizabeth Warren's campaign apparently leaked the absurd claim that Sanders had once privately told Warren he didn't think a woman could be elected president--something no one with any knowledge of Sanders genuinely believes--Sanders called this a lie. At the Iowa Democratic debate, the "journalist" who asked about it treated the charge as if it was an established fact, and Sanders was widely treated as the aggressor in the affair.[4] Every campaign--and pretty much everything--draws a certain number of noxious fans to social media; Sanders is the only one regularly denounced for his, the only Democratic candidate whose supporters are ubiquitously--and falsely--denounced as "sexists" and "racists," the only one condemned for not reigning them in, as if such a thing was necessary or even possible.

Within Democratic circles, the only reason attacks like those offered by Clinton can be received as anything other than an utter scandal is because Sanders' contributions to the Democratic party--not just his contributions to the Clinton campaign, already covered--are largely unknown, thus unacknowledged and unappreciated.

Those contributions are quite extensive but there doesn't seem to be a single article devoted to comprehensively cataloging them. That consideration is a big part of what gave birth to this project--an effort to cover this subject.

A few words about the parameters: In researching it, I quickly discovered a comprehensive treatment was beyond my resources. Among other things, while Sanders' higher-profile activities like televised town hall events can be tracked down with relative ease, many of his less-visible efforts have left barely a trace in the documentary record. The same is also--and especially--true of Sanders' activities prior to his first presidential race, and I've opted, as a consequence, to focus on his post-2016 work. Sanders has crafted a virtual universe of progressive legislation in the period covered but I've left that aside to focus on his political, rather than legislative, activities. While I've included some of Sanders' work on behalf of other candidates and while some of the events I've covered also involved such work, I haven't compiled a full accounting of it, and that's both to keep things manageable and because the existing record--the part of it within my reach, at least--appears to be inadequate to that task. All of which reinforces the original point: the story of Sanders' work on behalf of the Democrats is untold. While I can't cover all of it, I can certainly give some sense of the scope and the scale of it.


BERNIE SANDERS: A STARTER KIT

Sanders is an anti-Establishment kind of guy. He looks to upend the status quo and this leads some simple souls to see him as some sort of Trump figure, a chaos-bringer who only wants to burn down everything. Clintonite-rightists speak of him in terms of "horsehshoe theory." In theory, this is the notion that the extremes of left and right eventually become largely indistinguishable. In reality, it's the inability of the politically unsophisticated to distinguish an arsonist from an architect. Sanders is very specific in both what he supports and what he opposes. His "revolution" doesn't bring down the pillars of heaven; it's one that occurs firmly within the existing system. The Establishment to which he's opposed isn't, as is so often asserted by those more emotional than attentive, "Democrats" or "the Democratic party." It's an entrenched economic elite that enriches itself at the expense of the public and the public good. Democratic elected officials of the Clintonite-right variety, who currently control the major organs of the party, are some of the agents of that elite, piously mouthing progressive bromides in order to attract votes while selling out their constituents at every turn to their big-money donors. Sanders denounces the system as corrupt but not, for better or worse, the individuals within it. He adopts an old liberal idea--that institutions should serve people, not vice-versa--and seeks to tear down a politics that mostly just serves the needs of the powerful and build one in its place that is responsive to the needs of the people. The Democratic party was, as Sanders sees it, once the natural home of this politics[5] and needs to be again.

Some basic premises:

1) Often characterized as "far left," the progressive populist agenda adopted by Sanders is, in fact, a mainstream view in America and extremely popular with the public. Polling shows most of the headline items in that agenda have strong majority support, many quite significant majority support.[6]

2) That agenda is not only a mainstream view within the Democratic base, support for its headline items is overwhelming--usually 80% or better.

3) Sanders has pointed out that people don't feel represented by the major parties and argues those parties have failed to reach out to most voters in a meaningful way. Sanders argues for a Democratic party that is responsive to the needs of the people, not just a handful of well-heeled donors, and that offers a positive agenda that people support and that would make their lives better, rather than just being something less awful than the other side. Sanders' struggle within the Democratic party is to try to make it more representative of its own voters, which is, after all, what a party in a democracy is supposed to be.

4) Successful politics involve building coalitions and encouraging an energizing progressive movement has been his major political project. Such a movement, he has argued, will will mobilize existing voters, who have too often fallen into lesser-of-two-evils thinking when it comes to casting their ballots. It will draw in many of the enormous body of non-voters who either never become involved or have withdrawn from the process in disgust because they don't think anyone represents their interests. It can even draw in Republicans and others who may disagree with portions of a progressive populist agenda but find other parts of it appealing. A major theme of Sanders' work has, in fact, been outreach to Republicans. Red states are often badly neglected by Democrats; Sanders has argued "Democrats need to become a 50-state party. You can't have a great party on the West Coast and the East Coast. You need to have a party in all 50 states. That's not the case right now."


LEGWORK

Sanders believes this is a winning approach. Not just for one election but for establishing a new status quo, a progressive one.

In pursuit of that, Sanders has spent years traveling across the U.S. on behalf of progressive Democratic policies and candidates, often maintaining a pace that would be crippling for a lot of men half his age. A 2014 Daily Beast article, written before Sanders' first presidential run and rise to national prominence, sets the tone nicely. In what would become a long-running pattern by perplexed journalists, the author, David Freedlander, largely misses the point of Sanders' activities by trying to interpret them as merely a presidential campaign and is left scratching his head.

"[A] review of [Sanders] campaign schedule reveals a highly unorthodox approach in the pre-primary presidential process.

"There was a fundraiser for Keith Ellison, the Minnesota congressman who is one of the most consistently liberal members of the House and who routinely wins election by 50 points or more (and who faces only token opposition this year). Sanders also fundraised and campaigned for Gloria Bromell Tinubu, a former member of the Georgia state legislature who is making her second run for Congress in deeply conservative South Carolina after losing in 2012 to Rep. Tim Rice by 14 points.

"In tiny Richmond, California, Sanders has gotten involved in the battle for control of the city council, a campaign that has received little mainstream media attention but has become a touchstone in progressive circles. There, lawmakers are engaged in a fight with Chevron over the oil giant’s plans to upgrade a local refinery and a group of local progressives has been trying to keep the city council under their control against a slate of business-backed candidates.

"More than 500 people attended a rally that Sanders headlined in Richmond. He is the only national political figure to get involved.... [Sanders has] twice held rallies and town halls for the South Carolina Progressive Network, an umbrella group of grassroots organizations that tries to move the Palmetto State’s politics leftward. He keynoted the Fighting Bobfest, an annual gathering in central Wisconsin dedicated to the memory of the early-20th-century Senator Robert La Follette... [H]e has made the rounds to local Democratic parties, hosting a fundraiser for the Hillsborough County Democratic Committee in New Hampshire (the first primary’s state Democratic senator, Jeanne Shaheen, was a no-show) and keynoting the Clinton County Democratic Hall of Fame Dinner in Goose Lake, Iowa. He has hosted town halls at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall in Jackson, Mississippi, and fundraisers at the AFSCME headquarters in Philadelphia and a longshoreman’s hall in Charleston, South Carolina.

"In an interview with Esquire magazine, Sanders explained that this approach was consistent with his belief that the two major political parties have failed to reach out to most voters... The Vermont senator has given out more than $200,000 through his two PACs, Friends of Bernie and Progressive Voters of America. The PVA, in turn, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to embattled red-state Democrats like Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana."

In June 2015, a few weeks after entering that cycle's presidential race, Sanders fired off a letter to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee offering some of his ideas on party presidential debates in the upcoming campaign. For only two pages, it's an extraordinary document and incorporates many elements of Sanders' approach to politics. Sanders suggests a robust debate schedule, arguing that this would encourage voter interest and turnout. "[T]he purpose of our campaign should be to encourage as much voter participation as possible." In 2008, "an engaged and vigorous nominating process was one of the keys to success in registering voters early on and convincing people they had a meaningful stake in the general election in November." In a particularly visionary stroke, he suggested trying to organize inter-party debates, with the Democratic candidates taking on the Republican candidates, which, he argued, would, among other things, "engage large numbers of voters who typically do not pay attention to the process until much later when the general election begins to come into focus." His remarks on the need to address neglected states:

"Further, I also think it is important for us to debate not only in the early states but also in many states which currently do not have much Democratic presidential campaign activity. While a number of these non-target states have not in the past had much organized campaign presence, I believe it is critical for the Democratic Party and progressive forces in America to engage voters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. By expanding the scope geographically of debates beyond the early calendar states we can begin to awaken activism at the grassroots level in those states and signal to Democrats and progressives in places like Texas, Mississippi, Utah, and Wyoming that their states are not forgotten by the Democratic Party."

All of Sanders' suggestions regarding the debate schedule were, of course, entirely ignored.

When Sanders took his presidential campaign to these neglected states though, he found a warm reception. Zalid Jilani at Alternet noted at the time that a Sanders speech in Phoenix, Arizona was one of the biggest political rallies in the city's history.

"Bernie is campaigning across the Southwest to show he has broader appeal than just the safe blue-state regions of the country. It is an echo of the swing through the South that Sanders did in 2013, when he was still considering his candidacy.

"'I really strongly disagree with this concept that there's a blue state and red state America,' he told In These Times in an interview that year. "I believe that in every state in the country the vast majority of the people are working people. These are people who are struggling to keep their heads above water economically, these are people who want Social Security defended, they want to raise the minimum wage, they want changes in our trade policy. And to basically concede significant parts of America, including the South, to the right-wing is to me not only stupid politics, but even worse than that--you just do not turn your backs on millions and millions of working people."

Sanders' presidential campaign deflated the conventional wisdom that a "far-left" candidate who calls himself a democratic socialist couldn't possibly draw votes from the Republicans. After his defeat, 6-12% of his primary voters went on to vote for Donald Trump's faux-populism in the general election. Clintonites have latched on to this factoid to disingenuously blame Sanders for Trump's election but, as John Sides, research director of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, wrote in the Washington Post, this contingent of Sanders voters "weren't really Democrats to begin with."

Trump won the presidency running a right-wing faux-populist campaign that played on racial and ethnic hatreds but, as some noted at the time, he also ran to Hillary Clinton's left on some key issues like anti-corruption and, most importantly, "free trade." Trump secured the presidency by heavily touring key Rust Belt states that have been devastated by decades of horrendous trade agreements and promising to put an end to such practices. As with so most of what Trump says, this was just bullshit, a conclusion his subsequent presidency has even more strongly reinforced, but it made him the only source of hope in a contest against Hillary Clinton, who had spent decades pushing for those ruinous policies on behalf of her big donors.

Sanders' own quest for the 2016 Democratic nomination had been historic. He'd been the first Jewish person to win a major-party primary in the U.S.--an accomplishment almost universally overlooked as a consequence of the Clintonite right's insistence on treating him as "just another old white guy" for the purpose of waging weaponized identity attacks against him. More importantly, Sanders drove a stake through the heart of one of the foundational myths of the Clintonite right, the idea that Democrats have to perpetually move to the right in order to suck up the big bucks from big-money sources or they'll be unable to compete with Republicans, who gleefully wallow in such corruption. "Unilateral disarmament" is how they described swearing off the bribery-and-donor-service system, even as, in many cases (like Clinton's), they pretended to oppose it. In 2016, Sanders rejected this and funded his campaign, instead, with small donations from ordinary people. Far from being wiped out, he raised nearly as much money as Clinton, who was the legacy candidate of one of the major political machines in the U.S. and aggressively prostituted her potential future administration to every well-heeled interest. After 2016, candidates opting for the old, corrupt approach do so only because they prefer the corruption.

After the end of Sanders' 2016 primary campaign, his supporters founded a new group, Our Revolution, which described its mission thusly:

"Through supporting a new generation of progressive leaders, empowering millions to fight for progressive change and elevating the political consciousness, Our Revolution will transform American politics to make our political and economic systems once again responsive to the needs of working families."

OR has carried out this mission over the last few years with--in a part of their mission that is widely misunderstood and/or misrepresented--a particular focus on state and local elections. The org is helping build a bench of future progressive leaders.

Days after Trump won the election, Sanders published "Our Revolution," which is partly a memoir of his presidential run, but most of the book outlines what Sanders describes as "an agenda for a new America"--the agenda on which he'd run. The book became a bestseller and made Sanders wealthy. The agenda became the center of policy discussion within the national party. After making Sanders a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, congressional Democrats initially tried to coopt it. The 2018 congressional election cycle saw the emergence of an extraordinary number of "Berniecrat" candidates around the U.S., giving full-throated support for it. All of the major 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have made a big show of trying to copy portions of it.

Sanders has promoted progressive policies and been a strong voice of opposition to Trumpism through a series of primetime townhall events and debates on CNN and MSNBC that played out across 2017. The first, in January, touched on a wide range of issues. The next, in February, was a debate with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) over "The Future of Obamacare," which Trump had promised to gut, and proved a big ratings winner.

Sanders strongly argues that Democrats shouldn't cede red states to Republicans without a fight. In his travels, Sanders makes a particular point of visiting such states, challenging Trump and the Republicans on their own turf. In February, MSNBC scheduled a townhall event with Sanders in McDowell County, West Virginia. This is the poorest part of WV, the population has the lowest life-expectancy in the U.S.--only 64 years--and Trump carried it in 2016 by over 74%. The event initially had to be rescheduled when the local National Guard armory canceled it at the last minute. It happened a few weeks later in March. That old devil Conventional Wisdom holds that someone like "far left" Sanders would be met with hostility and deep skepticism in such a locale. Instead, Sanders' progressive message was greeted by enthusiasm and cheers.

"[A]s he did in his Kenosha, Wisconsin talk earlier this year, Sanders succeeded where so many Democrats failed this past election cycle—by connecting with red-state voters."

That same month, Sanders also traveled to Mississippi to support Nissan autoworkers who have been waging a long-running effort to unionize.

"A win at Nissan could be a game-changer. On Saturday, they had a guest speaker.

"'If we can win here at Nissan, you will give a tremendous bolt of confidence to working people all over this country,' Bernie Sanders told a crowd of 5,000. 'If you can stand up to a powerful multinational corporation in Canton, Mississippi, workers all over this country will say, "We can do it, too".'"

In April, Sanders embarked on a "Unity Tour," a project he carried out in cooperation with the Democratic National Committee.

"Beginning April 17, Sanders and [DNC chief Tom] Perez will hit the trail in so-called 'red' and 'purple' states, including Kentucky, Maine, Florida, Utah, Montana, Nevada, Arizona and Nebraska."

Sanders later donated $100,000 to the DNC to defray the expenses of that tour.

In May, Sanders traveled to California and stumped for a state-level single-payer bill then making its way through the state legislature.

"Sen. Bernie Sanders, assailing Republicans in Washington for their health care bill, delivered a message Saturday to the Democratic-controlled California Legislature: 'Please lead the country and pass the single-payer bill.'

"'Please make my life easier,' Sanders, who is proposing Medicare for All, single-payer legislation at the federal level, said in a speech in Beverly Hills where he was accepting an award from the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog. 'The great state of California can send a message that will be heard all over this country and all over the world if you pass single-payer here.'... Sanders did not delve into policy specifics Saturday. Instead, he continued to confront Republican President Donald Trump for helping lead the effort to repeal the federal health care law. Sanders, seizing on recent remarks by Trump, said he agrees with the president that Australia’s universal health care is superior to the one in the United States, remarks the White House later cast as merely complimentary.

"'Everybody is right once in a while,' Sanders said to laughs. 'And on this particular instance, Trump is quite right.'

"'So, let me say to the president that if you think the Australian health care system is so good, well, I am going to give you the opportunity to support Legislation that I am going to introduce.'"

The same month, Montana was to hold a special election to fill the state's lone House seat, which had been vacated by Rep. Ryan Zinke after Trump appointed him Secretary of the Interior. Sanders traveled to the state for a tour in support of Rob Quist, the Democratic candidate in that race, whom Sanders had endorsed.

A few days later, Sanders was on CNN again, this time taking part in a townhall debate with Ohio Gov. John Kasich on "The White House In Crisis."

When Republicans were scheming to replace the Affordable Care Act with their awful "Trumpcare" legislation, Sanders took the lead in defending the ACA. A Vox article from 7 Aug. details how Sanders and his team repeatedly delayed the roll-out of his latest iteration of his Medicare For All proposal, prioritizing preservation of Obamacare.

"[D]uring the Obamacare repeal fight in Congress, Sanders was a team player. He brought crowds to dozens of rallies with Senate Democrats who had once opposed him. He shut a Republican attempt to expose Democrats’ divisions, despite the interest of some of his team. And, perhaps most importantly, he marshaled his resources and newfound star power in defense of Democrats’ top priority: showing what it might look like for his movement to be incorporated into the party apparatus, rather than having it try to knock down its gates.

"'Our job today is to defend the Affordable Care Act,' Sanders said at several of his rallies this year. 'Our job tomorrow is to create a Medicare-for-all single-payer system.'... On January 15, as temperatures hit the low teens, Sanders joined Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) and Michigan Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters onstage at Macomb County Community College. Eight thousand people showed up.

"'Sanders knew he had a unique megaphone in American politics, and he used it to shout it at the top of his lungs at a time when few were paying attention to the health care fight,' said Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn.org.

"He kept shouting. In Portland, Maine, long before Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) proved a crucial health care 'no' vote, about 1,000 people watched Sanders decry the bill... For two days in June, his team and its gray van traveled 348 miles in Appalachia to build public opposition to the Republican health bill.

"Activists say that proved a crucial step in showing Democratic lawmakers that the public would join them in fighting for the ACA."

July saw Sanders back on the road defending the ACA. From the Atlantic:

"West Virginia was the senator’s first stop on a day-long, two-state trip to campaign against the Senate Republican health-care bill. Next up was Covington, Kentucky, a city near Cincinnati, Ohio, where Sanders called the health-care bill House Republicans passed in May 'the most anti-working class legislation that I have ever seen,' adding that 'the Senate bill, in many respects, is even worse.'

"It’s unusual for a high-profile progressive politician to hold a rally in a red state like Kentucky, or even West Virginia, a former Democratic stronghold that has trended conservative in recent years, outside of a presidential campaign. That may be part of the reason why the Democratic Party’s power has eroded so severely across the country."

Further details from the New Yorker, 31 July, 2017:

"Since the election, [Sanders] has staged events in Michigan, Mississippi, Maine, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Montana, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, and Illinois. At every one, he speaks about the suffering of small-town Americans, and his belief that the Democrats can help them... For decades, Sanders has argued for a single-payer health-care system, and he is getting ready to introduce a 'Medicare for All' bill in the Senate. This summer, however, he assigned himself the task of leading the campaign against efforts, by Republicans in the House and the Senate, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On the Sunday after the Fourth of July, as Senate Republicans prepared to release their bill, Sanders took a charter flight from Burlington to West Virginia and Kentucky, for a pair of hastily arranged rallies. He and his staff had chosen states whose Republican senators were pivotal in the health-care debate. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader, was shepherding the bill toward a vote without any public hearings. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, and Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, were indicating that they might vote against it.

"Sanders talked about the Senate bill’s likely effects in McConnell’s home state. 'How do you throw two hundred and thirty thousand people off the health care they have without hesitation?' he asked. 'It happens because the Democratic Party is incredibly weak in states like Kentucky. And so he doesn’t have to face the wrath of the voters.'"

August saw another tour, this one through Indiana, Ohio and Michigan in support of a variety of progressive issues:

"...Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is gearing up for his three-state Midwest 'Pickup Tour,' which will aim to demonstrate that his ambitious progressive agenda--which includes a $15 federal minimum wage, Medicare for All, and tuition-free public college--has 'universal appeal.'"

Near the end of the month, Sanders published "Bernie Sanders' Guide To Political Revolution," a book aimed at teens and calling them to "fight for a progressive economic, environmental, racial, and social justice agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment, and provides healthcare for all."

On 26 Sept., 2017, CNN hosted a townhall debate on healthcare, featuring Sanders and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) vs. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA). Sanders mopped the floor with his Republican opponents.

Toward the end of September, Trump had announced a plan for tax cuts, primarily benefiting the already-well-off. A few weeks later, on 18 Oct., CNN staged a rematch debate between Sanders and Ted Cruz, this one over tax reform. A few days later, Sanders trekked to Massachusetts to stump for a slate of local Dem candidates:

"U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders brought his strategy of trying to reenergize the Democratic Party by lending his star power to lower-level races to a small city just outside Boston on Monday, with a stop to endorse candidates for alderman and city council.

"Sanders... announced his support for a dozen candidates backed by 'Our Revolution' a group formed by supporters of Sanders’ campaign to boost progressive, liberal candidates.

"It is unusual for a politician with Sanders’ profile to weigh in on races with no serious Republican contenders, political observers said.

"'The local level, more than any other level, is a way to involve people in the political process,' Sanders said in Somerville, Massachusetts, a city of 80,000 people.

"Sanders last week pointed to the appearance as one of a series to try to build enthusiasm for lower-level elections."

In November, Sanders carried out a multi-state tour in opposition to the Trump tax-cut proposal:

"Sen. Bernie Sanders is traveling to Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania this weekend to rally against the Republican tax bill... Sanders, who held a similar series of rallies across the country this year to oppose the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, is using the 'Protecting Working Families Tour,' which is also organized by MoveOn.org and the Not One Penny coalition, to pressure on-the-fence GOP senators before a vote on the tax bill, President Donald Trump's top legislative priority."

On 28 Nov., CNN again tackled the question of Trump's tax-cut plan in a debate featuring Sanders and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) vs. Ted Cruz and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).

In 2018, Sanders began an extraordinary run of townhall events of his own, carried out in cooperation with the Young Turks and other progressive outlets and streamed live over the internet. His first, in January, was concerned with Medicare For All healthcare and featured many M4A advocates and experts charting the problems of existing U.S. healthcare, the experience of other nations with single-payer healthcare, etc. It ran nearly 2 hours and drew 1.1 million live viewers, with another 1.6 million tuning in the next morning.

Congressional Republicans had passed and Trump had signed into law his tax-cut bill in December. In February, Sanders responded with the "Repeal the Trump Tax" tour.

"Sen. Bernie Sanders will join progressive groups in Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan next week as part of a nationwide campaign to drum up grassroots opposition against the new Republican-backed tax law ahead of the midterm elections.

"The Vermont independent will take direct aim at Trump-era Republicans' signature legislative achievement in those three key states, two of which, Michigan and Wisconsin, were instrumental in the President's 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton."

In March, with Sanders on the road again, CNN reported that "Sanders is spending a lot of time in Trump country."

"The Vermont independent has spent the 19 months since President Donald Trump's election bouncing around the country, rallying support against Trump and the Republican Congress, stumping for progressive candidates, promoting a book, and appearing alongside Democratic National Committee leaders on a nationwide 'unity tour.'

"Since the last ballots were cast in 2016, Sanders has visited some 28 states (not counting his home in Vermont), often headlining multiple events in different cities over the course of just a few hours. He's made three stops in, yes, Iowa, but also two apiece in Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Wisconsin and New York, the only one of the bunch won by Hillary Clinton.

"This coming week he will drop in (again) on both Texas and Arizona, where he's first scheduled for an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper at South By Southwest in Austin on Friday before heading down to an event hosted by his political organization, Our Revolution, that night in San Antonio. Sanders hits Lubbock for another Our Revolution rally on Saturday, then skips west Sunday to join Reps. Ruben Gallego and Raúl Grijalva in Phoenix.By the time he returns back east next week, Sanders will have touched down in six states, five of them carried by Trump, over the course of a little more than two weeks. The whirlwind itinerary suggests Sanders is a man in a hurry. But even if the destination remains uncertain, the message is clear and, he insists, targeted.

"'We have put a significant effort into going into states that Trump won,' Sanders said in an interview. 'Not exclusively, but most of the states that I've visited have been states that Trump won. The reason for that is I think it's important for people who voted for Trump to understand that many of the promises that he made on health care, on taxes, on many other issues, are promises that he did not keep.'"

Politico noticed this too.

"Bernie Sanders is taking his pitch to Trump country... 'It's absolutely imperative that we get out to those states that Trump won, speak to the working people of those states, and make very clear that the campaign that Trump won on--where he promised to stand for working people--turned out to be a lie,' Sanders told POLITICO in an interview Thursday, shortly before taking off for Texas and Arizona, two states the president carried by single digits in the 2016 presidential election.

"'It's important to rally people around the progressive agenda, which says that we don’t give tax breaks to billionaires,' Sanders said, promising to add even more Trump-voting states to his travel schedule."[7]

On 19 March, Sanders held his next townhall event, this one on "Inequality in America."

"Tonight, Sen. Bernie Sanders, in partnership with The Guardian, NowThis, The Young Turks and Act.tv, will present a live town hall event on the rise of the oligarchy and the collapse of the American middle class. Sanders will speak with director Michael Moore, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, economist Darrick Hamilton and other guests about the 40-year decline of the middle class and possible solutions to the growing crisis of income and wealth inequality in America."

The event was another success, drawing 1.7 million live viewers, with 2.5 million watching it the next day.

May saw a two-day tour of Pennsylvania:

"With the same enthusiasm and populist appeals that defined his presidential run, Bernie Sanders told thousands of supporters in Lancaster that Democrats like Jess King are an essential part of his 'political revolution.'

"'Jess King is on board,' Sanders said, with a Medicare-for-all national health care system, with raising the minimum wage and with fighting efforts to cut Social Security.

"She supports criminal justice reform, 'commons sense' gun safety measures and taxing the rich.

"Those were among the reasons why Sanders, the two-term U.S. Senator from Vermont, said he was backing King in her uphill battle for the 11th Congressional District--an area that President Donald Trump won by 26 points in 2016.

"'We need Jess because her vision of America is a very different vision than the Republican leadership and Donald Trump, who now control our government,' Sanders said on a sunny Saturday morning in Lancaster city’s Musser Park... His trip here was part of a two-day Pennsylvania tour to visit three candidates--the others being lieutenant governor candidate John Fetterman and 7th Congressional District candidate Greg Edwards."

And:

"Espousing themes of economic equality and social justice, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders brought his 'political revolution' to Allentown Saturday to rally Democrats behind community organizer Greg Edwards in the Lehigh Valley's high-profile congressional race.

"Sanders, who shared the stage at a packed Miller Symphony Hall with Edwards, vouched for the congressional hopeful's commitment to 'progressive' policies such as universal health care, debt-free education and a higher minimum wage.

"Sanders urged the audience to vote in the May 15 primary and reach across the aisle to those who supported Republican President Donald Trump. He said many Trump voters are hurting, too, because they cannot afford health care and are having a tough time making ends meet."

That same month, Trump announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Iran nuclear agreement negotiated during the Obama administration which was aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. A week later, Sanders hosted his 3rd townhall event, this one on the nuclear deal and America's role in the world.

With June came a tour of California:

"Sanders will make four stops in southern California next Saturday, June 2, just days before the state's closely watched primary elections on June 5... Sanders will speak to protesting workers and rally with activists.

"His packed day will start with a roundtable with Disneyland workers in Anaheim, where unions are pushing a ballot measure that would raise wages for hospitality workers at companies that have received subsidies from the city.

"Then Sanders will hold a town hall with dockworkers near the Port of Long Beach.

"After that, he'll head to downtown Los Angeles for a rally with Shaun King and Patrisse Cullors, two prominent activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement. More than 3,500 people have RSVP'd online to attend the event."

In July, Sanders undertook a 4-state tour on behalf of several Democratic candidates. Pennsylvania:

"Vermont senator Bernie Sanders headlined a stage full of progressive candidates at Carnegie Mellon University on Sunday. The campaign event was billed as a rally to support Braddock mayor John Fetterman’s candidacy for lieutenant governor.

"Fetterman and Sanders were joined by Sara Innamorato and Summer Lee. The two Democratic Socialist candidates, running on progressive agendas, won strong primary victories in May. The overall message of the rally was that progressive politics is a winning strategy.

"Sanders said during his speech: 'Raising the minimum wage, healthcare for all, making public colleges and universities tuition free, protecting Roe versus Wade, transforming our energy system, criminal justice reform, immigration reform, on all of those issues, the American people are with us.'"

Minnesota:

"Over 15,000 people packed into First Avenue to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders rally for Rep. Keith Ellison, who is running for Minnesota attorney general."

Wisconsin:

"Former presidential hopeful and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was in Janesville Saturday evening to campaign for Randy Bryce, a Democratic candidate for the 1st Congressional District.

"Several hundred supporters turned out for the rally, where Bryce and Sanders emphasized their populist message, including calling for single-payer healthcare for all Americans and immigration reform.

"In his speech, Sanders characterized Bryce as a candidate who doesn’t rely on big political donors.

"'What this campaign is about and what Randy is about is saying enough is enough. We are going to have a government that represents all people and not just the 1 percent,' Sanders said."

At the end of June, Berniecrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a major upset victory over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), the 4th-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and became an instant rock-star among progressive Democrats. After Sanders' trip to Wisconsin, she headed to Kansas to join Sanders in campaigning for Democratic congressional candidates:

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will make campaign swing through Kansas next week, rallying for two congressional candidates who argue that left-wing politics are the key to winning in red states.

"'I've believed for years that the Democratic Party has committed political malpractice by writing off half the states in this country,' said Sanders in an interview, as he campaigned in Minnesota for Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). 'They've got to fight for every state in this country.'

"Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez will head to Kansas on July 20. They’ll begin in Wichita, where James Thompson, who narrowly lost a special election in 2017, wants another chance to win the 4th Congressional District. They’ll continue with an event in the Kansas City suburbs for Brent Welder, a former Sanders delegate now seeking the Democratic nomination in the 3rd Congressional District.

On 16 July, Sanders hosted his 4th townhall event, "CEOs vs. Workers." Sanders invited low-wage workers from five major corporations, along with the CEOs of those same corporations. None of the latter showed up.

"On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers--one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.

"The arrangement was an effective visual representation of the outrageous inequality that exists in the United States. The ten chairs represented ten people: five workers struggling to make ends meet, and their five indifferent bosses, too preoccupied to bother attending and too powerful to be compelled."

August saw a three-stop tour across Sanders' home state of Vermont in which Sanders appeared with ALS-afflicted activist Ady Barkan to promote healthcare reform. Then, it was down to Florida, to stump for Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, whom Sanders had endorsed in Democratic gubernatorial primary. After Sanders' intervention, Gillum surged from 4th to 1st place and won the nomination in an upset.

October, the lead-up to the midterm congressional elections, saw Sanders very busy:

"Senator Bernie Sanders will hit the campaign trail hard this month, stumping for left-leaning candidates at 15 planned events in nine states. Along the planned route are a number of locales the Vermont Senator will need to visit if he plans to run for president in 2020.

"Sanders will campaign on behalf of Liz Watson in Bloomington, Indiana, J.D. Scholten, who is trying to beat Republican Representative Steve King, in Iowa and Representative Barbara Lee in Oakland, California. Between stump speeches, he'll hold a rally on behalf of his PAC, Our Revolution, in South Carolina and town halls to discuss Social Security cuts in Iowa and Indiana.

"Sanders, 77, will also hit Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada on his October tour of presidential swing states."

And:

"[Sanders has] been promoting the party’s prospects in the Nov. 6 elections during a nine-state campaign swing that began in Bloomington, Indiana, on Oct. 19 and wraps up in Oakland, California, this Saturday. He’ll be joined on that last stop by Rep. Barbara Lee of California, a fellow progressive stalwart running for chair of the House Democratic Caucus."

ABC News reports that,

"Notably, the list of candidates for [which Sanders will be stumping during] this swing includes some true-blue progressives, as well as more moderate Democrats who do not agree with Sanders on all policy prescriptions. The senator, for example, will campaign with the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, though he campaigned for one of her challengers in the primary.

"Jacky Rosen, the Democratic Senate candidate in Nevada, also sticks out."

Details of this tour:

The 2018 congressional elections saw a blue wave lift Democrats to control of the House of Representatives and washed away several Clintonite-right "Democrats" in the Senate.

On 27 Nov., Sanders published "Where We Go From Here," a chronicle of his activities from the end of his 2016 primary campaign to the then-present.

In December, Sanders hosts his next townhall event, "Solving the Climate Crisis."

January 2019 saw a tour of South Carolina. ABC News reported:

"[Sanders] held several events around Martin Luther King Day including a private meal and meet and greet at Big T's Barbecue, a popular black-owned and operated soul food restaurant with 'Our Revolution,' a political non-profit formed by Sanders supporters following his 2016 campaign.

"During his visit to Columbia, South Carolina, Sanders also ratcheted up his rhetoric during stops at Benedict College, a historically black college and Zion Baptist Church, a historic African-American church... While at Benedict, Sanders told a standing room only crowd of over 250 African-American students on Tuesday that President Donald Trump was 'unamerican and absolutely disgraceful.' Sanders also told the students that the Republican Party is a 'right-wing extremist party.'

"Sanders made headlines at the NAACP rally at the South Carolina State House by calling Trump a 'racist,' an attack line that Sanders has used several times over the course of Trump’s political career... On Martin Luther King Day, the South Carolina NAACP held a town hall at Zion Baptist Church. The group reportedly invited Sanders and [Sen. Cory] Booker but Sanders was the only 2020 potential candidate to attend the event... In addition to his remarks to the Legislative Black Caucus on Tuesday, Sanders also spoke to the State’s Democratic caucus about the wealth gap, health care, taxes."

In February 2019, Sanders launched his second presidential campaign, which seems like a logical place to stop. Or perhaps to start.

Sanders has certainly continued his activities right into his presidential campaign. A few words are perhaps in order regarding a ridiculous "controversy" ginned up around that work. Sanders has, throughout his presidential campaign, continued to reach out to Republicans. In April, 2019, Sanders agreed to do a townhall event on Fox News. The decision was met with furious outrage by Clintonite right figures:

"Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders angered many establishment Democrats... over his plans to appear at a Fox News 2020 presidential campaign town hall later this month.

"Sanders was widely ridiculed by Democrats and supporters of 2020 rivals including Beto O'Rourke, Kamala Harris and even former Vice President Joe Biden's unannounced campaign backers who used the announcement as evidence the Independent senator is not 'loyal' to the Democratic Party. While voices such as The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald applauded Sanders for his open-minded outreach, mainline Democrats accused Sanders of courting conservative voters, promoting the cable news network's 'hateful' Trump rhetoric and turning his back on the DNC... Sanders was also widely ridiculed by Democrats who view his very appearance on Fox News as an affront to the party and an embrace of hateful, Trump-led rhetoric."

Sanders didn't, of course, offer any "hateful, Trump-led rhetoric"; entering into the lion's den, he talked about the same progressive issues he has for years without altering a dot and was met--as he has been so often in such initially hostile venues--with raucous applause. The event drew 2.55 million viewers, becoming the most viewed political event of the cycle up to that date. End result: Sanders brought the progressive gospel to an audience that ordinarily never hears it.[8]

Hopefully, this article provides the proper context for those and many other complaints about Sanders so endlessly offered over so many years by the Clinton cult and the larger Clintonite right.

Acting more like an activist than a long-serving member of congress, Sanders has encouraged and assisted the creation of a massive and enthusiastic grassroots movement, the core of which are young people--the future--and has directed its energy toward supporting Democrats. No one else in national politics does what he does. The amount he gives of himself is extraordinary. Well past the age most people have retired from the rat-race, he lives, breathes, sweats and bleeds his politics, utilizing his renown to support Democratic candidates and policies, and he is, by any serious evaluation, an invaluable asset to that cause.

--j.

---

[1] Clinton didn't get more votes than Obama. Michigan moved the date of its primary in violation of DNC rules and the org decided any votes in that mischeduled contest would be invalid. The other candidates removed their names from the ballot. Clinton agreed with this decision until she started losing, in which case she argued for reinstating the vote from Michigan, where, she had, in effect, appeared on the ballot uncontested. Clinton's claim of getting more votes rests on those votes. Clinton didn't "immediately" end her campaign--like Sanders four years later, she played it out right to the end of the primary season. Clinton didn't magnanimously go into the convention and move Obama's nomination by acclimation; she allowed her supporters to threaten a walk-out of the convention in order to have her name placed in consideration for the nomination then waited until over 1,000 delegates had voted for her before removing her name from consideration.

[2] Most of the public, of course, hates Clinton. After her appalling blame-absolutely-everyone-else book-tour in 2017, her polling shows she's regarded more unfavorably by America than even Trump, even as America suffers through year three of the perpetual shit-show that is that particular regime. In the Harvard/Harris poll from the end of January--the most recent of which I'm aware--Clinton was at 57% unfavorable vs. only 54% unfavorable for Trump.

[3] I went into this in a somewhat lengthy profile of Biden a few months ago. The relevant portion:

A few weeks ago, Biden launched a crusade of lies intended to discredit and defeat M4A, employing many of the same "arguments" against it being advanced by Donald Trump. At an AARP forum in Iowa, Biden said that under M4A, "Medicare goes away as you know it. All the Medicare you have is gone." This is, of course, entirely false--M4A, as the name implies, just significantly expands the existing Medicare program--but it also mirrors what Trump wrote in an op-ed back in October devoted, in part, to attacking the policy. According to Trump, "so-called Medicare for All would really be Medicare for None. Under the Democrats' plan, today's Medicare would be forced to die." Biden has repeatedly employed Trump's Orwellian characterization of M4A as taking away health coverage, rather than expanding it. "[T]he Democrats would eliminate every American's private and employer-based health plan," wrote Trump. Biden:

"How many of you like your employer based healthcare? Do you think it was adequate? Now if I come along and say you’re finished, you can’t have it anymore, well that’s what Medicare for All does. You cannot have it. Period."

Trump appeals to the absolute worst, most selfish "got-mine" entitlement psychology. "[Medicare For All] means that after a life of hard work and sacrifice," he wrote, "seniors would no longer be able to depend on the benefits they were promised." Biden incorporates all of this--without attribution, of course--into his own recent anti-Medicare For All ad.

[4] In her Hollywood Reporter interview, Clinton herself tried this, accusing Sanders of "having gone after Elizabeth with a very personal attack on her."

[5] Sanders himself draws the lineage of his politics directly from Franklin D. Roosevelt, the giant Democrat of the 20th century. Arguably, of any century.

[6] The link there is to an article Mitch Clark and I assembled back in January of 2016 examining the polling on Sanders' major issues. It's now hopelessly out of date--on many of those issues, the public is now even more progressive--but it still appears to be the best compendium of that information.

[7] Politico, being Politico, tried to make a negative out of the fact that Sanders was doing this of his own initiative rather than at the direction of senior Democrats and was sour about the fact that Sanders was campaigning for two progressive congressmen but not more conservative candidates (the latter being a recurring--though, as this article suggests, false--theme in the anti-Sanders press).

[8] A similar "controversy" erupted in January when Joe Rogan, host of perhaps the most popular podcast in the world but a fellow noted for some less-than-enlightened views, sort-of endorsed Sanders' campaign, resulting in another round of manufactured outrage, attacks on Sanders by his presidential rivals and demands that Sanders apologize for "bolstering the endorsement."