Why Senator Bernie Sanders could win the US election

Is Senator Bernie Sanders electable? As Sanders has surged in the polls, supporters of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are issuing increasingly dire warnings about his general election prospects.

On websites like Vox, many political scientists agree: He can’t win. Millions of dollars in Republican ads, they insist, will paint him a socialist or a red. Americans aren’t about to elect a Jewish socialist who still hasn’t lost his Brooklyn accent.

It will be a debacle, critics predict, like Democratic Senator George McGovern’s crushing 1972 loss, when the Democrats lost 48 states, or Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, buried by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s stunning landslide in 1964. It will set progressives back for decades.

Ironically, as Sanders rises in the polls and does better than expected, the alarms grow in volume and intensity. It verges on oxymoronic for Clinton and the party establishment to scorn as unelectable a candidate who is beating her at the ballot box.
Insurgent candidates face forbidding odds - but they don’t always lose.

In 1980, establishment Republicans issued much the same warnings about former California Governor Ronald Reagan, asserting he would be Goldwater redux. Moderate Republican John Anderson went so far as to mount a third party bid against him.

Reagan not only won, he led a re-alignment election. Republicans took control of the Senate, and launched, in Barack Obama’s words, a transformative presidency that marked the end of the New Deal coalition and the beginning of the conservative era. In 1984, Walter Mondale lost 49 states to incumbent President Reagan.

President Richard Nixon and then Reagan built the conservative Republican majority coalition by splitting off so-called Reagan Democrats - largely white, disproportionately Southern, working-class men - from the Democratic Party. The GOP attracted these voters with talk of God, guns and skillful use of race-baiting politics, while waging a culture war against gays and women.
Sanders similarly may have the potential to expand the Democratic majority coalition by attracting blue-collar, white male voters back into the Democratic Party.

As Donald Trump’s rise in the 2016 Republican primaries has shown, these blue-collar white male voters are restive. Trump has garnered significant support with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim diatribes. But he’s also echoed Sanders by scorning the corruption of U.S. electoral politics, failed U.S. trade policies and endless wars without victory.

Sanders’s passionate populism may gain him a hearing from these voters and potentially forge a far broader electoral majority coalition for Democrats.

The assumption that he wins the nomination - against Clinton, who enjoys universal name recognition, the support of virtually the entire Democratic establishment, the best party operatives and all the money in the world - posits a stunning political rise. It would mean that Sanders makes significant inroads among minority voters, sustains the enthusiasm of the young and consolidates his support among middle- and lower-income Democrats.

As Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist from Emory University has wisely noted, the fears of a Sanders electoral debacle may be overdone simply because the electorate is far more polarised now than when McGovern and Goldwater ran. The harsh negative partisanship of U.S. politics, the growth of segmented media and the rise of social media have all helped consolidate more ideologically cohesive voting blocks.

A Clinton candidacy, for example, will mobilise the Republican right, which loathes her nearly as much as they do Obama. The Republican nominee is most likely to push an extreme right-wing agenda that will help unify and mobilise the Democratic base, no matter who the Democratic nominee is.

The question of electability is generally a comparative one. There’s a natural tendency to assume that Clinton, the more moderate and experienced candidate, is presumptively more viable. But while Sanders has clear vulnerabilities, so does Clinton.

She is burdened with significant baggage - Wall Street money, the smarmy Clinton Foundation fundraising, the email mess and more. Sanders has been the most courtly of opponents, but Republican attacks are and will be incessant and poisonous. 

Sanders offers a clear and passionate vision. He indicts an economy rigged by and for the few, and a politics corrupted by big money. His calls for fundamental reforms: Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a $15 minimum wage, fair taxes on the rich, breaking up big banks, re-making U.S. trade policies and meeting the challenge of climate change.

He summons a “political revolution,” of millions of people standing up to push politicians to respond. Sanders has walked the walk - funding his campaign with literally millions of small donations, spurning the creation of Super PACs to collect large and dark contributions from the wealthy and corporations.
In face of the Sanders challenge, Clinton increasingly sounded like the “No, we can’t” candidate.

As New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow, among many others, has argued, she has yet to show that she has a vision that can provide hope and inspiration and can mobilizse voters. Yes, electing the first woman president would be historic - but thus far it has not been enough.