Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the candidate to beat in the Democratic primary. So how are other candidates, particularly moderates worried that a Sanders nomination would throw the election to President Trump, trying to beat him?
Pete Buttigieg: Argue that Sanders as a nominee could hurt Democrats’ chances to keep the House and win the Senate
After Saturday’s Nevada caucuses, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor accused Sanders of “not giving a damn” about Democrats running for election or reelection in suburban areas where Sanders’s policies and ideologies don’t poll well. As The Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis and Michael Scherer noted, Sanders polls worst among all the Democratic candidates against Trump with white college-educated women, a key constituency in the battles for Congress.
Against that backdrop, Buttigieg paints a picture of an intransigent Sanders who would reject other Democrats running for office if they don’t embrace his policies, like Medicare-for-all.
“The politics he is offering is one that says, if you don't agree with me 100 percent of the time, you don't even belong at my side,” Buttigieg said at a CNN town hall Monday.
The upside to this attack: It allows Buttigieg to fold in any slip-up on Sanders’s part — like praising the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro — into this “See? He’s bad for our party” argument. “As a Democrat,” Buttigieg said Monday, “I don’t want to be explaining why our nominee is encouraging people to look on the bright side of the Castro regime when we’re going into the election of our lives.” Sanders’s candidacy is already coming up in a Georgia Senate race, where the Republican incumbent has called him “dangerous.”
The potential problems: It hinges on Democratic primary voters believing Sanders is too far left for the rest of the country. And there’s evidence his politics are becoming more normalized among this subset of voters. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll this month, 62 percent of Democratic-leaning adults say Sanders is “about right” on the liberal spectrum, putting him on par with more-moderate candidates, like Buttigieg. And as Sanders points out, he is beating Trump in national polls that ask people whether they’d vote for Sanders or Trump.
Joe Biden: Accuse Sanders of hiding the fact that his plans will raise taxes
Sanders wants to spend tens of trillions of dollars to provide health care paid for by the government, free child care, free public college and to wipe out student loan debt. But he has struggled to articulate just how much it will cost and how he’ll pay for it.
Under criticism from his colleagues about this, Sanders released a plan Monday that details raising taxes on Wall Street, big companies, the wealthy and, yes, the average American. (Sanders argues that in the long run they’ll save money because they won’t have premiums or deductibles for health care, for example.) But his plan came up short on revenue for Medicare-for-all and other programs, according to a New York Times analysis.
The former vice president’s campaign put out a statement Tuesday accusing Sanders of still being unable to explain how much this would all cost: “Senator Sanders has put forward plans that would more than double the size of the federal government. The incomplete list of the payfors he’s put forward doesn’t even begin to fully cover the costs, and relies on fuzzy accounting for what it does cover,” Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield said.
We can expect to hear more of this from Biden in Tuesday’s debate.
The upside to this attack: It allows Biden to try to pull Sanders’s lofty ideas down to reality by driving home that they will be expensive and difficult to implement. Medicare-for-all gets positive reviews from Americans in theory, but support goes down when you get into the details of how to pay for it, like raising taxes.
The potential downside: The energy driving Sanders’s campaign suggests that his supporters either don’t care how much it will cost or think it will be worth it. From their perspective, when there is so much economic inequality in the country, it’s going to take big action to do something.
Also Biden: Say Sanders isn’t a committed Democrat
Biden released a digital ad Monday playing up Sanders’s independence from the party. (He has filed as a registered independent to run for Senate and as a registered Democrat to run for president). The ad shows a clip of Sanders musing in 2011 about someone giving President Barack Obama a primary challenge. And then the ad from Biden ends with: “When it comes to building on President Obama’s legacy, Bernie Sanders just can’t be trusted."
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, himself a former Republican and independent, is also questioning Sanders’s bona fides and his past positions on immigration and guns.
The upside of this attack: It plays to Biden’s strengths, that he’d be a continuation of one of the most popular figures in the Democratic Party, Obama.
The potential downside: It could play to a Biden weakness, that he’s looking backward, not forward, for the Democratic Party’s future. That’s something Buttigieg has tried to attack Biden with.
Mike Bloomberg: Sanders is ‘loony’ on more than just policy
JUST NOW: @MikeBloomberg Senior Adviser @TimOBrien goes there on @BernieSanders.
— John Berman (@JohnBerman) February 25, 2020
Orgasms. Rape fantasies. Children running naked. All there.@NewDaypic.twitter.com/EUckLVYNR0
On Tuesday, hours before the South Carolina debate, a top adviser to the former New York mayor’s campaign resurfaced some controversial things Sanders has written about sex. It got some headlines when Sanders ran in 2016, but unless you’re an avid follower of politics, this is probably a new line of attack on Sanders.
Tim O’Brien pointed out on CNN that Sanders wrote essays in the late ’60s for an underground Vermont newspaper trying to link cancer to sexual repression (arguing that cervical cancer could be caused by women having too few orgasms), trashing schools as serving “no other function than to squash the life, joy and curiosity out of kids,” questioning fluoride in water supplies, and arguing that it would be good for society if young children went around naked and felt free to see and touch each other’s sexual organs.
“Bernie has all of this loopy stuff in his background,” O’Brien said.
The upside to this attack: Sanders did write those things, and they’re pretty eyebrow-raising. He has since distanced himself from the essays.
The potential downside: The writings were 50 years ago, and it might not jive with the Sanders that Democratic voters today know.
Elizabeth Warren: Argue Sanders is not enough of a team player to get his agenda done
If the senator from Massachusetts wants to revive her struggling campaign, she’s going to need to knock Sanders out of the top spot in the primary’s liberal lane.
She has fought with Sanders in the past — specifically by accusing him of raising doubts a woman could win against Trump — but not necessarily on his signature health-care policy because she once supported it. That’s starting to change. At a debate in Nevada last week, Warren attacked everyone onstage, including Sanders, albeit briefly and not with her sharpest barbs. She accused him of not being realistic or a team player on how to implement his ideas.
“His campaign relentlessly attacks everyone who asks a question or tries to fill in details about how to actually make this work,” Warren said of Sanders. “And then his own advisers say that probably won’t happen anyway.”
The upside of this attack: She has to thread a needle here: She wants to enact liberal polices but needs to position herself as better able to do that. She hopes questioning Sanders’s ability to get things accomplished will help chip away at his lead.
The potential downside: Warren has also been accused by her competitors of being too inflexible in her ideology. If voters want an alternative who can work with colleagues, is she the one they’d pick?
