“The first thing is to raise hell,” said labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. “That’s always the first thing to do when you’re faced with an injustice and you feel powerless.”
That’s not exactly the advice of Kevin Drum, who blogs at the website that bears the name of Mother Jones. His guidance is more along the lines of: Be moderate, because that’s the only way to be electable.
Drum offered this insight in a recent post headlined “New Survey Suggests Bernie Can Win Only With Enormous Youth Turnout” (2/25/20). It summarizes a new paper (“Candidate Ideology and Vote Choice in the 2020 US Presidential Election,” 2/25/20) by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, political scientists at Berkeley and Yale, respectively, which—to start with—does not say that Bernie Sanders can win only with enormous youth turnout.
What the paper actually reported was that in a survey of potential voters, Sanders beat Trump by 4.3 percentage points—the same victory margin that Joe Biden got, 0.2 points more than Michael Bloomberg’s margin, 2.4 more than Pete Buttigieg and 3.2 more than Elizabeth Warren. Sanders did well in the survey, the political scientists found, because Sanders strikingly increased the number of young people who said they would turn out to vote for him, among both Democrats and independents.
However, when they adjusted the demographics of respondents to match the turnout in 2016—that is, when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee—and assumed that Democrats who said they won’t vote if Sanders isn’t the nominee will actually end up voting for whoever the Democratic nominee is, then Sanders’ victory margin went down to 0.5 percentage points—compared to 4.4 points for Bloomberg, 2.5 for Buttigieg, 1.1 for Biden and -1.6—a loss—for Warren.
Note that even when you assume that Sanders supporters won’t vote as much as they say they will, and will vote when they say they won’t, Sanders still wins—contrary to Mother Jones‘ headline. He just doesn’t win by as much as some other candidates. (Note: Polling is not voting—no one actually knows who will win an election until it happens. But polling remains the best means we have of predicting results.)
But for Drum, the point of the paper is that Sanders’ electoral advantage involves young people voting more than usual, and that’s not going to happen: “I long ago became cynical about promises of getting young people to vote in larger numbers than usual,” he writes. As the post’s graph notes: “To believe Sanders is as electable as the moderate candidates, his nomination must increase youth turnout by 30% over 2016.” Asserts the blogger: “Every four years, for as long as I can remember, I’ve heard promises that this is the year we’ll finally get young people to turn out for us. But they never do.”
Except, of course, when they do. The graph that accompanies the post shows that youth turnout increased from 34.5% in 2000 to 45% in 2004—which works out to a jump of, huh, 30%. And according to the US Census Bureau (4/23/19), writing about midterm turnout: “Among 18- to 29-year-olds, voter turnout went from 20% in 2014 to 36% in 2018, the largest percentage point increase for any age group—a 79% jump.” So maybe it is possible for young people to change their voting patterns, sometimes?
But really, the biggest problem with Drum’s column is the assumption that in late February 2020, there’s still time to trade in for a more electable model, like clicking from a navy to a burgundy sweater while shopping online. The reality is that stopping Sanders at this point means dismantling a well-organized, enthusiastic mass movement—probably by March 3, at which point 38% of the delegates will have been awarded. It’s hard to see how this happens without a savage ad attack, backed by Bloomberg’s billions, hoping to drive up the negatives of the Democrats’ most popular candidate.
To hope that when the dust clears, they’ll be able to put the pieces of the Democratic coalition back together behind a “moderate” candidate without seriously depressing voter turnout—to me, that seems like far more of a fantasy than to believe that young people will turn out in greater numbers for Bernie Sanders than they did for Hillary Clinton.
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Scrappy Earthling
Well, if one really wishes to take on hypotheticals, a wiser move could be for Sander to back Bloomberg and not the other way around.
Put yourself in the shoes of people who voted for Trump; Trump has made a mockery of their trust, devotion, enthusiasm for relief & revolution while abandoning their disdain for the “swamp”!
In the next election, these individuals have nothing to lose, other than: Trump!
Bloomberg is a far closer replica of Trump from the perspective of these individuals than Sanders, hence, if Sanders would jump out in favor of Bloomberg tonight, there is a higher probability of a more sound transition of power from Trump to Bloomberg, than if Sander would win the election; Even if by a landslide.
You have to understand, the fact that nobody except Romney voted for Trump’s impeachment, demonstrates that even the Republican senators know that for their electorates the idea of losing Trump is unbearable. Psycho-emotionally unbearable.
I understand a pundit such as yours pays little attention to the masses that build up his opposite side of political agenda, especially, you’ll fail to imagine them as psycho-emotional being, methinks, however they are.
I recommend Maria Konnikova’s Confidence Game, as her book is riddled with examples of victims of conmen who even after intellectually have been made clear for them that they were victims of a con, they still continued supporting the conman in his or her pursuit.
Bernie Sanders is just too blind to the reality that most people aren’t as capable as conmen in changing their ballot from day to night based on the realization that what they had initially chosen wasn’t in their interest. If I’m not remembering wrong from the memory, Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” has a whole chapter devoted to making it visible that people tend to stick with an investment that has no hope of ever yielding any returns, only because they have already invested too much in it!
Unless Bernie Sanders can have some magic trick up his sleeve to change this tendency of human psychology overnight in Trump’s supporter, he is going to lose; Miserably so!
Feel free to do everything you can in order to actualize a coalition between Sandes and Bloomberg, one in which they understand why they are supporting Bloomberg as the front-runner for Democrats.
I’m not currently residing in the U.S. and I’m still shooting in the darkness because I know better than you regarding human psychology – by the Lord’s leave.
Don
What the f*ck did you just write? It makes no sense.
Enai
Or, better still, have Bloomberg drop out and support Sanders.. since no one likes Bloomberg, and people like Sanders, but Bloomberg DOES have alot of money, this would clearly be the ideal partnership- its hard to see the advantages of Sanders supporting Bloomberg, given that Bloomberg is a weak candidate who polls worse vs. Trump than any other of the Dem candidates, whereas Sanders is a popular candidate who polls extremely well vs. Trump.
Jexpat
If I recall correctly, Kevin Drum wrote a lot about Clinton, Sanders and Trump’s electability in 2015-16 -nearly all of wrong.
Clarence
The thing I find most disconcerting, but also not surprising, is that putative Democrats, starting with Lloyd Blankfein, are beginning to float the idea of their voting for Trump before voting for Sanders. They of course are revealing themselves, and their real political views, which could not more crudely correspond to their class interest, while at the same time berating Sanders and his supporters for being obsessed with class war in a doctrinaire mode. It’s brazen hypocrisy, but nothing’s shocking anymore. At any rate, these types must be ruthlessly exposed for the selfish, unprincipled, reckless idiots they are.
Harald K
Please put years on that graph! I’ve been looking everywhere for the answer to a simple question: what’s the relationship between youth turnout and dem victories? You come closest to answering it, but you’re pointlessly cutting off the most important data in that graph!