Preview: On Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party
Quick preview of a mid-week post.
I will have a few things to say soon about Bernie Sanders and the state of the Democratic Party.
1) Can Sanders win the nomination? Yes. In the past, I have been extremely skeptical, and I need to reassess. Translation: admit error. Why? The short version: Warren's fall, combined with the growing extremism of the Democratic Party. I didn't see the first part coming in the short run, and I didn't see the second part coming back when Trump won in 2016.
2) What does the rise of Sanders-style extremism mean for the Democratic Party? It has me rethinking some things about a model of political time from Stephen Skowronek. New Deal-Great Society liberalism essentially reached its primary objectives under Barack Obama, and the "movement" aspect of the left-wing movement has cast about for direction.
3) Could Sanders defeat Trump? Highly unlikely. The key thing missing from every head-to-head poll you have ever seen, and every general discussion of Sanders you have ever seen is that nobody has ever run a hard campaign against him. Democrats have always treated him with the softest of kid gloves, so as not to offend his delicate, delicate, delicate, skittish, little followers. He has more weaknesses than Hillary Clinton ever did. Candidates are not generally all that important in presidential elections. The economy matters more. The fundamentals favored the GOP in 2016. They will favor the GOP again in 2020 because the universe has conspired to make Donald J. Trump the luckiest person in the history of humanity. And Sanders would walk into that election giving up even more.
4) If I predicted that Sanders wouldn't win the nomination, why am I confident in my general election statements of Sanders' electability, or lack thereof (3)? As I have reminded readers on a regular basis, we have no quality, social scientific models of the nomination process. (Let's all take a moment to laugh at The Party Decides.) So, we're all talking out of our hemorrhoids when it comes to forecasting nominations. General election forecasting models work. We (political scientists) screwed up by disregarding those models in 2016. Those models say that extremism hurts, strong economies help the president, and someone like Sanders is a terrible candidate.
More soon. And we'll have some empirical observations!
I will have a few things to say soon about Bernie Sanders and the state of the Democratic Party.
1) Can Sanders win the nomination? Yes. In the past, I have been extremely skeptical, and I need to reassess. Translation: admit error. Why? The short version: Warren's fall, combined with the growing extremism of the Democratic Party. I didn't see the first part coming in the short run, and I didn't see the second part coming back when Trump won in 2016.
2) What does the rise of Sanders-style extremism mean for the Democratic Party? It has me rethinking some things about a model of political time from Stephen Skowronek. New Deal-Great Society liberalism essentially reached its primary objectives under Barack Obama, and the "movement" aspect of the left-wing movement has cast about for direction.
3) Could Sanders defeat Trump? Highly unlikely. The key thing missing from every head-to-head poll you have ever seen, and every general discussion of Sanders you have ever seen is that nobody has ever run a hard campaign against him. Democrats have always treated him with the softest of kid gloves, so as not to offend his delicate, delicate, delicate, skittish, little followers. He has more weaknesses than Hillary Clinton ever did. Candidates are not generally all that important in presidential elections. The economy matters more. The fundamentals favored the GOP in 2016. They will favor the GOP again in 2020 because the universe has conspired to make Donald J. Trump the luckiest person in the history of humanity. And Sanders would walk into that election giving up even more.
4) If I predicted that Sanders wouldn't win the nomination, why am I confident in my general election statements of Sanders' electability, or lack thereof (3)? As I have reminded readers on a regular basis, we have no quality, social scientific models of the nomination process. (Let's all take a moment to laugh at The Party Decides.) So, we're all talking out of our hemorrhoids when it comes to forecasting nominations. General election forecasting models work. We (political scientists) screwed up by disregarding those models in 2016. Those models say that extremism hurts, strong economies help the president, and someone like Sanders is a terrible candidate.
More soon. And we'll have some empirical observations!
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