Bernie Sanders Has a Surrogate Problem

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)

If you've been on Twitter in the past 24 hours, and you're a Democrat, you have seen the video.  Two days before the Iowa caucuses, with tensions flaring high (every poll shows a close race between Joe Biden & Bernie Sanders, with the campaigns of Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, & Amy Klobuchar flirting between "surprise winner" and "irrelevant"), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was at a rally event for Sen. Sanders where the subject of Hillary Clinton came up.  Several members of the audience booed, with the moderator quickly moving to quell the reaction, but Tlaib encouraged it, stating "No, no, I'm gonna boo-Boo!-you all know I can't be quiet.  We're going to boo.  That's all right, that's all right-the haters are gonna shut up on Monday when we win."  She said this while the two other women on her panel, Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) laughed, seemingly in agreement with the sentiment.

This...is bad.  Really, really bad.  Tlaib has since issued an apology, though one that feels less genuine and more politically expedient (it includes the lines "I allowed my disappointment with Secretary Clinton's latest comments about Senator Sanders and his supporters get the best of me," seemingly blaming Clinton for her own behavior toward Clinton's supporters), but in my opinion this opens up a really ugly reality in the Democratic Party that "we're not supposed to talk about"-that most Democrats still have wounds that have not healed from the 2016 election.  Well, since Rashida Tlaib brought it front-and-center, I'm going to take the chance to talk about it.

It is impossible to tell why Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016.  Everything from Russian interference to James Comey can be blamed.  There is certainly blame to go around for the loss in Clinton's campaign.  Polls showed her race in Michigan tightening (and from the sounds of it similar polls were coming out of Wisconsin), but she made only one trip to the former and none to the latter in the days before the election; this feels like foolish hubris in hindsight, assuming that these states were in the bag when they clearly weren't.  But as a Democrat, it's hard not to take into account Sen. Sanders' behavior toward Clinton as one of the culprits as to why we currently have Donald Trump as our president.

Sanders' supporters did defect to Trump, though not in historically atypical levels.  A survey by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study pegged the number at about 12% of Sanders' primary voters going for Trump; this isn't an unusually high number, but it was consequential (in all likelihood Clinton would have won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had these defectors not voted or voted for her, enough to win the White House).  More importantly, it was clear as early as March of 2016 that Sanders had lost the nomination, and that his continued presence was doing nothing but sewing division amongst the Democratic voters, but he stayed in the race, not endorsing Clinton until July, a full month after the last primaries in the District of Columbia, by which time she had mathematically achieved the nomination (and didn't need the "superdelegates" to do so).  Sanders' lack of party unity was noted, and it was felt at the convention.  Not only was Clinton booed by his supporters during the convention, but so to were seemingly universally-beloved figures like John Lewis & Michelle Obama.  It was bad enough that at one point, comedian Sarah Silverman pronounced "to the Bernie or Bust people-you're being ridiculous."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

Sanders, as a result, is a polarizing figure in the Democratic Party.  There are people who adore him, clearly, but there are people who, rationally or not, loathe him for hurting Clinton in 2016.   This hasn't been quelled in 2020, with Sanders doing little to stop surrogates like Tlaib from attacking his chief political opponents in seemingly underhanded ways, particularly mass posting about candidates like Warren or Biden on Facebook, or leading the #NeverWarren campaign on social media.  One of the main reasons I wish both Sanders and Clinton had skipped this race is that I don't think there's an easy solve here.  I think that a significant number of Sanders people will always hate Clinton for depriving them of a chance to stop Trump in 2016, and I think that a significant number of Clinton people will always loathe the Sanders campaign for inviting discord into a party that was clearly headed toward a tough general election against the worst foe they'd ever faced.  Initially this seemed like it might even happen-no one assumed Sanders would be the frontrunner in 2020, and for months it looked more like Joe Biden (taking the role of Hillary Clinton) and Elizabeth Warren (taking the role of Bernie Sanders) would run a similar, less divisive campaign, and the victor would more readily endorse, giving the Democrats a strong chance against Donald Trump in what is going to be a tough election.

But that's not happening.  Warren's chances have slid dramatically, and at best for those who want to avoid 2016, Biden is going to be fighting Sanders in a similar style to Clinton, rather than having two new names in the contest.  It's also very possible (it is, as I've stated before, my guess) that Sanders will be the nominee in 2020.  If that's the case, he and Tlaib and all of the other Sanders' supporters need to realize something-it's not as easy as saying "shut up and support the nominee."  That clearly didn't work in 2016, and it won't work in 2020.  Sanders will not only need his supporters to come out full-force, he'll need the people who voted for Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and hell, even Mike Bloomberg, to get out and vote for him in the general.  And yes, he's going to need the most ardent supporters of Hillary Clinton from 2016 to endorse his campaign.

That's not going to happen with comments like this.  It's not going to happen with your surrogates laughing and mocking the volunteers and voters you're going to need to win.  Politics is personal, and many people spent years trying to get Hillary Clinton elected as president-those people are going to need to be on your side in November if you want to win more than a nomination.  It might not be fair to have Clinton denouncing Sanders, but here's the thing-politics ain't fair.  The difference between Sanders in 2016 & Sanders in 2020 is that Sanders had no shot of being the nominee in 2016 and has a decent shot of it in 2020.  Hillary Clinton has nothing to lose in 2020-Bernie sanders does, and it's time he & his campaign start acting like it.  Joe Biden & Elizabeth Warren are doing that-they're running a campaign where (if they win) they'll be able to use their coalitions to actually take the White House.  Bernie Sanders is not, and as illustrated by Rashida Tlaib and multiple other surrogates throughout this primary, his campaign has not graduated to a place where it understands that there's a difference between making a point and winning.  If Bernie Sanders intends to become the next president, he needs to figure out a way to mend this riff between he and the other factions of the Democratic Party, and to control his surrogates, because there's nothing the Democratic Party hates more than a general election candidate who can't win.  I believe I know a woman he can call who can vouch for such a reality.