Democratic Primaries

If you look back at Sanders’ share of the vote in each primary, he hasn’t actually lost ground. In Iowa and New Hampshire, he got a quarter of the vote. In Nevada, he got a third. In South Carolina, he got a fifth. On Super Tuesday, he stayed in the same range, drawing about a quarter of the vote in the states he lost and a third of the vote in the states he won. What hurt him was that Biden increased his share of the vote, while Sanders didn’t. As other candidates dropped out, their voters went to Biden, not Sanders. And one reason for this pattern is Sanders’ constant message of antagonism. He has cultivated enemies instead of friends. Now he’s paying the price. …..

Sanders’ first defeat, on Feb. 29 in South Carolina, was a warning that he needed to assuage fears about his candidacy. Instead, he celebrated those fears as proof of his success. On March 1, he proudly told a crowd in San Jose, California, that the turnout at his rallies was alarming the establishment. The next day, in St. Paul, Minnesota, he repeated that message. When Sanders was informed that fellow candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were dropping out and endorsing Biden, he said it was no surprise, since the corporate elite was out to get him. And when Maddow asked Sanders whether he was specifically running against “the Democratic Party establishment”—not just a generic “political establishment”—he replied: “Democratic establishment. Yes.”

At his rallies, Sanders has continued to call for a “political revolution.” And he has added another villain to his list of enemies: the stock market. When the market surged after Super Tuesday, Sanders, far from welcoming this news, cited it as evidence of Biden’s corruption. “We’re taking them all on,” he said of the companies whose valuations had increased. “The stock market went up this morning ’cause they thought that Biden did well.” Sanders told Maddow that “the health care industry and the drug companies did very well” because “Biden had a good day.” And he warned these companies that if he got his way, their stocks would suffer. “I got some bad news for those guys,” he said. “Don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched.” ….

Meanwhile, Sanders has escalated his talk of conspiracies. On Sunday, he claimed that “the establishment put a great deal of pressure” on Buttigieg and Klobuchar to “force” them out of the race. “What was very clear from the media narrative and what the establishment wanted,” he told George Stephanopoulos, “was to make sure that people coalesced around Biden and try to defeat me.” On Wednesday, after his defeats, Sanders again rebuked “the Democratic establishment” and insisted that “our campaign has won the ideological debate.”

What Sanders fails to understand is the connection between his defeats and his rhetoric. It wasn’t the media or the Democratic National Committee that turned Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and millions of voters against him. It was Sanders. His relentless message of conflict, along with his expanding list of putative enemies, attracted a fraction of the electorate but alienated everybody else. As the primaries narrowed to a two-man race, his base was no longer enough to win. The establishment didn’t destroy Bernie Sanders. He destroyed himself.