The EconomistFebruary 29th 2020 United States 292 would put up enough cash to counteract
this onslaught of digital and television ad-
vertisement is an open question. The fact
that Mr Sanders once seemed enamoured
enough of the Soviet Union to honeymoon
there, that he plans to ban fracking (vital to
the economy of Pennsylvania, a swing
state), or that he would like to eliminate
private health insurance and raise taxes to
pay for undocumented immigrants to get
free coverage, all seem untapped veins for
negative advertisements. Whereas Mr
Trump’s liabilities are well-covered and
relatively well-known, Mr Sanders’s may
not yet be known by less attentive voters—
meaning that his slim lead in national polls
could slip away. Drawing the contours of
the coming general-election contest is a
necessarily speculative exercise, but for
Democrats it does not inspire confidence.
The choice could not look starker.
Should Mr Sanders win the nomination,
November’s election will pit a right-wing
nativist with authoritarian tendencies who
wants to Keep America Great against a
democratic socialist who wants to turn it
into the Sweden of the 1970s. The horse-
shoe theory of politics holds that the ex-
treme left and extreme right sometimes re-
semble one another more than might be
thought. Mr Sanders does not share Mr
Trump’s contempt for the rule of law,
which is important. But they do share a
populist dislike of elites. As Mr Trump was,
Mr Sanders is deeply distrusted by party
stalwarts. The contempt between that
camp and Mr Sanders’s is mutual. A day be-
fore his Nevada triumph, he tweeted: “I’ve
got news for the Republican establish-
ment. I’ve got news for the Democratic es-
tablishment. They can’t stop us.”
A further worry among moderate
Democrats is that a Sanders-led ticket
could doom their plan to seize control of
Congress—it already looks unlikely be-
cause of the combination of Senate seats
that are up for election this year. In 2018
Democrats engineered a takeover of the
House by running moderate candidates fo-
cused on kitchen-table issues such as
health care—not promising Medicare for
All, but preserving and expanding the aca.
That resulted in a 36-seat majority, includ-
ing victories in 31 districts that Mr Trump
won in 2016. One first-term Democrat be-
lieves that “the easiest way to hand most of
[those seats] back is to put Bernie Sanders
at the top of the ticket.” Matt Bennett of
Third Way, a centrist Democratic think-
tank, warns that Medicare for All and Mr
Sanders’s intent to provide free health care
to undocumented immigrants “take an ad-
vantage that Democrats have on health care
and turn it into a liability.”
Socialism may play well in cities and on
college campuses, but not in the suburbs,
which are vital to the current House major-
ity. Some have already started to speak out.
Joe Cunningham, who in 2018 flipped a
South Carolina congressional seat last won
by a Democrat in 1978, said earlier this
month that “South Carolinians don’t want
socialism,” and said he would not support
“Bernie’s proposals to raise taxes on almost
everyone”. In the wake of favourable com-
ments he made about Fidel Castro on Feb-
ruary 23rd, virtually every elected Demo-
crat in Florida, a perennially important
state in presidential elections, distanced
themselves from him. Mr Sanders has a
history of fringe political views (though so
does Mr Trump). The fact that he even now
seems incapable of muting his admiration
for Cuban social policies worries Demo-
crats. It risks turning what should be a ref-
erendum on Mr Trump, which should be a
winning argument, into one on socialism,
which could well be a losing one.SOS
The odds of Democrats winning the Senate,
which are already long, could look even
worse with a radical at the top of the ticket.
Down-ballot Democrats could try to dis-
tance themselves, but Republicans will not
let them. Martha McSally, a vulnerable in-
cumbent Republican senator from Arizona
trailing her Democratic challenger, Mark
Kelly, in the polls, recently released an ad
titled “Bernie Bro”, linking Mr Kelly to Mr
Sanders’s unpopular policy to give free
health care to undocumented immigrants.
Doug Jones, the Democratic senator from
Alabama, might find his chances of victory
narrowed to zero. Against a candidate as
unpopular as Mr Trump, Mr Sanders might
still achieve victory—only to find that there
are insufficient Democrats left on Capitol
Hill to carry out his revolutionary march-
ing orders.
Sandernistas often vacillate between
the idea that their agenda is the one, true
route to restoring the American dream and
the idea that it is merely a maximalist
opening bid in the bruising negotiationswith Congress. Rather than Medicare for
All, for example, they might end up with a
government agency that could provide
public health insurance, if they wanted it,
to middle-class people who did not qualify
for Medicare. Mr Obama got so little done,
the story goes, because he compromised
with himself, rather than playing hardball.
“The worst-case scenario?” asked Ms Oca-
sio-Cortez, not usually known for her prag-
matism, in an interview with the Huffing-
ton Post. “We compromise deeply [on
Medicare for All] and we end up getting a
public option [which means allowing peo-
ple to buy government-run health insur-
ance]. Is that a nightmare?” Asked about it,
Mr Sanders did not yield, saying that Medi-
care for All was “already a compromise”.
“There will be absolutely no difference
between what Bernie has been fighting for
in the primaries, in the Senate and in the
House and what he will be fighting for as
the Democratic nominee, and more impor-
tantly in the White House,” wrote Warren
Gunnels, a longtime adviser on economic
policy to the senator. Mr Sanders’s idea for
how he would achieve victory, given the
hard political maths facing the Democrats,
is not terribly convincing. He says that he
would use the bully pulpit of the presiden-
cy to shame Republican senators into vot-
ing for the good of their constituents. That
is naivety befitting a novice, not a 30-year
legislator. Mitch McConnell, the Republi-
can majority leader in the Senate, has
proved himself happy to halt all lawmak-
ing for years, if necessary. The Sanders rev-
olution would not shake his resolve.
The likeliest outcome for a Sanders
presidency would therefore be a slew of
ambitious legislative plans all gleefully
thwarted by Mr McConnell. Should his po-
litical revolution take him inside the gates
of the White House, it is likely to stop there.
Perhaps after four years of this, Mr Sanders
would kvetch to his successor that it, like
Congress, is a lousy place to work. 7Ready for a political revolution