‘Bernie beats Trump! Bernie beats Trump!’ That’s what Bernie Sanders’s fans keep chanting, and they have the polls to prove it. Survey after survey suggests that, of all the leading candidates for the Democratic party’s nomination, Sanders is most likely to defeat Donald Trump in the election in November. Voters like Bernie. Some 46 per cent of voters say they admire him. Only 26 per cent say the same of President Trump.
Still, most political experts think Sanders will be a disaster for the Democratic party. He may be popular with the base, they say, but he is far too left-wing for the general electorate: 2020 would be a repeat of 1972, when the radical leftie George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide. Sanders as nominee would all but guarantee four more years of Trump and put both houses of Congress back under Republican control.
Senior Democrats are freaking out. At the candidates’ debate in South Carolina on Tuesday night, Michael Bloomberg even rehashed the idea that Vladimir Putin is driving Sanders’s success — a sure sign of elite despair.
What Sanders’s campaign has really shown is that all the expert theories as to why Bernie can’t win are not so clever. It’s said that he can’t appeal to racial minorities, yet in Nevada last weekend he won 27 per cent of African-American voters and 53 per cent of Hispanics. It’s said that only young voters are drawn to his socialism, yet he won every age group apart from the over-65s. He’s meant to have a ‘ceiling’ of about 30 per cent of Democratic voters, yet he won about 47 per cent of the vote, including about 22 per cent of voters who identified as ‘moderate’. By Wednesday next week, after Super Tuesday — when 14 states vote — his lead could be insurmountable.
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