Why Bernie Lost — Autopsy Compilation
Introspection and nuance are healthy
This is a list of informative articles, interviews, videos on why Bernie Sanders lost the 2020 Democratic Primary. Our campaign was good, but it wasn’t enough. If we want to win the future, we need to learn from our mistakes and change accordingly.
HuffPost — Bernie Sanders Soared Back To Life. But He Couldn’t Close The Deal
by Daniel Marans
A well-researched, must-read article on the campaign’s key pitfalls: lack of endorsements, friction with Elizabeth Warren, misreading the electorate, and reluctance to attack Joe Biden. “His greatest strength is his greatest weakness, which is that his independence and stubbornness mean he is not agile enough to respond to shifting moods.”
FiveThirtyEight — Did Sanders Blow It For The Democratic Left? Or Was The Nomination Always Out Of Reach?
by Perry Bacon Jr.
“Did the left broadly and Sanders and Warren in particular blow the 2020 campaign? Or did Sanders, Warren and the left always have a narrow path to victory because Democrats have tended to prefer more centrist candidates, and the period between Nevada and Super Tuesday a bit of a mirage? Let’s look at both perspectives.” (I’m not a fan of FiveThirtyEight but found this article excellent.)
BuzzFeed News — The Week Bernie Sanders Realized He Was Losing
by Ruby Cramer
“Over the last 13 months, Sanders has held a firm, at times unyielding grip on his own strategy … It’s also meant that Sanders, a candidate rarely willing to budge, served as his own press secretary, digital director, pollster, advertiser, and campaign manager. The true inner circle around the senator is already exceptionally tight — limited to his wife and five or so staffers — and even smaller still is the group of aides on his 2020 payroll who are willing to tell him “no.”
The Hill Rising — Funky Academic: Why black voters rejected Bernie Sanders
VIDEO
Irami Osei-Frimpong, Ph.D. candidate at University of Georgia speaks to The Hill Rising about why black voters, especially in the South, rejected Bernie Sanders. Reasons include an understandable skepticism of government.
POLITICO — ’No one went for a knockout blow’: Inside Bernie’s campaign nosedive
by Holly Otterbein
This article has similar themes as HuffPost’s autopsy, with more information about disagreements within the organizing program and how the campaign tried to handle the media, including Bernie meeting with MSNBC’s network president.
Secular Talk — Bernie Drop Out, What Now?
VIDEO
“If you told me, Kyle, if you have to give me one correction for the Bernie campaign, just one, it would be, compare Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton and say you’re more electable. That’s it. If he would have made this argument a couple of months before Iowa to today, he would win.”
Vox — Why Bernie Sanders failed: The Sanders campaign and his supporters bet on a theory of class politics that turned out to be wrong
by Zack Beauchamp
The author makes the case that Americans do not vote based on class, but rather on identity and party and this trend can be seen across Western democracies since the 1950s.
New Republic — After Bernie: How the left can expand its appeal and change the Democratic Party
by Osita Nwanevu
“As far as criticism of the Democratic establishment goes, it might be wise to frame those critiques in terms of the party’s capacity to fight against the right and Trumpism — not because the Sanders approach of calling out the establishment meaningfully hurt him, but because the Democratic electorate’s attachment to bipartisanship as an ideal should be broken down as quickly as possible.”
POLITICO — Barack Obama wins the Democratic primary
by Ryan Lizza
“But some of his aides now concede that behind the scenes Obama played a role in nudging things in Biden’s direction at the crucial moment when the Biden team was organizing former candidates to coalesce around Biden.” THANKS OBAMA!
POLITICO — Bernie Sanders Didn’t Win the Ideas Primary, Either
by Bill Scher
The author argues a closer look at polling data at Bernie’s policies, such as Medicare For All and Free College, reveals greater opposition. “But there’s a big difference between superficial support for abstract concepts and devout support for concrete policies. Support for Sanders’ list of largely simplistic-though-popular principles splinters once respondents have to grapple with policy details, consider counter-arguments or choose from among multiple proposals.” I suspect COVID-19 will boost Medicare For All’s polling.
Not an autopsy, but I’d recommend reading this if you’re feeling down.
Commonweal Magazine — Beautiful Losers: The Left Should Resist the Comforts of Defeat
By Sam Adler-Bell
In “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” Brecht wrote:
[It] takes courage to tell the truth about oneself, about one’s own defeat. Many of the persecuted lose their capacity for seeing their own mistakes. It seems to them that the persecution itself is the greatest injustice. The persecutors are wicked simply because they persecute; the persecuted suffer because of their goodness. But this goodness has been beaten, defeated, suppressed; it was therefore a weak goodness, a bad, indefensible, unreliable goodness. For it will not do to grant that goodness must be weak as rain must be wet. It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak.
I often find myself rereading these words in moments of defeat, to ward off the comforts of melancholy. The Sanders campaign has been premised, in part, on the idea of a righteous struggle: against the callous forces of profit and their political enablers. Our cause is righteous. But we should remember that righteousness is not enough to win. And that if we fail, our righteousness will be no consolation at all. The Bernie campaign is good, but if we are losing — to Joe Biden! — then the form of its goodness is “bad, indefensible, unreliable.”
