'A liberal party drifting helplessly along as a small radical cabal steers it toward likely catastrophe? I didn’t think it could happen here.' jonathanchait writes
Photo: Ringo Chiu/AFP via Getty Images Watching the Brexit debacle from afar, it seemed impossible to understand how the Labour Party could know full well it needed to win a national election in order to prevent an irreversible setback, yet harness itself to Jeremy Corbyn, whose toxic leadership made victory nearly impossible. The rise of Bernie Sanders, at a moment when Donald Trump is accelerating his war on the rule of law, is retroactively illuminating.
But to concede that we cannot be certain about the future does not mean we know nothing. An imperfect comparison might be to predicting the outcome of sporting events. You don’t know the outcome in advance, but it is usually possible to make probabilistic predictions. Those predictions are wrong all the time. But it would be silly to conclude that, just because upsets happen, every game should be treated as a coin flip.
The Democratic primary can be seen as a series of candidates goading each other to jump into the lion’s den. All the candidates have exposed themselves by taking at least a few unpopular positions, but none have gone quite as far as Sanders. What makes Bernie’s profile uniquely toxic is the way his liabilities all reinforce each other.
Just how damaging these positions will ultimately prove in the general election is impossible to measure. The effect is probably not zero. As a general rule, politicians for every position from dog catcher on up understand that advocating unpopular things makes winning elections harder. Not impossible, but harder. All things being equal, a candidate for dog catcher who promises to round up and cook stray pets at random has less chance of winning.
The Sanders campaign’s standard-issue response to electability concerns is to tout his ability to generate enthusiasm which, he predicts, will produce the highest voter turnout in history. But his campaign has failed to produce anything like this so far. Even given the near-optimal conditions of the campaign’s early stages, when his organizers could devote months concentrating all their resources on a handful of low-turnout contests, they have not yielded any measurable spike.
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