Maybe he wins. Maybe he doesn't. But America cannot ignore the political realignment that is a Democratic Socialist in a close race for President of the United States.
What Bernie Sanders has done in just a matter of months is quite remarkable. In the same way that Donald Trump has brought racist, xenophobic, sexist, and generally uncivilized white people into the spotlight this election season, Bernie Sanders has highlighted just how many Americans are ready for radical progressive change on scale with the likes of FDR. It's what many of us thought we would get with Barack Obama and were sorely disappointed. Had we known he would run to the middle as soon as the political calculations of doing so seemed advantageous he most likely would not be where he is today. That being said, he has gotten a lot accomplished in the face of nearly unprecedented obstructionism from a republican party so divided that the only thing they want to see the first black President fail.
I only bring up Obama because he has laid the ground work for Bernie Sanders to get the support he has gotten. He brought the youth vote and the minority vote into the mix in a big way, and while he couldn't fulfill their wildest dreams of a progressive utopia, they're paying attention now and they're ready to vote for someone who will push the envelope even further.
Don't believe this shift to the left is happening? That's fair--it's hard to see through the thick, putrid smog that is Donald Trump ranting and bullying and carrying on like a five year old with ten billion dollars in the bank--but let's look at some numbers.
Favorability ratings among the general electorate--not just republican primary voters--show that Donald Trump is unfavorable with 58% of potential voters and favorable to only 33%, giving him a net favorability rating of -25%, the worst of any candidate in the race on either side. Does that mean he won't win the nomination? Not at all, but it does mean he is very likely to lose in November. On the other side, Bernie Sanders is the only candidate in the race with a positive favorability rating of +3. Does that mean he'll win the nomination? Nope; but it does mean that if he does, he'll have a good chance of becoming President. In fact, in Real Clear Politics' average of all polls, Sanders beats Trump in a hypothetical match-up by 6 percentage points. Clinton, meanwhile, only wins by 2.8 over Trump, if at all. Say the candidate is somehow Cruz or Rubio instead: Sanders beats Cruz by 4.7% and is tied with Rubio while Clinton is tied with Cruz and loses to Rubio by 4.7%.
The point here isn't that Bernie Sanders is going to be President, it's that he could be President. By the numbers, he's the better candidate. He's better liked and has more voters lined up in his column in head-to-head match-ups against republican challengers. Unfortunately, he's still 5 points behind Clinton nationally. Worse, Nate Silver, the statistics and probability wizard who has in the past two elections predicted with absurd accuracy, not just who will win which states, but who will win which counties within those states, says Clinton has a 62% chance of winning the nomination to Sanders' 38% chance. He also says Trump has a 97% of winning the GOP nomination, which even if he's way off the mark, pretty much guarantees we're going to see a lot more of a very unfavorable person this year.
For Sanders' supporters, myself included, these are very frustrating numbers. Our candidate is better liked and more likely to win and yet it seems very unlikely that he will be the nominee. But, regardless, his message and his policies are the future. A Pew Research Center poll found that while only 31% of all Americans react favorably to the idea of Socialism, most Americans favor Socialist policies and Socialist values, especially young people. 49% of voters age 18-29 have a positive view of Socialism and only 47% view Capitalism as a positive concept. The link above give a much more exhaustive and cited list of the specific Socialist programs Bernie is proposing that the majority of Democrats and Republicans support (as long as the programs aren't called, "Socialist"). A quick preview though: 64% of Americans support reducing greenhouse gases emissions, 58% of Americans believe the big banks are too powerful and need to be broken up, 63% believe the minimum wage needs to be raised to $15 in the next few years, 53% support new legislation to make it easier for workers to unionize, 68% of households say wealthy families pay far too little in taxes, 85% of business owners favor closing all overseas tax loopholes in their entirety, 68% of the public agrees that the government should close all tax loopholes for large corporations that ship jobs offshore, more than half of all Americans say corporations and private parties should be banned from donating to political campaigns and campaigning should become government funded, over 50% also agree we should move to single-payer healthcare, and finally, most voters support expanding Medicare and Social Security as well as Medicaid (Again, click here for citations of the polls backing these numbers).
As you can see, Bernie may not win, but the majority of Americans are already Democratic Socialists. We are worlds away from the policies of the Republican Party, if such a party can even be said to exist anymore given its multiple dueling factions, and even further from their intolerance of people unlike themselves. 2015 was the first year minorities outnumbered whites enrolling in kindergarten. yet conservatives seem to be latching ever tighter to their hate toward these people. We've moved left, we'll continue to move left, and mark my words, by the time Gen Xers reach retirement, the Republican Party, if it doesn't drop this title altogether, will look like today's Democratic Party and the Democratic Party will be a party of Democratic Socialist fully out of the closet.
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