“Please do not think these are somehow radical, or unpopular, or extreme or fringe ideas,” Bernie Sanders tells me. It’s early May, and the once-and-perhaps-future presidential contender is ticking off progressive policy proposals—his policy proposals—that, in the two years since his loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, have rapidly remade the Democratic Party: universal health care, tuition-free public college, a $15-an-hour minimum wage. When he’s told that some believe his ideas may be better suited to Finland than Nebraska, Sanders bristles. “Look at the polling,” he snaps in his thick Brooklyn accent, which decades in Vermont have not diminished. “You don’t have to believe what I tell you.”
By many measures, he’s right. In the two years since his insurgent campaign for the White House succumbed to the Clinton juggernaut, Sanders has gone from cult hero to mainstream dynamo. Larry David can mock him on Saturday Night Live as a cranky, quixotic septuagenarian, but when Sanders endorses an idea, many of his peers in the Senate listen without laughing. The American public has become increasingly receptive to his brand of democratic socialism; once-skeptical centrists have seen the polls and have followed accordingly.
This has resulted in a high-stakes ideological war to out-Bernie Bernie. In March, for example, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York endorsed a proposal that would ensure the government guarantees a job to every American. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey followed with modest legislation, before Sanders bested both lawmakers with a national plan (pay rate: $15 an hour, of course).
This is all new for Gillibrand and Booker, Northeasterners closely affiliated with the centrist donor class that funds the Democratic establishment. For the Sandernistas, however, the focus hasn’t changed since Bernie announced his candidacy for president in 2015. Their liberalism is not transactional, pegged to the latest focus-group findings. It is ferocious and uncompromising: Scandinavian to supporters, Soviet to detractors. Sanders and his backers believe the old divides between Republicans and Democrats are being replaced by the far more real rift between those who can’t comprehend how anyone could live on as little as $15 an hour and those who spend their working lives making half that much.
Outside Washington, however, this vision is getting a mixed reception. On May 8, in a series of Democratic primaries, establishment figures romped to victory over liberal insurgents. In Indiana, a health care executive who had donated to Republicans won the Democratic nomination for a House seat, besting challengers who backed universal health care. And in Ohio’s race for governor, Richard Cordray, the staid former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, defeated former Representative Dennis Kucinich, the liberal firebrand endorsed by the Sanders-aligned Our Revolution, the political group started by his campaign’s alumni.
Within a week, the Berniecrats had rebounded. On May 15, the more liberal candidates beat mainstream hopefuls in Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Idaho. Most striking was the victory of Kara Eastman, a progressive community organizer from Omaha who campaigned for a House seat on a platform of single-payer health care, gun control and marijuana decriminalization. The national Democratic apparatus made no secret of its preference for former Representative Brad Ashford, a centrist who promised compromise. Republicans cheered the result, convinced that Eastman will be the weaker opponent in the conservative-leaning district.
This electoral whiplash has some party leaders afraid the midterms will be more of a referendum on Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump, sapping party resources and potentially costing Democrats their best chance to retake the House in years.
Sanders, however, sees a necessary reckoning. On the day that we spoke, he was headed to Pennsylvania, where he would campaign for John Fetterman, the hulking, tattooed Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor who would go on to oust incumbent Mike Stack. “My role,” Sanders says, “is to do everything I can to support progressive candidates.”
According to The Washington Post’s calculations, Sanders is batting just below .500 in his endorsements, with 10 of the 21 candidates he has supported having emerged victorious. This is a better record than Our Revolution’s: Only one-third of its 134 candidates, 46 in all, have won. But losing doesn’t bother Sanders as much as it does the ordinary politician. He wants to win, no doubt, but the victories he is looking for are victories of permanence, the kind that are enshrined in history books, not tweets. In fact, Sanders would likely find this entire discussion frivolous. He wants economic justice, and you want to show him some trifling poll?
Winning by losing is a time-honored political strategy—but it does involve a lot of losing. Sanders, the principled warrior tilting at windmills, can make his point by never winning. In fact, losing only bolsters his assertion that politics is a puppet theater, and he is a man who has cut all his strings. And, yes, it is easy to exaggerate the meaning of endorsements for the one making them (Barack Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton, after all, and campaigned for her, but her loss didn’t tarnish his reputation). But if Bernie wants to play kingmaker—to have the legacy of Bill Clinton, not George McGovern—shouldn’t he be minting a few more regents? And if his ideas represent the future of the Democratic Party, as his supporters claim they do, why have so many candidates espousing those ideas failed to win?
Cracking the Clinton Machine
Jeff Weaver has the near-certain distinction of being the only person in American history to have run both a presidential campaign and a comic book store. The shop is called Victory Comics, and Weaver has been its owner and operator since 2009, when he left Capitol Hill, where he’d been Sanders’s chief of staff, to spend his days with Wonder Woman and Spider-Man instead of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
In 2015, Sanders asked Weaver to run his presidential campaign. Months later, the Green Mountain State socialist was offering an unexpectedly credible challenge to the relentless Clinton machine and all its supposed affiliates: the coastal donors, the permanent political class, the Beltway pundits. Sanders didn’t come all that close, with Clinton earning 3.7 million more votes (as her surrogates will eagerly remind you). Still, there were the adoring crowds, drawn to revolutionary calls to undo inequality everywhere, from pocketbooks to prisons. After Trump’s election, “Bernie would have won” became a wistful meme, a sign of things that should have been.
You can’t blame Weaver for thinking Sanders was victorious—or for believing that Sanders will win in the 2018 midterms and perhaps in 2020, when he is expected to run for president again. Weaver is not shy on this point. The title of his new book is How Bernie Won. Its last sentence: “Run, Bernie, run.”
Weaver’s central argument is that Sanders was the first candidate to clearly and honestly describe the destructive economics that have been at work for at least the last half-century, and which have steadily widened the income gap between rich and poor. He was also the first to offer solutions, primarily by returning the federal government to the kind of role it played during the height of the New Deal—that is, more regulation of corporations but also more support for the indigent. Nearly four decades after Ronald Reagan declared that “government is the problem,” government would become the solution.
Sanders’s disciplined insistence on these points has made people who normally do not care about politics fervent supporters of the 76-year-old Vermonter. They feel he speaks their truths instead of resorting to tested platitudes. Donald Trump’s supporters feel much the same way about their guy. (And there is some degree of crossover appeal; one study found that more than one in 10 Sanders voters in 2016 ultimately cast ballots for Trump in the general election.) “That is how we’re going to win in the long term,” Weaver says of the approach to disenchanted voters. He argues that most independents are not centrists unsure of the choice between Republicans and Democrats but are more broadly dismayed by both parties’ inability to offer solutions to real-life problems. “The American people, writ large, want to embrace a progressive economic agenda,” Weaver says. That agenda has expanded, most recently, to guarantee a job to every single American, along with health care coverage and a college education.
Progressive can be a dirty word in many parts of the country, nearly as bad as liberal. But when I asked Representative Cheri Bustos, an Illinois Democrat whose district Trump narrowly carried in 2016, whether Sanders’s message flops in blue-collar Midwestern territory like her own, she scoffed at the suggestion. “Nobody’s sitting around their kitchen table with their teenagers saying, ‘Well, these are socialist issues,’” Bustos tells me, citing college affordability and the cost of health care.
There is some truth to that: Recent polling finds that 51 percent of Americans support a single-payer system, while 63 percent support making state college tuition-free. As for Sanders, he has not receded into senatorial senescence since returning to Washington. More than two years since his defeat in the Democratic primary, he’s one of the most popular politicians in America; one poll placed his approval rating at 57 percent, 17 points higher than Trump’s.
But that approval has not always translated into political currency. Last year, Sanders endorsed House candidates in Montana and Kansas. These were difficult races; both men lost. Later, in a Virginia gubernatorial primary that was seen as a major test of Democratic prospects in the age of Trump, he endorsed liberal Tom Perriello, who lost to centrist Ralph Northam. So did all three Sanders-endorsed candidates for the New Jersey Legislature. In both Missouri and Pennsylvania, he tried to boost state-level legislators. There, too, he failed to make the difference. Wins in some May primaries are encouraging for the Sandernistas, but just as the Democrats need a wave to gain control of the House, liberals need a wave of their own to assert dominance over a party that remains skeptical about their staying power.
So why haven’t more Sanders-endorsed candidates won? People in Bernie’s camp think the question is fundamentally unfair, evincing the same establishment skepticism that didn’t give him a chance in 2015. But they are clearly prepared for the question. When I asked a senior Sanders aide about the senator’s mixed record, he promptly produced two spreadsheets. One chronicled the 43 state visits Sanders has taken in 2017 and 2018. The other listed the candidates Sanders has endorsed in 2018. Many of them, like Emily Sirota, running for the Colorado Legislature from the Denver suburbs, are likely to benefit from the attention. The point the Sanders aide sought to make was clear: Bernie is hustling and taking chances to build the progressive ranks, even if some of his picks are long shots.
As for Our Revolution, it has “a pretty damn good win record,” says Jane Kleeb, a Nebraskan who sits on the organization’s board and is unfazed by the 66 percent of candidates who have lost. “Our country is moving in a more progressive direction,” she says.