Why Bernie Sanders Is Not Ronald Reagan
This should seem obvious.
Scott Wong at NBC News has raised the question, “Who will own the Bernie Sanders lane in 2028?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was considered an obvious contender, but progressives are reportedly open to other options. (After all, Ocasio-Cortez has demonstrated a measured pragmatism that’s frustrating to many on the left.)
Of course, my question is why anyone would want to “own” the Bernie Sanders lane in the first place. Sanders himself ran in this lane in 2016 and 2020 and lost both times. He did significantly worse in his second outing — unlike John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton, who all won the nomination in their comeback campaigns. A better question is which Democrat will own the Clinton or Barack Obama lane. (Their winning coalitions were slightly different.)
Sanders supporters were greatly offended when I pointed out the undeniable fact that he was never president or even the Democratic nominee. David Sirota, a senior adviser for Sanders’s 2020 campaign, which failed by the way, responded to my post on social media, “Reagan ran in the GOP’s Goldwater Lane after Goldwater’s loss - Reagan lost once in that lane (’76) & then won. Had he heeded your claim about lanes not being winning if someone lost in them, there wouldn’t have been a Reagan Revolution. Your tweet ignores how history often works.” (Watch below.)
Sirota is not the only progressive who has compared Sanders to Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964. Lyndon B. Johnson defeated him in a landslide — 486 to 52 electoral votes with a whopping 16 million vote margin in the popular vote. This happened just months after LBJ signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which Goldwater opposed for what he insists were non-racist reasons.
Just two years after leaving the Democratic Party, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in support of Goldwater that’s commonly known as “A Time For Choosing”:
“You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right,” Reagan said. “There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”
“The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people,” he continued. “And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.”
Reagan successfully ran for California governor in 1966. Instead of running for a third term in 1974, he challenged incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford in 1976. Sirota contends that Reagan primaried Ford from the far-right Goldwater conservative lane, and while that’s true, it’s important to point out how close Reagan came to actually unseating a sitting president from his own party. (Watch below to see Reagan set the stage for his campaign in an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.)
The conservative revolt that led to Reagan’s rise was significant: Reagan won 24 primary states to Ford’s 27. The president’s popular vote margin was less than a million votes. Reagan denied Ford a majority of delegates before the Republican National Convention.
Conversely, in 2016, Sanders benefitted from a party revolt that was less strictly ideological than more fiercely anti-Clinton. Christopher Achen of Princeton University and Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University examined primary exit polling data in a New York Times op ed and determined that Sanders supporters “were less likely than Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to favor concrete policies that Mr. Sanders has offered as remedies for [income inequality,] including a higher minimum wage, increasing government spending on health care and an expansion of government services financed by higher taxes. It is quite a stretch to view these people as the vanguard of a new, social-democratic-trending Democratic Party.”
Politics is extremely personal in this case, which is why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or frankly any woman) probably wouldn’t resonate with anti-establishment, anti-HRC 2016 primary voters the way Sanders did. However, this doesn’t mean that some white guy in a hoodie who rails against billionaires might glide down the Sanders lane to electoral victory.
Sirota even concedes that Reagan won his second presidential campaign, unlike Sanders, whose support cratered in 2020. In 2016, Sanders won 23 primary contests to Clinton’s 34. He managed 43 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 55 percent. This was nothing like 1976, which was actually close. Sanders won just nine primary contests in 2020 and tapped out at 26 percent of the vote to Joe Biden’s 51 percent.
Sanders supporters will protest most bitterly that moderate Democrats Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar both dropped out before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, reportedly under Obama’s instruction. (He had better luck with them than he did with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) However, that’s how campaigns work. If you want to defeat the “establishment,” you must accept that the “establishment” will strike back. Moderate Democrats won’t behave like the goons in an action movie, who obligingly attack the hero one at a time rather than all at once.
Where Sanders’s promised revolution ended with a whimper in 2020, the actual Reagan Revolution dominated the GOP primary in 1980. Reagan won 42 primary contests to George H.W. Bush’s nine. Reagan won almost 60 percent of the vote to Bush’s 23 percent. His overall margin of victory was almost 5 million votes. That’s how Reagan put a fork into the moderate wing of the Republican Party.
Reagan didn’t just run as a Goldwater conservative, either. He actively courted the Religious Right, a group the late John McCain said Goldwater disliked “because he felt they were intolerant, because Barry was not only conservative, but he was also to a degree libertarian.”
So, a true Ronald Reagan figure from the left would discover how to expand the Bernie Sanders lane, which currently doesn’t exit to the White House. This will prove more complicated than simply repeating the same message, only even louder this time.
Reagan and the conservative takeover of the GOP had a lot to do with Reagan’s personal gifts as a politician (Goldwater was by contrast a very obtuse politician—1964 was a bigger rout than it needed to be because he felt no need to sell his positions to anyone not already committed to them—Reagan could make all his right wing beliefs seem “common sense”.). The conservative movement also spent decades working to win converts, and finally benefited from an exodus of right wing Democrats (including Dixiecrats) to the GOP.
Sanders by contrast seems more like Goldwater in that he speaks well for those who are already very liberal but I don’t see him selling moderates on liberal ideas. Maybe the Far Left would benefit from some demographic movement the way the Far Right did (white noncollege voters shifting left?), maybe a Reagan of the Left (talented politician who can bring more converts to the fold) will emerge, but for now the “Bernie wing” seems like a distinct minority in the Democratic coalition.
Well, maybe. Reagan wasn’t just “better” at politics. As you noted, he inherited a conservative movement with decades of institutional buildup behind it: donors, media, think tanks, activist networks, and a country already turning against the liberal consensus by 1980. But Bernie Sanders had *almost none of that*. He was a one-man band especially in 2016, trying to drag an institutionally moderate (and IMO stagnant) party to the left while labor was weak, progressive infrastructure was fragmented, and Democratic elites were actively hostile to his agenda.
(Also: Reagan himself was constantly called unelectable, extreme, and fringe before he won.)
In my opinion, the more accurate comparison is that Reagan was the *culmination* of a movement, and Sanders was the start. Time will tell if that's true or not, though.