The Daily - ‘A Prophet’: The Zeal of Bernie Sanders Supporters

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

At a rally in New York City last weekend, Senator Bernie Sanders drew the largest crowd of his presidential campaign — at a moment when his candidacy may be at its most vulnerable. After a heart attack this month, Mr. Sanders faced a challenge in convincing voters that he had the stamina to run both a campaign and the country. His first rally since his hospital stay attracted supporters still resentful of his loss in 2016, and of a party establishment they feel favored Hillary Clinton over Mr. Sanders in the primary. The question for Democratic candidates now is how to respond to this grievance and harness the fervor of Sanders supporters to mobilize support for the Democratic Party more broadly.Guest: Alexander Burns, who covers national politics for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background coverage: Revitalized by an endorsement from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders proclaimed “I am back” as he rebooted his campaign after a health scare.The response to Sanders’s rally from public housing residents in Queens exposed the race and class tensions in a gentrifying slice of New York City.

It wasn't until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care, housing, education, and a living wage. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. They're very unhappy that Bernie is back. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. They're very unhappy that Bernie is back. Bernie Sanders drew the largest crowd of his campaign yet at a rally in New York City last weekend, at a moment when his candidacy may be at its most vulnerable. The only heart attack we should be talking about

is the one Wall Street is going to have when Bernie Sanders is president of the United States. Those crowds are raising a fraught question for the leaders of the Democratic Party. Is the loyalty of Sanders supporters to the party or just to him? I don't know why you would take the copy, baby, when you can have the original. It's Friday, October 25th. Hi, I'm a producer at the New York Times and Daily. Can I ask you guys a few questions?

Alex Burns, we're going to do something a little bit different here. My colleague, Daily Producer Jessica Chung, went to this Bernie Sanders rally over the weekend in Queens, New York, and she recorded everything that she heard. What brought you out here today? We love Bernie. I'm a huge Bernie fan. I've always supported Bernie even before I could vote.

And it felt to her, and it felt to us, that she had really picked the right Bernie Sanders rally to attend if you're going to attend just one. She really did. This came at a huge moment for the Sanders campaign. It was a huge test for the Sanders campaign. We got a permit for 20,000 people and we have to close the doors. It has been a tough stretch for Bernie Sanders. He had a heart attack. He was off the trail for a couple weeks ahead of this rally, with the exception of the debate in Ohio. Before the heart attack, the race was showing signs of becoming really a two-candidate contest between Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden. And Sanders was really struggling to

show that he still had a path to win this thing, not just to be relevant, but to win this thing. And so these forces really converge in Queens. I want you all to take a look around and find someone you don't know. Maybe somebody who doesn't look kind of like you. You don't know. Maybe somebody doesn't look kind of like you. Maybe somebody might be of a different religion than you. Maybe they come from a different country. My question now to you is, are you willing to fight for that person

who you don't even know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself. And he delivers a speech that is in most respects not thematically groundbreaking. It's about the big ideas of his campaign. Today in America, half of our population is living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay their rents, their mortgages, their light bill, or fix their car. Economic inequality, Medicare for all, corruption in Washington and on Wall Street. But he rolls out one of the biggest endorsements a progressive candidate can get, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and delivers his message with a force that is intended to really convey the idea

that Bernie is back. In fact, I think he says... To put it bluntly, I am back. I'm back. I am back. I'm back. Which is an acknowledgement, of course, that he needs a comeback. Right. I think he has really resisted the idea that he has fallen behind in this race, but it's manifestly clear that he has.

And from his body language, from his rhetoric, from the way his campaign is now approaching the early states and big events like this one, it's clear that they know he does need a comment. I am more than ready to assume the office of president of the United States. And because his campaign is at this pivotal moment, we wanted to better understand his supporters and the nature of his support. What somebody who shows up at a Bernie Sanders rally thinks about Sanders, how they talk about him, and what that means for the Democratic primary. So that's what Jessica ended up asking voters about. And so I want to play that for you. What about him excites you? Bernie is the true progressive, the only true progressive running in the race. Bernie doesn't say, leave it to me. Bernie says, come with me.

We must join forces to create the fundamental changes required in this society. If you look at Bernie's record, Bernie's been just saying the same things since pretty much like the 60s or whenever he came into public office. And it's like, yeah, sorry, the 80s. And so I think now there's a lot of people that are like jumping onto the bandwagon. And so I really just think it's the strength of Bernie Sanders and his platform. He's a prophet. He knows the way forward. What you hear there is just the extraordinary stature that Sanders commands on the left. The real fruits of that campaign that he ran in 2015 and 2016 when he got out there into an ideological space that other Democrats were just not comfortable entering and ran an insurgent campaign against the party establishment in a way that most Democrats had really never seen before. So, you know, I think you rarely hear candidates referred to as prophets, but even stopping short of that sort of quasi-religious language,

the depth of commitment to Bernie Sanders among his supporters probably exceeds the bond that any other candidate in the race has with their voters. Greater even than Trump, or you mean greater even than anyone on the Democratic field? On the Democratic side, I should say. It is probably closer to Trump than to any of the other Democrats. That's fascinating. But I mean, at the end of the day, a vote is a vote no matter how enthusiastically someone casts it, right? So I wonder what this kind of next level devotion means for his candidacy. Well, it has meant that even in what was a very lean summer for him, just a challenging political time where he was being eclipsed by another candidate on the left, Elizabeth Warren, he has never really been at risk of being irrelevant in this race,

of being truly sidelined. Because right now, it looks like anywhere between 10 and 17 or 18 percent of the Democratic Party is very, very tightly bonded to Bernie Sanders. And that— One out of five Democrats. One out of five on a good day, closer to one out of 10 on a bad day. But still, on his worst day, he's got more support in the party than every other candidate in the race, except for Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. That's a pretty good place to be. And his support is different from any other candidate in the race. It is particularly strong among young people. There's the irony of the Bernie Sanders campaign. The guy who would be the oldest president ever, the oldest candidate in this race. His strongest age group is the youngest age group in the Democratic electorate. What it has also meant is that he has this incredible flow of cash into his campaign, almost irrespective of whatever else is happening in this race. He has a small donor online fundraising machine that has collected tens of millions of dollars for him every quarter that he has been in this race. And in the most recent quarter, he was the number one

fundraiser in the Democratic field. That's an extraordinary thing to say about a candidate who isn't running a super PAC, isn't holding conventional big donor events, and is running on Democratic socialism, that he's the best funded candidate in the race. So his fundraising is outpacing his polling, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is quite unusual in politics. Right. And you basically only see it when you have these candidates who have a limited but unbelievably passionate base of support. You know, just one analog for this might be the Ron Paul campaign in 2012, where he was a more marginal candidate in the Republican Party.

There was never a realistic chance he was going to be the nominee. But his support was so intense that his online fundraising just sustained him in a way that other candidates couldn't dream of. Bernie Sanders has a broader appeal than that, and his fundraising is much more robust. So it feels like Bernie Sanders is kind of a test case for why genuine enthusiasm matters so much in politics. His supporters are willing to do things for him that other candidate supporters may not be, right? staying financially competitive, mobilizing volunteers, and especially in some of these early voting, cold-weather states in February, getting them to actually show up and caucus in Iowa in a blizzard if necessary. They'll do it.

They'll do it. So the next thing that Jess asked voters about at this Sanders rally was this heart attack that Sanders had a couple weeks ago. This is his first rally since he just came back from a heart attack. I wonder if you think that that makes him less electable in any way. I don't think age matters. I think that's a stupid, like, I don't know why people care about that. No, because he came back stronger and it was a routine procedure that many people go through. I know a lot of people that have had stents put in and then felt better afterwards than before. And I think he looked great, so I'm going to stick with him. The curious thing is that Bernie, having undergone this procedure,

may feel like 110% better than he did before. Just the amount of literal blood flowing to his heart may give him a level of energy and stamina that he didn't feel before he underwent the procedure. I don't think that our current president has the best health, so why are we worried so much about a heart attack that wasn't a big deal? He went right back into it afterwards. Both George Bush and Clinton had the same operation done in their 60s, so he's also pushing it, you know.

He is, but I mean, it doesn't, I don't, I'm not thinking about it. There's a pretty heavy bias against Bernie Sanders because he's a fairly unique candidate. Like, Joe Biden's eye exploded while we were all watching a debate. And they didn't single him out with a question like, hey, Joe, like, why'd your eye explode? Like, is it going to happen again? Did I miss something? Did Joe Biden's eye suffer some kind of explosion? There was a CNN town hall where he had some kind of burst capillary in his eye or something like that. It was unsightly, but something did happen. Not medically serious. So in summary, it feels like Sanders supporters in this crowd, they are not concerned about this heart attack.

And I wonder what you think of the way it was discussed. I think right after the heart attack happened, there was this moment of questioning, would Sanders persist in this race? Would his health become the defining issue of his candidacy? And at least for his supporters, the answer to all those things is no. They are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on so much, and his physical health is not an exception to that. I think that you hear people giving rationalizations. It's true that Bill Clinton had a similar operation. It was after he was the president of the United States. The reality is a candidate having a heart attack is a really big deal. And historically, by any standard of political coverage, it is more than inbounds as a subject for scrutiny and for voters

to consider. We've never had a president turn 80 in office before. We have two candidates in this race. Two of the top three candidates in this race would turn 80 in their first term as president if they were elected. People remember, I think, pretty well Hillary Clinton fainting at the 9-11 memorial in the middle of the way that was covered. But a candidate collapsing in the middle of a general election is a relevant subject for coverage. President Trump's lack of transparency about his health has been a huge subject for coverage over the last few years. There's enormous suspicion about whether we really know everything that we deserve to know about the president's health. So this is not bias against Bernie Sanders, but the fact that people are inclined to see it as bias against Bernie Sanders, again, underscores the strength of his support. So you mentioned Hillary Clinton in 2016. Jessica encountered a lot of supporters who very much wanted to go back to that race and talk about what happened the last time around. And I want to play some of that. We need to get Bernie elected this time around. The DNC screwed him over in 2016.

He was robbed of the nomination. So people want Bernie. I think it's the race we needed to have in 2016. I think there's a populist feel going on. The elites are destroying the country and the Democrats lost because we ran an elitist. And now it's time to run a candidate with a multiracial working class coalition. The Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans because there's been evidence that the DNC did screw with caucuses. That in Seattle, he won by a landslide, but the delegates voted for Hillary anyway. So, Alex, what do you make of that? I think there are a lot of myths about the role of the DNC in 2016.

But the valid core to all of that is the sense among Sanders supporters, and this is really not up for debate, that the Democratic Party establishment did everything they could to give Hillary Clinton an advantage over him in that primary. Remind us of that, just so we can have it in hand. You had everyone at the top of the party, including President Obama, do what they could to clear the field for Hillary Clinton. You had the leadership of the party in both houses of Congress try to clear the way for Hillary Clinton. You had other kinds of coordination between party officials who were supposed to be neutral, who are ostensibly neutral, and leaders of the Clinton campaign in ways that none of it was illegal and none of it was outside of the American

political tradition. But if you're a Bernie Sanders supporter and you looked at that and you felt like there ought to be an even playing field in this race, there wasn't. I wonder how that makes a Bernie Sanders supporter relate to the Democratic Party, especially if Sanders starts to falter. This is one of the Trumpiest things about Bernie Sanders and his political movement, that in 2015, 2016, one of the best predictors of support for Donald Trump in the Republican primary was dislike for the Republican Party. He has obviously now come to embody the Republican Party, so that dynamic has changed. But you have a lot of people in the Democratic Party or on the left who are Democratic primary voters supporting Bernie Sanders

and do not like the Democratic Party. Something that really frustrates more mainline Democrats, that they feel like Bernie is this interloper who is sort of rousing the left against the only party that really speaks to them. But if you are a Bernie Sanders supporter, you look at the traditional Democratic Party establishment as a collection of people and ideas that have failed. And what about the candidates? And what about the candidates? Well, that is one of the great questions of this race. If Bernie is not the nominee, whether his core supporters will embrace another candidate with similar enthusiasm.

We'll be right back. We'll be right back. over Elizabeth Warren. Warren calls herself a capitalist, and she's not out for a political revolution. She is taking all of Bernie's policies and kind of putting a spin on it, and it's like, do you have any original ideas? And if she believed in these things, why wasn't she supporting them four years ago? I think Medicare for All is a big one. I don't know if I trust Warren.

She says she's for it, but it took her a long time to get there. And, you know, Warren used to be a Republican. Warren used to be a Republican. She was a Republican. And so, like, Elizabeth Warren, I feel like is just a watered down form of Bernie to try to make her more appealing. But the second the primary is over, she's just going to pivot. Well, look, that's really striking. She's not been a Republican since I was in primary school, which was a while ago. But the fact that Sanders supporters have latched onto that in the way they have, I think, reflects just the gap in trust between how they feel about Bernie and how they feel about almost literally any other politician, certainly any other politician running for president. almost literally any other politician, certainly any other politician running for president.

It still feels surprising to hear Sanders supporters attempt to differentiate a Democratic rival who, on paper, is so ideologically similar. I think there are some important ideological distinctions, at least in the abstract, that I think in Elizabeth Warren's ideal world, we would be a heavily regulated, heavily enforced free market economy, that it would be something similar to an FDR, Teddy Roosevelt kind of regulatory regime. Bernie Sanders would, I think, in his ideal world, have us much closer to a sort of Scandinavian social democracy, have us much closer to a sort of Scandinavian social democracy, which is a really fundamentally different way of approaching government. And part of this is a dynamic that happens in primaries generally, that the candidates who are ideologically closest together can end up having the most sort of intense hostility between their supporters because they feel like only one of

these people can emerge from this. And they're right. But there is, I think, also a level of seeing the trees but not the forest here, where you have the number two and number three candidates in this Democratic primary, if they were nominated, would be the most liberal nominee in certainly my lifetime and in lifetimes a good deal longer than mine as well. So the level of frustration does seem sort of out of proportion to what the downside of an Elizabeth Warren nomination would be. So, Alex, to your point about the forest for the trees, Jess asked a lot of these voters, if Sanders doesn't win, are you fine voting for anybody else in the party who becomes the nominee? And this is what people said. And who is your second candidate of choice? Elizabeth Warren. If Bernie can't make it, I'm happy with Elizabeth.

If either Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders win the nomination, I would be so happy. And I think it would be, again, a sign of how much the Democratic Party is shifting. I do like Elizabeth Warren's policies. And like, if Elizabeth Warren is the nominee, I'll like happily vote for her. So a lot of them, despite their skepticism of Warren,

say, if I had to, I would vote for Elizabeth Warren. But then there were several voters who said that they would be very hard-pressed to turn out for anyone who wasn't Bernie or what they consider to be kind of Bernie-lite, which is Warren. Sure, so I like Liz Warren. I think she's probably the only other candidate I would ever even consider supporting. The rest of them I find to be rather embarrassing. If it wasn't Bernie, who's your second candidate of choice?

If it wasn't, I would probably vote for Elizabeth. If she was the candidate. I wouldn't vote for Biden. That's really interesting. It really is. And I guess, as they say in the Senate, I should revise and extend what I said about people sort of missing the forest, that you do hear people there sort of recognizing that the party as a whole has moved, that there are candidates besides Bernie, although clearly anyone else would be the second best choice in this race for them. But I think what you heard is how hard it will be for a candidate who is not an economic populist to speak to this set of voters, that if you end up with a candidate who is an avowed centrist or a

nominee who has repudiated what Bernie Sanders stands for, hasn't just revised or watered down his views, but has rejected them and attacked them, that's going to be a real challenge in the general election. I think one of the calculations that Democrats have traditionally made, certainly made in 2016, is that the left will come home at the end of the day. And I think you saw in 2016, that was a risky bet to make. Right. I mean, that was a bet that just did not come true because when Sanders supporters were asked to support Hillary Clinton, many of them did is an ideological liberal, as we traditionally think of it, people who just didn't like Hillary Clinton. And then in the general election, there were people who were Democrats who just weren't enthusiastic. They would have turned out to vote for Bernie Sanders, would have volunteered for Bernie Sanders, would have donated to Bernie Sanders. And when you start to look at the margins of defeat for Hillary Clinton in the states that made the difference, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, could Democratic enthusiasm have turned out an additional 70,000 voters?

Very possibly. So not to be too prescriptive, but based on everything you're saying, if Joe Biden is the nominee, it will be a challenge, maybe a significant challenge for this group of voters to be won over and transferred to him. If it is Elizabeth Warren, that will be more logical, although it will not necessarily be seamless. I think that's probably a safe bet. And if you're Joe Biden, you know, maybe you can bring these people around. Maybe you need to make up for a lack of enthusiasm on the left by winning over voters closer to the political middle, even folks on the center right. That's clearly a bet that candidates like Joe Biden are making, that if Bernie has his populist following, that would be much more enthusiastic about him than about me. Well, I have moderates who will never vote for a democratic socialist, but who I can turn out

in a general election. And in a lot of ways, this is the big strategic debate in the Democratic Party right now. We've talked a lot about the ideological and policy debates in the party, but sort of fundamental to the democratic race right now is, are you better off trying to marshal a really enthusiastic and diverse coalition on the left or a more ideologically diverse coalition that is somewhat less reliant on liberal enthusiasm. For whoever the nominee is in this election, and I think probably in most elections going forward, just given the ideological and demographic trajectory of the Democratic Party and the country, it's going to be a recurring challenge for them.

How do you harness what Bernie Sanders has created while also appealing broadly to the voters that you need in order to capture the nomination, because Sanders is not actually doing that right now, and win a general election, which Sanders has never had the chance to try to do? right now and win a general election, which Sanders has never had the chance to try to do. It's a particularly important question when you look to the future of the Democratic Party. If you were to sort of make a bet right now about the trajectory of that party over the next few years, it will probably look more and more like the Bernie Sanders base and less and less like the coalition that defeated him in 2016,

if the party stays on its current course. This is a group of voters that is very much here to stay. And the question is, do they stay as engaged and enthusiastic Democrats? Right. Or do they basically start and finish their political journey with Bernie Sanders in a way that doesn't really help the party. Do they become passionate, lifelong Democratic voters, volunteers, donors, or do they go back to being either casually engaged with politics or disengaged entirely or really sort of disgusted with the party as they were in 2016? Alex, thank you very much. Thank you.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. OK, I have introduced a resolution today with Senator McConnell. And the purpose of the resolution is to let the House know that the process you're engaging in regarding the attempted impeachment of President Trump is a substantial deviation from what the House has done in the past. The Republican campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the House impeachment inquiry escalated on Thursday as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced a resolution condemning it as unorthodox and improper. a resolution condemning it as unorthodox and improper. Graham focused on the closed-door hearings led by Representative Adam Schiff, despite the fact that Republicans themselves conducted closed-door testimony during the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998.

And in his latest effort to break the deadlock over Brexit, after yet another major delay, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would seek a new general election in December. We're being very, very reasonable. We're saying if you genuinely want more time, you can have it. Here it is. But the condition for that is that we all agree to go for a general election on December the 12th. Johnson hopes that such an election would give him a popular mandate

to carry out his vision of a swift Brexit, despite deep resistance within Parliament, whose support is needed for such an election. In an interview with the BBC, Johnson defended the strategy which his opponents in Parliament say is a form of political intimidation designed to scare them into supporting his plan. But Prime Minister, it's not standard behaviour. You're essentially trying to blackmail Parliament with the threat of an election in order to ram through your bill.

You could just say, fine, let's have as long as it takes to get through this line by line in Parliament. Would that not be the responsible thing to do? No, come on. We've had three and a half years. Not looking at this bill. The Daily is made by Theo Balcom, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tennesketter,

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