What happened to Bernie Sanders’ Campaign and What can the Socialist Left Do Now?

By Mimi Harris, Seattle. Mimi Harris was elected as a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America Seattle Chapter at the end of March and is a member of DSA's Reform & Revolution caucus. She works as a warehouse worker for Amazon.

Facing COVID-19, most of the U.S. is in lock down. The message everywhere: we are all in this together. But as many of us continue to work on the front lines in hospitals, grocery stores, delivery services and warehouses, without masks, without hazard pay, it’s clear that a deep class divide runs through the global COVID-19 crisis. There are reports of politicians briefed early on about the likely severity of the pandemic, who used this knowledge to sell millions of their stocks, while simultaneously reassuring voters not to worry. Amazon will undoubtedly make unfathomable profits in the coming months -- while denying its employees safe working conditions. And the recovery package passed by U.S. Congress gives billions to bail out corporations like Boeing, while working people get modest relief checks and are asked to “adjust”.

Coronavirus has cut through the Democratic Party primaries and put in stark relief the different politics on offer: While Joe Biden has been largely absent from the political arena over the last weeks as the U.S. has plunged into crisis, Bernie Sanders has been fighting in the Senate to increase relief for working class people. He has, for example, demanded a $2,000 per month stipend for every adult plus $1,000 for every child, far beyond the one-time $1,200 check Congress agreed to. His demand for Medicare for All -- that is free healthcare at the point of delivery -- feels more urgent than ever, with the first teenager in the U.S. dying of COVID-19 after reportedly being sent away from an urgent care clinic because he didn’t have insurance. And he has supported Amazon workers’ petition for fair pay and safe working conditions.

But this primary was for the most part decided weeks ago, before the Coronavirus had taken over most aspects of U.S. life. It was decided on the basis of beating Trump: who Democratic Party voters thought would be in the best position to get it done. And while poll after poll showed that Bernie had the best chance of any of the Democratic candidates to beat Trump, it looks clear that the majority of voters selected Joe Biden to be their candidate, with Bernie basically having no numerical path to the nomination at this point.

So how did we get here?

Few expected this turn of events in the middle of February. Sanders took a commanding lead through the first three primaries, sweeping Nevada, as hospitality workers there, a majority of them Latinx, defied their influential union’s orders and voted in huge numbers for Sanders and his Medicare for All plan. There was a real feeling that we would defy all expectations and win the nomination.

Even in the later primaries that Bernie lost, polls showed that approximately 60% of Democratic Party voters support Medicare for All. Almost 60% of Democratic voters in Texas and California support socialism (though the term is not defined). 72% support free college tuition.

But support for Bernie’s policies did not translate 1:1 to support for the candidate. The same people who not only support single payer healthcare (that is, universal free healthcare), but also feel that healthcare is their top issue, still went to the polls and voted for Joe Biden, a candidate who has stated over and over again that he does not support single payer healthcare, but rather a “public option”, which would only offer public insurance alongside private, keeping expenses high for millions.

The Great Centrist Consolidation

In January and February it was a bit embarrassing for someone to be a supporter of Joe Biden. His campaign was a long circus train of gaffes followed by inappropriate behaviour followed by media reveal of the despicable stances he has taken over decades, embodying establishment politics.  Throughout his career, he has exuberantly supported the war on drugs, helping create the reality of the mass incarceration of black and brown people in the U.S. He was one of the most vocal Democratic Party cheerleaders for the Iraq War. He voted to deny federal funding for abortions, pushing the reproductive justice movement back by decades. He voted to outlaw gay marriage, and has spoken numerous times about the benefits of cutting social security.

Given all that, there were plenty of other options: Pete Buttigiegg as a much more palatable version of Biden, Elizabeth Warren if someone wanted to keep their progressive credentials while secretly deeply fearing Bernie’s “political revolution,” Amy Klobuchar if you were out and proud with your neoliberal ideas, Andrew Yang stood for a neoliberal version of a universal basic income, even Bloomberg if you were one of the millions of people who primarily learned about the election through his hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisements. But it was almost universally agreed that Joe Biden wasn’t going anywhere.

And then the Great Consolidation happened. Jim Clyburn, a prominent black establishment politician of the Democrats from South Carolina, endorsed Biden. While anger against structural racism is very real, Biden's campaign was able to present itself as the safe option for African American voters to oust Trump. And with strong links to black progressive leaders, and Bernie’s campaign not yet rooted enough in the South and among black communities, Biden swept the Democratic Party primaries in South Carolina on February 29. 

In a matter of hours, just in time for Super Tuesday, March 3, Biden became a viable candidate and the entire dynamic of the race shifted and wouldn’t return to the way it was. 

Former President Barack Obama made some calls. Buttigiegg dropped out and endorsed Biden. The next day Klobuchar did the same. Then Bloomberg. All supporting Biden. 

And finally Warren, who refused to endorse either Sanders or Biden. As the only other progressive candidate, who’s base was quite evenly split between left progressives who would have gone over to Bernie, and more conservative voters who liked the challenge of trying to stay relevant, Warren’s silence was a vote for Biden. In a battle between business-as-usual and political revolution, “neutrality” is a vote for the status quo.

Young people - as always, a bit of a mystery

Young voters did not turn out in the droves that were expected from polling and through the visible and vocal young base of Bernie’s campaign.

There needs to be more discussion on the left, why this happened. On the one side, there was no bigger movement that helped to activate and reach millions of young people. Bernie did not put enough effort into organising protests. Days of action for free tuition could have had a big impact on campuses. Protests around climate change would have allowed people to understand more about the proposals behind everyone seemingly agreeing to take the issue seriously.

However, young people might also have lost some faith in the electoral process. After the 2016 Democratic Party which millions of young people felt was rigged, many thought they could reform the DNC, but those attempts led to a dead end. Then Hillary Clinton, as the lesser evil, won the popular vote, but Trump won the electoral college and that was that. And then it was 2018 and young people and old people alike turned out to flip the House of Representatives toward the Democrats. And they did. But Trump continues to march on with his agenda. So many young people might have concluded: What’s the point of elections?

Has the left lost?

Given the high expectations in February, this turn was bitter to swallow. And given the high stakes we find ourselves in: a deadly pandemic in a nation where 44 million people don’t have health insurance, the irony of needing Medicare for All now more than ever is certainly not sweet. However, without in any way sugarcoating the situation, if we take a step back, the Sanders campaign was a huge step forward for the left.

Let's be clear. We lost, and we lost fair and square. We knew the terms of battle beforehand: we’d be up against not only Biden, but a corporate media that dutifully played its role in providing tens of millions of dollars of free positive coverage for safe, establishment candidates. Primaries controlled by a DNC that cared little whether later voters, many of them young, were able to cast their votes. A convention, if we got there, that would pull no stops to make sure Bernie wasn’t the nominee.

But we knew all those conditions ahead of time and we agreed to the fight anyways. Why? Because we had little to lose and a lot to gain. And we made huge gains.

One million people registered as volunteers for Bernie’s campaign. He has raised a total of $180 million, largely through small donations, far more than the next candidate behind him (aside from Billionaire Bloomberg’s self-funded campaign).

DSA, far more than in 2016, was an independent organised force playing a major role in this campaign, and will likely grow significantly out of it, even if the electoral result was not what people had hoped for.  

But we also have a long way to go. The campaign was lost not on the basis of ideas, but on the basis of organisation.

While we had some wonderful moments, like among hospitality workers in Nevada, ultimately we have yet to build much power in unions. Our roots in black communities, while strong among young people, were ultimately too shallow to counter the powerful influence of the black establishment leaders. We energised millions of young people, but ultimately weren’t able to consolidate that energy into votes.

We need to expand in the South. We need to make inroads in labour. We need to not only endorse candidates, but take ownership of our own campaigns. We need to expand in rural and suburban areas. We need many more people of colour and women to join us, while recognising that our campaign for President was by far the most diverse in the country in terms of active support.

Organising toward a Democratic Socialist Party

Doing this will require more than just a one-off campaign. When Bernie’s campaign officially closes shop, his hundreds of thousands of active supporters will need a place to be organised to continue fighting for the issues important to them.

DSA, with 60,000 members and a proud socialist platform, is in the best position to provide this and help arm our movement with the class-based movement-building approach we’ll need to win Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and the dozens of other reforms that energised a whole new generation of activists.

But DSA can also provide more than that. It can start the work of building the ground for a political alternative, a new Democratic Socialist Party.

Enough people are sufficiently disillusioned with the two-party system at this point that an opening exists for a conversation about how a new party can be built. We should be clear that it will not be enough to just declare a new party -- and it’ll be important to get the timing right. For example, some on the radical left are calling for a conference at the DNC this summer before the general election is over. I think we can get a far larger echo by preparing the ground first: 

First and foremost, we cannot ignore the reality of the general election and the desire to wipe out Trump (though I fear we are doomed on this front). And for a new party, we need to develop roots in labour, we need to be based in struggles of oppressed communities. We need to bring together the millions of Sandernistas that the Democratic Party doesn’t even aim to represent.

In many important ways DSA already acts as a left party: running candidates as DSA members even if they are often technically on the Democratic Party ballot line, using membership meetings to make decisions about our priorities and stances, launching campaigns and supporting workers in struggle, and vocally criticising the Democratic Party and the two-party system.

But that is not enough. It’s time to open a conversation about consciously building toward a new party, as a way to bring these different forces together with an explicit goal: a break with the Democratic Party, on our own terms, when we are ready. That self-consciousness is key, and it needn’t preclude using the Democratic Party ballot line when we deem it useful to our goals.

To be clear: I believe a majority in DSA is very open for this discussion. However the conclusions are not yet drawn.

The first step for DSA would be to organise regional conferences in early 2021, after the presidential election is over, to discuss the formation of a new Democratic Socialist Party. Others and myself have started a petition for DSA to do just that.   

When Bernie first ran for president in 2016 it was shocking that he openly called himself a democratic socialist. But then the world shifted and new openings developed. The terrain has once again shifted and people, with all the experience they have accumulated over the last four years, are looking for an alternative. We have already in many ways built the structure for a new democratic socialist party; now is the time to organise towards it, build towards it, and own it.