Good piece:
I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters.
Sean Moorhead
Mar 18 · 10 min read
I’m a volunteer with the Bernie Sanders campaign. I’ve been observing conversations between Biden voters online and have not seen much gloating about his victory, which now looks inevitable. People are concerned about having lost the youth vote by, in some cases, fifty points or more. They are concerned that the coalition Biden has assembled is not quite equal to the Obama coalition. They want to figure out what concessions will win back the Sanders wing of the party. It is this same dim sense of danger that makes birds fly to high ground before a tidal wave. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "I don’t like Bernie or his Bernie Bros, but that energy…”
I campaigned for Bernie in the 2016 primary and voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Actually, in spite of my reservations about the party, I have, as a form of harm mitigation, chosen a straight Democratic ticket in every election I have ever voted in. I will probably volunteer for Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts after the Sanders campaign concludes. Because I’ve texted literally tens of thousands of Bernie voters, I wanted to offer some suggestions about what the party (and you as individuals) can do to ensure that enough of them show up in November to beat Donald Trump.
I am also writing because, although I have disliked Joe Biden for years, I think most of you recognize his flaws and support him because you are fighting to bring decency, dignity, and integrity back to the White House.
Please do me a favor and read all of what follows even if there are parts that make you want to stop and draft a rebuttal. You can think I’m mistaken, but my object isn’t to convince you, just to give you an idea of how my friends on the campaign think. There are two instances of profanity which are unfortunately necessary for dramatic effect. If you don’t want to read every word I have to say, please stop here.
The answer is that you can do nothing. The opportunity to win back Bernie's voters came and went four years ago. Bernie could spend the rest of the year campaigning for Joe. Joe could promise to abolish private property by executive order on day one. It would not be enough.
Bernie was projected to win a decisive lead on Super Tuesday. Biden was, everyone thought, on his last legs and had not campaigned or established a ground presence in many states. Then, in the days immediately before Super Tuesday, several of his opponents dropped out. Their endorsements and a raft of others carried him to victory.
This was a message to Bernie voters: "#### off. We would rather drag Joe Biden over the finish line, knowing that he is no longer mentally competent, than cede anything to the candidate who is winning your votes by fifty points or more."
You may disagree with me about Joe Biden’s mental competence. That’s fine. It has been reported that party insiders believe what I believe about Joe. You could say listen to his speech, he talks about unity, he is not telling Bernie voters to go pound sand, but that is the message my friends heard.
We have all spent the past four years arguing about whether Bernie Bros are alienating voters by being rude on Twitter. My personal feeling is that if people care enough about their candidates to get into fights about them on Twitter, the fighting is not what made up their minds. It doesn’t bother me if you are rude to the Bernie Bros. I know how intolerable we can be. We specialize in intolerability. You have to react in whatever way feels natural. The way the Biden campaign won made a greater and more unalterable impression on us than any sweet or stern words you have for us now.
Toward the end of a primary there is often talk to the effect that even if your candidate didn’t win, he changed the conversation, whatever that means, and might be able to whisper ideas in the winner’s ear or even to hold him accountable, whatever that means. This was a fantasy when it came to Hillary Clinton. It is a joke when it comes to Joe Biden. If Biden were the kind of candidate who could be pushed left, no one in the party leadership would have endorsed him. It doesn’t matter if he makes Free College for Some a plank of his platform, and it doesn’t help that he spent decades cultivating the image of a conservative’s kind of liberal.
I know by this point you have all kinds of desperate or righteously angry appeals in mind. "Think about Trump’s racism. Think about the kids in cages. If nothing else, think about the Supreme Court!" Sorry, that #### doesn’t work anymore. Never mind Biden’s role in getting Clarence Thomas on the Court. This primary came down to one candidate who gave Strom Thurmond’s eulogy and another who — I know you are tired of hearing this — marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. It came down to one candidate who wanted to break up ICE and another whose boss built the cages that Trump filled with children. We know how you chose.
For various reasons, you believe that Joe Biden’s faults have been exaggerated, that Bernie Sanders is the real racist, that Obama’s militarization of border enforcement was fundamentally different from Trump’s. Even to level these accusations at a Democrat strikes you as whataboutism or — worse — dezinformatsiya. You believe or say you believe that when we talk about the Democratic establishment coming together for Joe Biden, we are talking about elderly Black voters in South Carolina rather than the party machinery. That’s fine, but all of your arguments, however eloquent, are of interest mainly to people who think like you. They are good for lengthy Facebook replies that begin "Oh yeah, well…" Writing may make you feel better, which is valuable, but no one on my side cares. It’s Charlie Brown’s teacher going wah-wah-wah at this point. If you want, in 2020, to make the case that Joe Biden voted against school integration for liberal reasons or because he had a problem with the way it was being done, knock yourself out. Maybe Samantha Bee will have you on Full Frontal. But in the 1970s the battle lines were quite clear. Joe Biden chose the side that was bombing school bus depots. The battle lines are quite clear now, too, and have only gotten clearer since most of the candidates who were called progressives or competitors to Bernie instead endorsed Joe. As far as most of us are concerned, Bernie could not have asked for a more dramatic illustration of the corrupt political and economic system he is always yelling hoarsely about.
According to the New York Times, Bernie Sanders was the most donated-to candidate in almost every district of every state in the union. He has a volunteer corps of over a million people. He lit a fire under a bunch of us who spend most of our time joking around on Twitter. I have never seen more people give freely to something bigger than themselves. It was not enough to win, but it was something unique in recent history.
If Sanders drops out of the race and endorses Joe Biden, that network of volunteers and grassroots donors will vanish like frost. The problem is not that Sanders lost but that he was defeated by main force. You don't see it that way, but my friends do.
You are going to have to count on losing more Bernie Bros than Hillary lost. Maybe you don’t need them, but you do need to take stock of your own forces. Your army is consultants, suburban parents, journalists who are addicted to Twitter, and senior citizens who are addicted to MSNBC. Also, possibly, the handful of very confused senior citizens who have wandered onto Twitter.
I have been giving about twenty to thirty hours a week to the Sanders campaign, which amounts to a few more than six hundred assignments requested. The top texter has requested, last I checked, over eleven thousand assignments. The total number of volunteers on the text team is over thirty thousand. On a slow day, I sign up maybe a dozen people to join us as volunteers. Other texters have told me much the same. You can do the multiplication.
If you want to beat Trump, you will have to work harder than we did and rally more of your people to volunteer. Name recognition is enough to win a primary. It is not enough to win a general election. You need hundreds of thousands of people texting, making phone calls, knocking on doors. You cannot be satisfied with knocking on doors locally, either. We had people who spent every weekend busing into neighboring states. I know this would be harder for Biden voters, who are generally older than us and may, like Joe, have mixed feelings about busing. Have you ever met a Hmong or a Bhutanese person? We had organizers working with them. You have won the black vote, but you cannot take anyone else for granted.
I understand: You have a small business, you are on the board of a local charity, you have two kids or three grandkids to look after. You have to be so many different things to so many different people. Our advantage in that area is that we are only ever one thing, namely losers. We are losers when we wake up and losers when we lay down to sleep. We have dead-end loser jobs or no jobs at all. We date losers or do not date. We can argue about what Bernie did wrong, but the problem may simply be that he ran a campaign by, of, and for losers.
You have to be so many different things. I know how hard it is. Now there is one more thing you have to be: winners.
I said before that you are fighting for decency, dignity, and integrity. I believe that. Unfortunately, none of those things are real. They have no mass, volume, or color. You can't cut off a piece of decency to eat.
Laozi says (in Thomas Cleary’s translation) "When the Great Way is abandoned, there are benevolence and duty. When ingenuity emerges, there is much fabrication." What this means is anyone’s guess. What I am going to say for the sake of argument that it means is that by the time you begin to give names to your values, your thinking has already reached an advanced stage of degeneration. Values do not exist, either. Right now thousands of people who claim all kinds of different values are dying from the same germ.
We talk about values and about politics and government for ease of communication. The words don’t refer to a certain group of people, because we have seen, in every month of the Trump administration, how quickly those people can change. We talk about institutions and institutional norms. Sometimes I think the simplest reason that Trump upsets people is that he demonstrates every day that those things do not matter. If enough people agree that you are the most powerful man in the world, you can do whatever you want.
For everyone else, what matters is that when you are sick, your ability to get medicine depends on decisions made by people who do not know or care about you. That’s real.
That is why we are fighting for real things like healthcare and housing. It’s why we’re so fierce. We can easily remember and explain to other people what we are fighting for and no amount of arguing can make us feel foolish about it. (Of all the people who said, “Liz has a plan for that!” how many could explain in detail what Sen. Warren’s plans were and how they differed from Bernie’s?) Every day is full of little reminders. If you go to McDonald’s for lunch and see, at the deep fryer, a man who is way too old to be working for minimum wage, you know exactly what a Sanders presidency would do for him, likewise if your coworker is sick and still coming to work because she’s out of sick days, likewise if your friend lost his job and cannot make his student loan payments. We do not need compassion. Our compassion consists in fighting for the wellbeing of people we hate. That is how you have to live.
I will help you out. I will vote for Joe Biden and even volunteer for him unless — I add this exception not as a means of escape but because we live in such strange times — the Democratic party collapses and there is a credible third-party campaign to replace it. Most of my friends will not vote and will not help, and to tell you the truth, I don’t blame them. You’re thinking of privileged college-age hipsters who listen to socialist podcasts. I’m thinking of Latino guys with undocumented parents who have never believed in a politician before, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are not going to get in line to crank the lever for Joe Biden.
The other day I saw someone on Facebook write to a Bernie Bro, "Now listen here, you will vote as you are told." He got the same response you will get even if you practice empathy and nonconfrontation. Don't waste your time anymore. Out-text us, out-phonebank us, out-canvas us. Campaign in every free hour you have.
You may object that none of this is so easy when you have a small business, you are on the board of a local charity, you have two kids or three grandkids to look after. You're probably right. On that point I have no advice to offer.