Donald Trump has gone from blaming Bernie Sanders’s supporters for disruptions at his rallies to making overtures to them — saying Sanders has been “treated terribly by the Democrats,” saying that he would harvest attacks on Hillary Clinton from Sanders’s speeches, and even urging Sanders to run as an independent.
And, to take it further, CNN reported Friday that “Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said the campaign is ready to bring into the fold anyone in the ‘feel the Bern’ movement who is not inclined to support Clinton in the general election.”The network quoted Lewandowski as saying:“
You have two candidates in Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders which have reignited a group of people who have been disenfranchised and disappointed with the way Washington, D.C., and career politicians have run the country … Bernie Sanders has large crowds — not as large as Mr. Trump’s, but large crowds — and so there is a level of excitement there for people about his messaging and we will bring those people in.”This is a fascinating political ploy, but rife with folly.
First, it is important to acknowledge that both movements are born of the same populist source: white working- and middle-class voters’ fear, anger, anxiety and disappointment over what they see as a broken political system, beholden to moneyed interests and oblivious to their pain, suffering and rage.
According to a Pew Research Center report published on March 31, Trump’s supporters are more likely than supporters of his Republican opponents to say that life in the United States has gotten worse for people like them compared with 50 years ago, and Sanders’s supporters were more likely than Clinton’s supporters to say the same. But still, there was a 40-point gap between the percentage of Trump and Sanders supporters agreeing with that sentiment.
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyThis is a largely white American lament. A majority of white voters believe that things have gotten worse, while a majority of black voters and a plurality of Hispanic voters believe that things have gotten better for people like them in the last 50 years. It is these more optimistic minorities who have formed the bedrock of Clinton’s support and pushed her within striking distance of securing the nomination.
Furthermore, the Pew report found that Trump’s and Sanders’s supporters were the most likely on their respective sides of the ideological divide to be angry at the government; believe that the economic system unfairly favors powerful interests; and are more isolationist, believing that America’s involvement in global problems makes those problems worse.
And lastly, there is an implicit, or even explicit, critique of President Obama present in both camps, which seem to see him as a disappointment: either as feckless or fainthearted, either because he went too far or not far enough, either because he was not tough enough with our international adversaries or not tough enough with his congressional opponents.
This view of the Obama presidency as, at best, a disappointment, or at worst, a failure, is a pernicious and unsupportable lie that did quite a bit to sour minorities on Sanders and to rally opposition to Trump.
Obama wasn’t perfect. He didn’t accomplish all that he thought he would or could. He made mistakes. But, all told, he was true to the deliberative, center-left pragmatist that he has always been.
Indeed, according to PolitiFact, Obama has kept twice as many promises as he has broken.
He was never a superhero, but some of the hurt feelings come from him allowing people to believe that he was. As Obama wrote in the prologue to “The Audacity of Hope”: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” The thing is, he did not become what some people projected. He remained himself.
That said, these Trump and Sanders supporters are looking at the dragon from different vantage points and seeing fundamentally different dangers.
Trump’s supporters seem to see a country in decline, a government that is out of control and incompetent, an influx of immigrants that represent an existential threat and a culture that is hamstrung by political correctness.
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyConversely, Sanders’s supporters see a democracy slipping into oligarchy, a country that has utterly failed to keep pace with its global peers on social structure issues — economic equality, taxation, health care and education — and has gone completely off the rails on many others, like criminal justice and mass incarceration.
These are not crowds that are likely to lie down together. Indeed, I would imagine that Trump’s brand of xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, misogyny and fascism would not go down easily with the faction of left progressives that swell the ranks of Sanders’s supporters.
Indeed, The Washington Post reported in March:
“Polling shows little evidence that Trump has a shot to win large pockets of Sanders voters in November, should Clinton maintain her lead and win the Democratic nomination. Among Democratic-leaning voters who … prefer Sanders to win the party nod, only 13 percent have a favorable view of Trump, compared to 86 unfavorable, according to a Washington Post-ABC News national poll earlier this month.”
If these numbers are correct, any substantial Trump-Sanders coalition is a nonstarter.
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CHARLES M. BLOW>
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