What do a top Sanders staffer, a chief surrogate and his wife Jane have in common?
They’re quoted in a retrospective on the campaign that implies they know Sanders very probably can’t win.
And they’ve known since they lost caucus day in Nevada.
One reason is that they’ve always had trouble with black voters and no real strategy to win them.
As we know, that weakness has really undermined Sanders’ ability to win delegates.
The morning after he lost the Nevada caucuses in February, Bernie Sanders held a painful conference call with his top advisers.
Mr. Sanders expressed deep frustration that he had not built a stronger political operation in the state, and then turned to the worrisome situation at hand.
His strategy for capturing the Democratic presidential nomination was based on sweeping all three early-voting states, and he had fallen short, winning only New Hampshire — to the consternation of his wife, Jane, who questioned whether he should have campaigned more in 2015.
Without that sweep, his aides thought at the time, Mr. Sanders had little hope of overcoming his vast problems with black voters in the Southern primaries. And he had no convincing evidence to challenge Hillary Clinton’s electability.
“If Clinton had lost Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, it would have been a devastating series of defeats that would have called into question her entire campaign,” said Tad Devine, one of several Sanders advisers who described the Feb. 21 conference call. “We had to shift our strategy. But no matter what, the nomination became tougher to win.”
What strategy did they shift?
The article reports that Sanders staffers pushed him to go negative earlier. That has a cover your ass quality and shows disloyalty that they’d go to the press on this.
It’s reminiscent of the leaks from the Clinton campaign in 2008, the proposed tactics of the odious Mark Penn, and a big contrast from team Obama.
And it’s unlikely the attacks would have been effective.
Democrats don’t care about the emails — remember how Sanders was cheered when he said the American people was sick and tired of the story?
We also see in the article that Sanders believed that attacking Clinton on speaking fees was wrong. That’s why he didn’t do it earlier.
In October, as they gathered at a hotel outside Las Vegas to prepare for the first Democratic debate, Mr. Sanders’s advisers urged him to challenge Mrs. Clinton over accepting $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for delivering three speeches, according to two Sanders advisers. They thought the speaking fees meshed with the senator’s message about Wall Street excess and a rigged America. But Mr. Sanders, hunched over a U-shaped conference table, rejected it as a personal attack on Mrs. Clinton’s income — the sort of character assault he has long opposed. She has the right to make money, he offered.
As Sanders has been attacking more, hasn’t risen in national poll averages and his favorables have declined.
Anyway, the campaign knows it’s in a big hole.
All those decisions stemmed in part from Mr. Sanders’s outlook on the race. He was originally skeptical that he could beat Mrs. Clinton, and his mission in 2015 was to spread his political message about a rigged America rather than do whatever it took to win the nomination. By the time he caught fire with voters this winter and personally began to believe he could defeat Mrs. Clinton, she was already on her way to building an all but insurmountable delegate lead.
Another reason why strategist Devine says the campaign hasn’t worked out is, ironically enough, those big rallies.
Although Sanders backers see them as a strength, Devine says they likely hurt him in Iowa.
Mr. Sanders also resisted pleas to do the kind of retail-style campaigning that Iowa voters like. He wanted to do more large rallies instead, even though many Iowans like politicians winning them over face-to-face.
“Bernie would say, ‘If I’m at a diner having a cup of coffee, I don’t want candidates coming up talking to me,’ ” Mr. Devine said.
Tad Devine, who lost plenty of other Democratic campaigns, sounds like he’s telling the world that Sanders’ problems in the delegate count are not his problem.
Sanders deserves better from him.
I’m not a Sanders supporter, but I have many good friends who are. I respect Sanders a lot and this sort of thing is unseemly.