Artificial Intelligence Predicts Big Bernie Win Tomorrow-- With Far-Reaching Effects On Biden's Electability Argument

When computers mimic the human mind by showing an ability to "learn" and then use that learning to solve problems... that's AI-- Artificial Intelligence. Today it goes beyond human speech recognition, military war-game simulations and autonomously operating cars and tracks to... predicting who's going to win the Iowa caucuses tomorrow. You don't need AI for that you say? You can check the Real Clear Politics polling average (which shows Bernie ahead with 23.8%, compared to Status Quo Joe's 20.2%, Mayo Pete's 15.8% and everyone else below the 15% needed to win any delegates). Or you can check the latest trustworthy polls, like Emerson's (which shows Bernie with 30%, Biden with 21% and no one else over 15%) or the Civiqs poll with Iowa State University (which shows Bernie leading with 24%, followed by Elizabeth with 19%, Mayo with 17% and Status Quo Joe hanging on with his fingernails at 15%).

Or go ask Polly. Polly? Polly is an AI tool powered by Advanced Symbolics Inc., itself an artificial intelligence-driven market research company. Polly, the first AI in the world able to predict human behavior up to the minute-- everything from buying decisions to voting intentions-- is predicting a win for Bernie tomorrow. "She uses publicly available online information," explains ASI, "to create representative samples of any population or target audience. Without asking any direct questions, Polly tracks and interprets how people in the sample feel toward a topic along with their intentions.

When looking at the forecast numbers, the story isn’t between Sanders and Biden (although polls have shown them neck-to-neck for the past few days), but with the shift in momentum for Warren. Polly sees Warren cracking 15% of the vote, which is significantly higher than the 13-14 percent polls have been showing. These votes come at the expense of Biden, who will drop to 20% for the first time since the Democratic Debate on January 15.  Heading into New Hampshire, this will appear momentum shifting from Biden to Warren.

Young voters will be responsible for Sanders’s win in Iowa. 24% of voters under 25 are supportive of Sanders. Biden strongly resonates with older voters, especially 65 and over. Polly is seeing that younger voters will turn out at higher than historic levels, swinging the election to Sanders, countering the strong voter turnout among retirees.

Looking beyond the two front runners, Polly sees Buttigieg holding steady in 3rd place with 17% of the vote, followed by Warren with 15%, and then Klobuchar with 8% of the vote. The race between Warren and Klobuchar, the two leading female candidates, is interesting. Women are more likely to support Klobuchar then men (9% of women voting for Klobuchar compared to 7% of men), while Warren has more endeared herself to the male constituent (16% of men will vote for Warren, compared to 14% of women). This is consistent with Warren’s debate showing, where she held her ground as a strong female candidate while not offending men.

This is what Polly predicts for tomorrow among all people who attend the Democratic caucuses:

• Bernie- 21.47%
• Status Quo Joe- 19.98%
• Mayo- 16.82%
• Elizabeth- 15.44%
• Klobuchar- 8.36%
• Yang- 3.24%
• Steyer- 3.09%
• Tulsi- 1.88%
• Bloomberg- 0.58%

I would also note that among caucus attendees with no party (independents), Bernie's lead goes way up (although he also leads among Democrats alone 20% to 18% over Biden). The Bernie landslide among independents is something Democrats concerned about electability should be paying close attention to, since independents decide election is states Trump won that Bernie is targeting for November, namely Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Arizona, Florida and Alaska, as well as electoral college voting congressional districts NE-02 and ME-02. It should be worrying to see how badly Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Status Quo Joe perform among independent voters. This is each candidate's projected performance among only independent Iowa voters likely to participate in the Democratic caucuses tomorrow:

• Bernie- 34% (+13)
• Status Quo Joe- 14% (-6)
• Klobuchar- 10% (-2)
• Elizabeth- 5% (-10)
• Mayo- 9% (-8)
• Yang- 7% (+4)
• Steyer- 3% (same)
• Tulsi- 5% (+3)
• Bloomberg- 3% (+2)

I also want to mention one more metric Polly measured-- support for each candidate by gender. Bernie wins among males, beating Biden 26 to 14% and wins among females, beating Biden 21 to 20%. So who is against Bernie-- these corporations funding the Republican wing of the Democratic Party's (Third Way) vicious attacks against him with over a million dollars worth of TV advertising smears in Iowa:

Good target for progressives: CVS

Speaking of which, there are Democratic Party sore losers... like Hillary Clinton, once a Republican Party operative in Illinois who then moved to Massachusetts where she rose in the GOP ranks and spent her teens and twenties as a hard-core Republican. And she's still that kind of person. What kind of person? Have you ever met a Republican? I have. And I've met Hillary Clinton-- several times-- and she's the same kind of creep, which is why I just could not bring myself to vote for her in 2016. And why her repugnant attacks on Bernie come as no surprise to me whatsoever. (And, yes, that said, she was still a better candidate than Joe Biden!)

Get involved-- no matter where you live, no matter who you are. Let's not stick ourselves with another lesser of two evils candidate the DNC thrusts on us as "inevitable," the way they did in 2016. There's a great candidate running, great in the way Franklin Roosevelt was great. I hope I see another great president-- the first in my lifetime-- and I hope this guy does too. Don't feel sad... feel inspired.

Should We Think Of Trump As An Illiterate Buffoon Or As Someone With A Disability?

One of the reasons why I don't like using RealClearPolitics' polling averages is because they include Rasmussen, a company known for delivering polling numbers their clients pay for. But even with a ridiculous Rasmussen poll included, the RealClearPolitics polling average for Trump's job approval shows that just 45.2% of the electorate approves of the job he's doing, as opposed to 52.3% who don't. A more accurate poll, by Morning Consult in mid-December, shows that just 41% of registered voters approve and 56% disapprove. That 41% approve of the job Trump is doing is mortifying, not about Trump but about our countrymen.

David Graham's essay in Monday's Atlantic, The President Who Doesn't Read, might confirm your decision to oppose Trump. The the ignoramuses who approve of the job Trump is doing-- whether 41% or 45.2%-- actually like him more precisely because he is allergic "to the written word" and to them his reliance on oral communication is anything but a liability in office. He's just like they are, just like the moron they used to watch on that TV sitcom he presided over that caused them too aspire to be just like him-- and to vote for him.

In Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff wrote that Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time. Wolf: "He didn't process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate." Wolff quoted Gary Cohen: "It’s worse than you can imagine... Trump won’t read anything-- not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored." Trump himself: "I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you."




Graham: "In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon." Trump prefers to absorb his information on TV-- especially on TV that talks admirably about him. Wolf painted an ugly picture: "If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls-- the phone was his true contact point with the world-- to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another."

Trump has always loved the telephone: Stories of him calling business associates and friends, or reporters, whether under his own name or pseudonyms, litter his business career. (There are limitations, Wolff suggests: Aides found that Trump “could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.”) His conversations with friends are a crucial source of information and pressure release. Shortly after taking office, per The Times Trump told a friend, “I can invite anyone for dinner, and they will come!” The ability to invite-- and one presumes call-- anyone and have them reply flatters Trump’s ego and seems to be one of the few parts of his position that he enjoys.

In view of this oral fixation, Trump’s affection for Twitter is not as paradoxical as it seems. It requires only 140, and now 280, characters at a time, is often fed by what he’s watching on TV, and it is only outgoing: The president need not read himself to tweet effectively. The conversationality of Twitter fits his M.O., too. While Trump is billed as the author of many books, it’s clear he didn’t actually write them. Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz savaged him during the campaign, while Trump has blamed errors in other books on mysterious speechwriter Meredith McIver. It’s not like these books are great literary achievements, anyway. What Trump imparts to them is his conversational shtick. Unlike past presidents, there’s little evidence of a written record of letters or other correspondence, either. The paradigmatic Trump epistle is a cease-and-desist letter from counsel.

Trump’s particular affection for television is notable. As a Baby Boomer, he is a member of a generation raised on television and still especially fond of it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people in Trump’s age cohort watch an average of four hours of television a day, meaning his reported four-to-eight-hour habit is only somewhat greater than the norm. But that demographic also spends the most leisure time reading-- almost an hour a day, per the BLS, by far the greatest of any age group.

There’s a reason so many 65-to-74-year-olds read a lot: Many of them are retired, and don’t have to do work. Trump, by contrast, has one of the most demanding jobs in the world. One reason that it’s demanding, however, is that the holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading, and there’s little to suggest that Trump is doing that. Instead, he has taken that time up with phone conversations, television, and golf, another forum for oral communication. (Per Philip Bump, Trump played golf every 4.7 days in 2017, good for 10 full 24-hour days and far higher than Obama’s rate as president.)

Trump denies this, of course. “All my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office-- in other words, when you're president of the United States,” he said earlier this year. “So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle.”

The president's actions show little such sign of preparation and study, while displaying faulty understandings of many things. After visiting Saudi Arabia and hitting it off with the country’s leaders, he forcefully backed Riyadh in its dispute with Qatar and many other issues, over the objections of some of his staff-- even publicly contradicting Tillerson. In December, however, he suddenly became concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The minimal thought put into several of Trump’s core views on China became clear when President Xi Jinping was able to change his entire view of the Korean incident in 10 minutes-- 10 minutes of oral conversation, of course.

Then there was his more recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel and move the U.S. Embassy there. That decision was controversial but not without defenders, and the U.S. insisted the move did not settle the final status of Jerusalem in peace talks with the Palestinians. Apparently Trump did not get (or perhaps did not read) the memo, because in a tweet earlier this week he said that the U.S. had “taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table,” rattling both Israelis and Palestinians.

The refusal to read, and the resulting limits of Trump’s understanding of complicated issues, doesn’t mean that every decision he makes is bad. Indeed, it can be liberating-- allowing him to act on instinct, even in the face of expert reservations. My colleague Krishnadev Calamur, for example, writes that the anger that led the White House to freeze aid to Pakistan this week is understandable. But the shaky grasp of the underlying currents means Trump is more likely to blunder on any given case, and Trump’s misstatements and missteps earn him mockery and undermine his stature around the world.

Perhaps no single area better summarizes Trump’s strange tendency than his press shop. He was reportedly driven to distraction by Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s ill-fitting suits and bumbling demeanor, and eventually Spicer was pushed out in favor of Sarah Sanders, a calmer and more commanding force in the Brady Room. But in its written work, the White House press team continues to commit errors and gaffes and issue typo-flecked statements.

While most problems faced by presidential administrations are incredibly complex, the solution to problems caused by a president who does not read is fairly simple: He ought to start reading. Simple and easy are very different matters, though, and expecting a man who has always preferred chatting and watching television to the printed word to become a reader at 71 would be foolish. There’s no Trump pivot, especially not to the bookshelf.

Since we're talking about words, you can't imagine how excited I was the other day to see RJ Eskow did a Progressive's Guid To Corporate Dem-Speak. Unless is the first week you're reading DWT, you likely already know how insane it makes me to see people misuse words like "moderate" and "centrist." Eskow tackled the latter but not the former, presumably because it's the corporate media more than corporate Dems who are the culprits in the misuse of "moderate." Eskow introduced his piece by nothing that "Certain words and phrases are routinely used by 'centrist' political candidates. By design, these terms are imprecise, emotionally charged, and often self-contradicting. In fact, the word 'centrist' is just such a term, since polling shows that the economic viewpoint of these candidates-- especially regarding health care, Social Security, education and other social programs-- is often well to the right of the general public. In his guide to centrist terminology I had an initial impression that he was mostly thinking about Mayo Pete, until I read it a few times and realized it was primarily a critique of Status Quo Joe.

• Centrist: Someone who presents a corporate-friendly agenda with less fervor than the typical Republican, with a modest measure of regulation as demanded by circumstances and with a patina of social liberalism.

• Choice (when applied to a public good): A word used as an attempt to distract people from the flawed state of the American social contract by forcing them to choose from an array of semi-functional, overpriced private-sector products. This allows policymakers to subsidize private corporations at public expense, while at the same time providing the public with something that loosely resembles-- but is not-- a functioning social safety net.

• Compete (as in, “prepare workers of the future to compete”): A word used to describe what workers will be required to do to survive in the new, Randian economy. For example, to become competitive, workers are sometimes expected to run through a gauntlet of poorly conceived and insufficiently funded educational programs to re-train them for the “new economy” (defined below), often under the assumption that there is a secret app designer hiding inside every laid-off manufacturing employee. To “compete” after training, workers should be prepared to fight like crabs in a barrel for low-paying jobs that provide no employment security or benefits. (See also: “Jobs of the future,” defined below.)

• Free stuff: A term of contemptuous dismissal for public services that are commonly available in other developed countries, and which any decent society would make available to all human beings.

• Friend of mine (as in, “John McCain was a friend of mine”): A declaration of sentimental attachment not only to an individual across the aisle, but also to a long-passed era of comity between powerful individuals from both political parties. The term reflects an unwillingness to accept the cynicism and depravity of today’s GOP. It may also indicate a willingness to use “bipartisanship” as a cover for offering conservative policies by pretending they are needed to attract Republican votes (which they will not do).

• Health care consumers: People who are forced to choose from a bewildering array of inadequate private health options, based on future needs they can’t anticipate, as offered by private corporations that benefit financially by confusing them now and denying them medical care later. The word “consumers” allows policymakers to accuse individuals of not being “smart shoppers” when things go wrong, thereby deflecting blame away from both themselves and the corporations.

• “I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on bold ideas”: I don’t have any bold ideas.

• “I know how to get things done”: I intend to keep using a political approach that hasn’t gotten anything done for years.

• “I will not raise taxes one penny on the middle class”: I’ll let corporations keep ripping the nearly-vanished “middle class” off instead, charging people more than they’d pay in taxes while providing less in services-- and without public oversight or accountability.

• “I’m pragmatic”: I don’t believe that a country that won two world wars, rebuilt its economy with the New Deal after the Great Depression, created Medicare and Social Security, developed the internet at public expense, and sent several manned missions to the moon can do big things.

• “Ideology” (as in, “I don’t believe in rigid adherence to any political ideology”)" A pejorative term for principles and/or core values.

• “Jobs of the future”: Menial piecework tasks, parceled out through apps that force workers into 12-hour days in the hopes they can eke out a living through a lifetime of endless servility.

• “Managed competition”: Managed confusion. (See “Choice,” above.)

• “New economy”: Same as the old economy (circa 19th century), but the boss wears a turtleneck or a hoodie.

• “Our country needs to balance its budget like a family sitting around the kitchen table”:

Definition 1: I don’t understand how finance works.
Definition 2: I don’t want you to understand how finance works.

• “Pipe dream”: Any bold idea I don’t support.

• “Privatization”: Theft of public resources.

• “Public/private partnership”: See above; the exploitation of public resources for private profit.

• “Purity test”: Any belief or policy I won’t espouse because it would alienate my funders, but that I won’t openly oppose because it’s popular with voters. It implies that people who support it are rigid and unreasonable, rather than principled and thoughtful.

• “Reaching across the aisle”: A coded message to big-money donors that you will not fight for the policies you claim to believe in.

• “Realistic” (as in, “Your proposal (backed by a large majority of voters) isn’t realistic”): We don’t live in a functioning democracy and I don’t plan to do anything about it.

• “Rich kids/Trump’s kids” (as in, “I don’t want to give free college to Donald Trump’s kids”): 1) I believe that social program X is a commodity, not a public good; 2) if I really cared about economic inequality, I’d raise taxes on the Trumps of this world to pay for it, and 3) my logic could be applied to elementary schools, too, so I hope you don’t think about what I’m saying too much.

• “Something we can get done” (as in, “The public option is something we can get done”): A cautious proposal that can’t get passed as long as Republicans control the Senate, but will not inspire voters to turn the Senate Democratic. In other words, something that can’t get done.

• “Universal coverage”: The stated goal of providing every American with inadequate health insurance that ensures neither financial security nor decent medical care.

• “You can be progressive and practical at the same time”: I am neither progressive nor practical.

Yesterday the New York Times published their Of Course Bernie Can Win editorial-- and by Bret Stephens, no less. If you missed it, it's worth reading the whole thing. I'm sure the Biden and Trump campaigns did, carefully. It begins with a quote from Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. What's he got to do with feeling the Bern? "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-- and you are the easiest person to fool." The Times made that relevant to the 2020 election by revising it slightly: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself that Bernie Sanders can’t win-- not just the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency itself."

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

According to the theory, Sanders’s support has a hard ceiling: It may be intense, but it’s also cultlike and off-putting. Too many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly (even if he insists it’s of a more benign variety). He embraces nearly all of the same policies, like Medicare for all, that raised Elizabeth Warren high in the polls but are now dragging her down.

And then there are those clips of him saying nice things about the Soviet Union, or defending the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, or finding the silver lining in the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Didn’t Jeremy Corbyn, whose ideological affinities run in the same direction, just lead Britain’s Labour Party to disaster?

It all sounds superficially convincing-- and eerily familiar. It’s what many conservatives kept saying about Donald Trump around this time four years ago.

As with Sanders, Trump was seen as being way outside his party’s mainstream: a protectionist in a party of free traders; an isolationist in a party of interventionists; a libertine in a party of moralists. As with Sanders, Trump barely belonged to the party whose nomination he sought. As with Sanders, Trump’s message was that he was fighting a “rigged system.”

And as with Sanders, the ideological distaste for Trump among conservatives was matched to the conviction that he couldn’t possibly win. Let’s Elect Hillary Now, was the title of one conservative lament about the popularity of supposedly unelectable Republicans, written toward the end of 2015. I know the article well because I wrote it.

Trump won because he was willing to say loudly what his supporters believed deeply; because, in his disdain for what politicians are supposed to be and do, he exuded authenticity; because he was hated by the people his base found hateful; because he had an opponent who, in the minds of his supporters, epitomized corruption and self-dealing; and because he offered radical cures for a country he diagnosed as desperately ill. Despite being the oldest man ever elected president, he seemed (to his voters) fresh, true, bold, and sorely needed.

So it is, and would be, with Sanders. Depth of conviction? Check. Contempt for conventional norms? Check. Opposed by all the right people? Check. Running against a “crooked” opponent? Check. Commitment to drastic change? Check. Like Trump, too, he isn’t so much campaigning for office as he is leading a movement. People who join movements aren’t persuaded. They’re converted. Their depth of belief is motivating and infectious.

The strength of Sanders’s movement is reflected in his blowout fund-raising numbers-- nearly $100 million for 2019-- which only rose in the wake of his heart attack. If Sanders wins Iowa (where polls have him in a dead heat for first), and New Hampshire (where he has a slight lead), then the argument about his supposed non-electability will begin to crumble-- including among older black voters, who have so far been among Joe Biden’s most important pillars of support.

But even if Sanders won the nomination, how would he win the election? Perhaps more easily than people suspect.

Intensity among Democratic-leaning voters will never be greater. There will likely be no third-party challenger like Ralph Nader to shave his margin, or an influential “NeverSanders” wing among liberal pundits. He will find crossover support from former Trump voters in places like Ohio and Michigan, just as Trump found it from former Obama voters. To energize African-American support, he could choose Eric Holder or Stacey Abrams as his running mate.

Nor will scare tactics work any better against Sanders than they did against Trump. Overwrought comparisons with Hugo Chávez will wear thin, just as comparisons between Trump and Benito Mussolini did. The easiest move in American politics is to show yourself to be less scary than your caricature. Ronald Reagan’s devastating “There you go again” line against Jimmy Carter can be a Sanders quip, too.

Stephens concludes with some conservative nonsensical palaver but admits in the end, despite his own ideological preferences, that "To say Sanders is unelectable is indefensible." He's not quite ready-- nor will he ever be-- to agree that Bernie will be America's greatest leader-- only great leader-- since Franklin Roosevelt.

No One Will Beat Trump Whose Only Offering Is That He's Not As Bad As Trump Is

Biden is such a effing mess, that his latest bullshit just moved me to call him Biden-- which I’ve been avoiding since he announced his desperate end of life candidacy-- instead of the preferred Status Quo Joe. Just as Democrats are making some headway in getting Moscow Mitch to consider calling some witnesses for Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, Biden had to go give him and Trump the ammo they were waiting for to back away. Can’t this asshole learn to keep him mouth shut while he’s still a candidate people are paying attention to? He told the Des Moines Register editorial board, on tape, that-- just like the Trump Regime criminals-- he will not comply with a subpoena issued by Congress. Isn't that one of the counts Trump is being charged with-- obstruction of Congress? Biden should quit the race today. “The reason I wouldn’t,” he said, stupidly, “is because it’s all designed to deal with Trump doing what he’s done his whole life: trying to take the focus off him. The issue is not what I did. This is all about a diversion. And we play his game all the time. He’s done it his whole career.”

It was like pulling teeth to get him to do it but he finally-- kicking and screaming the whole time-- released a list of the rich crooks who are bundling for him (i.e., hopeful future ambassadors). His corrupt campaign conveniently released the list Friday night at 9:30 PM, during the deadest week of the media calendar, between Christmas and New Years. The other 7 times Biden ran or tried to run for president, he was knocked out of the running within weeks. He’s lasting longer mostly because Trump is even more of a disgusting, repulsive hack than he is. Unfortunately, Status Quo Joe can’t win a general election, not even against Trump. He’s much worse than Hillary and he doesn’t have the idea of at least shattering a glass ceiling working for him. He’ll have nothing working for him at all outside of lockstep Democratic voters and shared hatred of Trump. So who’s the best bet to beat Trump? Well, Bernie-- And there’s a big bonus there. Not only will he beat Trump, he would be the only actually transformative and great president in almost all of our lifetimes (exception: people in their 80s and 90s).

Meagan Day and Matt Karp explained why Bernie is the most electable in a Jacobin essay about a week ago. “While every other general election matchup seems likely to descend into the bleak and muddled culture clash of 2016,” they wrote, “a contest between Sanders and Trump would present American voters with a stark choice: the populist who wants to win you health care and cancel your debt, or the rich prick who doesn’t care if you live or you die so long as your boss gets paid. Trump’s true electoral weakness is not his loutishness, his congenital lying, or even his personal corruption. It’s his function as a tool of the rich man’s Republican Party, and his blatant disinterest in making life better for the vast majority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Over the last forty years, no politician in America has focused as frankly or relentlessly on the unnecessary economic hardship faced by ordinary people as Bernie Sanders. This bread-and-butter emphasis is part of what has made Sanders the most popular presidential candidate in the field, especially among independent voters. And in a general election-- on a scale far larger than any primary contest-- no one is better prepared than Sanders to use that popular economic weapon to annihilate Donald Trump.”

For Democrats still scarred by the memory of November 2016, it is easy to imagine that Donald Trump is an electoral juggernaut, endowed with awesome and occult powers. But the truth is closer to the opposite: Trump is a historically unpopular leader who won a narrow electoral college victory over an equally unpopular rival.

Beyond a core of die-hard Republicans, most Americans don’t like Trump at all. Since his first few months in office, Trump’s overall approval rating has hovered between 38 and 42 percent, making him by far the most consistently disliked president in modern US history. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, the last two incumbents to lose an election, had much better numbers than Trump over their first three years in office.

Even in the key swing states where he defeated Hillary Clinton-- Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania-- Trump’s approval rating has been consistently underwater for over a year now.

Trump can be beaten, and the way to do it involves winning three key groups of voters in these Rust Belt battlegrounds: first, the Democrats and independents who backed Obama twice before turning to Trump; second, Obama voters who declined to vote in 2016; and third, the even larger group of Americans who do not typically vote at all.

There is reason to believe that on purely hard-headed electoral grounds, Sanders is the Democrat with the best chance to win back disaffected Obama supporters in the Rust Belt. Targeted polling of Obama-Trump voters shows Sanders and Joe Biden with a significant edge over Elizabeth Warren in Michigan and Wisconsin; while Biden still seems strongest in Pennsylvania, the differences are small.

But the real kicker is that in the 206 counties that went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Trump in 2016, Sanders has out-fundraised all of his competitors-- by a long shot. By September 2019, he pulled in 81,841 individual donations from 33,185 donors in these flipped counties. That’s roughly three times as many as Biden, Warren, or Pete Buttigieg.

This high volume of individual small-dollar donations in Obama-Trump counties (and the “sticky support” it indicates) shows that Sanders has strong grassroots support in those places-- which makes sense, given that his political message is targeted to people whose lives get harder as elites grow richer. That captures the experience of many working-class people in the deindustrialized Rust Belt, abandoned by corporations in search of cheaper labor and higher profits elsewhere.

The most detailed study of these decisive swing voters comes from two Johns Hopkins political scientists who recently confirmed what other analysts have understood for a while: “economic anxiety” did, in fact, play a crucial role in the 2016 election. A close look at the American National Elections Survey data shows that Obama-Trump voters in 2016 were, on average, more worried about their “current financial situation” than either Romney-Trump or Obama-Clinton voters.

Obama-Trump voters were also far more likely than party-line Republicans (and just as likely as party-line Democrats) to believe that “rich people buy elections,” and to support higher taxes on the rich. And they were more likely than both Republicans or Democrats to oppose free-trade agreements that cost American jobs.

Trump wooed and won these Obama voters, the Johns Hopkins authors conclude, with a combination of “bandwagon bigotry” and “economic populism.” In 2020, Republicans will surely attempt to fire up the bigotry machine again. If Democrats cannot answer with a credible alternative economic agenda-- one that spells real change-- they are doomed to lose these voters all over again, and probably the election too.

Despite his residual popularity among Democrats stemming from the Obama years (now fading fast), Joe Biden cannot deliver this message.

He opposes strong measures to tax the ultra-rich; it is no coincidence he has more billionaire donors than any candidate in the race, Trump included. Worst of all, Biden has no credibility as an economic populist: he has devoted much of his political life to supporting free trade, including NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and permanent normal trade relations with China.

In a general election, Biden’s long record as a friend to banks and outsourcing businesses-- not to mention his son’s lucrative service on the board of a Ukrainian gas company-- will surely suffocate any Democratic attempt to battle Trump on economic grounds. Instead, a Biden-Trump contest stands every chance of offering a glassy-eyed sequel to the 2016 charade that put Trump in the White House. Of the two candidates polling competitively in the Rust Belt swing states, only Bernie Sanders can actually make the economic case Democrats need to win.

Just ask important as Obama-Trump voters are the millions of Obama voters who did not cast a ballot in 2016. Any good autopsy of the last presidential election will emphasize that turnout in key states was dismal. In Wisconsin, for example, turnout was down 3 percent from 2016, and in Ohio it was down 4 percent. In order to win, those margins need to be recovered or exceeded by Trump’s opponent in 2020.

Some commentators are quick to attribute low turnout in 2016 to restrictive voting laws, implying that nothing can be done to bring voters back to the polls. But then how to explain the fact that 1.7 million people cast incomplete ballots in these states and others, declining to vote for any presidential candidate-- far more than had been the case in 2012?

In Michigan, Donald Trump won by about ten thousand votes, while seventy-five thousand people cast ballots but declined to register a presidential preference. Meanwhile, nearly 3 million eligible voters didn’t even bother to go to the polls.

The Pew Research Center found that, nationwide, non-voters’ top reason for abstaining in 2016 was that they “did not like candidates or campaign issues.” Twenty-five percent of nonvoters cited distaste for both candidates as their rationale for staying home, compared to only 13 percent in 2012 and 8 percent in 2000.

The truth is that many people in swing states-- including many otherwise loyal Democratic voters-- were not sufficiently excited by Hillary Clinton, who they rightly associated with business-as-usual politics. And the very real “economic anxiety” that helped turn some white Obama voters toward Trump, as Malaika Jabali’s reporting has shown, helped dissuade many black Obama voters from casting a ballot in 2016, especially in battleground cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

The Obama voters who stayed home in 2016, one targeted survey has found, are focused overwhelmingly on bread-and-butter issues, with a larger share (64 percent) emphasizing the economy, health care, Medicare, and Social Security than registered voters as a whole (55 percent), or even the famously precarious Obama-Trump voters (58 percent).

If you think this suggests that these critical voters might be receptive to Bernie Sanders’s message of healthcare, education, and good jobs for all, you are right: Bernie’s favorability among this group (+38 percent) far surpasses Elizabeth Warren’s (+16 percent) and exceeds Joe Biden’s (+35 percent).

But perhaps the strongest argument for Bernie Sanders concerns a much larger group than any slice of disaffected Obama voters: the tens of millions of people, over 40 percent of the country, who typically do not vote in presidential elections.

American nonvoters, including nonvoters in the battleground states, are disproportionately young, non-white, and working-class. Bernie is distinctly popular with all of these groups, suggesting that he is by far our best shot to mobilize this vast slumbering army in a general election against Trump.

In the 2016 primaries, more people under thirty voted for Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined. Today, Sanders is the overwhelming favorite in the Democratic Party primary among young people. Trump’s approval rating among people under thirty is pathetic, but as we learned four years ago, that’s no guarantee that every young person who scorns Trump will show up to vote against him.

Democrats have a choice: either nominate a challenger who excites young people and can turn them out en masse, or hand the nomination to someone who doesn’t motivate them, greasing the wheels for a Trump victory.

Young black and Latino voters are especially enthusiastic about Bernie. Although he currently trails Joe Biden among older black primary voters, these voters are reliable Democrats and will likely come to the polls no matter the nominee. In Rust Belt and Sun Belt swing states alike, the crucial margin of victory may come down to the Democratic candidate’s ability to bring young people of color who are typically less inclined to vote to the polls. No politician in America is better suited to do that than Sanders.

And finally, an umbrella category: Sanders is the candidate of the working class, which encompasses most young and non-white people but also plenty of older white people too.

His supporters are the least likely of all the Democratic primary candidates to have a college degree. In the primary field, Sanders receives the lion’s share of individual donations from nurses, teachers, retail workers, servers, tech workers, truck drivers, and construction workers.

By contrast, Biden gets the most donations from company presidents, attorneys, real-estate developers, and investors.

People who work for a wage make up the majority of the US population, and low-wage workers make up the majority of people who don’t vote. Nearly three quarters of nonvoters in 2016 had a family income of less than $75,000.

If we want the sometimes-- or never-voters in swing states to turn out on election day, that candidate needs to have broad working-class appeal. That candidate needs to be Bernie Sanders.

Sanders has been crushing Trump in head-to-head polls for years now, and his lead is especially strong among lower-propensity voters. A recent SurveyUSA poll showed that in a matchup with Trump, Bernie actually runs a few points better than Biden (and much better than Warren) among voters making less than $80,000, and with voters who describe themselves as “poor” or “working class.” And those are just people who are already registered. Of the major Democratic candidates, Sanders clearly has the best chance to awaken the sleeping giant of young and working-class nonvoters and bring them into the electorate.

The United States has some of the lowest voter turnout in the world. Given the pervasive political alienation of the working class here, no single election is going to put us on par with nations like Belgium or Sweden, where over 80 percent of the voting age population casts ballots, compared to our paltry 55 percent in the 2016 presidential election. But precisely because the proportion of nonvoters is so large in the US, an uptick in turnout among people who don’t usually vote could be a decisive factor in 2020.

Bernie Sanders can draw people who don’t normally vote out of the woodwork. Nobody else can.

…You wouldn’t know it from mainstream media commentary, but Sanders has been relatively tender with his primary opponents so far. That’s because the rules of primary elections are different from those of general elections: primary candidates run the risk of alienating would-be supporters with harsh criticism of their opponents in a way that general election candidates typically don’t.

In a general election, we might expect Sanders to behave a bit more like he did during his first Senate race against Republican megamillionaire Rich Tarrant.

By 2006, Vermont was clearly trending Democratic, but just six years earlier, Republican Senator Jim Jeffords had won re-election by 40 points. Sensing an opportunity, Tarrant poured millions of his own money into the race, aiming to label Sanders-- still a socialist curiosity on the national stage-- as an out-of-touch Burlington radical.

But Bernie too took the gloves off against “Richie Rich,” activating his base of small donors and lambasting his opponent’s effort to buy the election as a symptom of the rigged economy. In the most expensive Senate campaign in Vermont history, Sanders won by 33 points.

If Sanders brought that kind of unbridled energy to a general election against Donald Trump, it would amount to perhaps the most high-profile spectacle of class conflict in the modern history of American electoral politics.

The campaign ad practically writes itself. In 1940s New York City, two boys were born only a few years and a few miles apart.

One, the son of a real-estate tycoon, grew up in a white-pillared mansion, literally doing his paper route from the back of his father’s limousine.

The other, the son of a penniless immigrant whose family was killed in the Holocaust, grew up in a cramped Brooklyn apartment, sleeping on a trundle bed in the living room.

One, educated in the best private schools money could buy, devoted his life to the pursuit of profit and power, abusing tenants, stiffing workers, and flaunting his wealth in New York’s highest society circles.

The other spent his life working in the trenches on behalf of the vast majority-- protesting segregation in Chicago, protecting poor tenants in Burlington, fighting for workers in Washington, and taking aim at the pampered elite who rule the economy from their penthouses.

This is a dynamic that we’ve never seen before in a presidential election. In fact, we’ve rarely seen anything like it in modern US history at all, so submerged has class politics been beneath the bipartisan pro-corporate consensus and its pablum about meritocracy and the marvels of capitalist free enterprise.

The self-seeking billionaire versus the lifelong crusader for the working class: it would be potent, resonant, and emblematic of the deep economic divide that people intuitively understand but don’t yet have the language for. It would be the kind of epic symbolic rivalry in which you can imagine people taking a side for the first time in their lives.

When people say that Sanders is a risk, they usually mean that his platform and his rhetoric are too far outside the Democratic political mainstream for comfort. But at this juncture in history, comfort itself is a risk. The Right has taken advantage of the public’s appetite for transformation in order to further enrich the masters of the universe. His opponents will have to take advantage of that same appetite to do the very opposite.

Sanders’s ambitious agenda represents a dramatic departure from the neoliberal Democratic consensus, and that’s exactly what we need to win. If we want to beat Trump and build a countervailing force capable of taking on the systems and institutions that produced him, we can’t afford not to nominate Bernie Sanders.

Biden's Campaign Is Confusing Name Recognition With Electability-- Don't Take The Bait

Remember what Chris Hayes said about looking at the 2020 candidates as the cycle kicked off? I saved the video to remind you. Let's use it as a quick lens to look at Status Quo Joe. Who will he fight for? What will he fight for? Well, who has he always fought for? His own career, his family, his family's lobbying clients, Big Banks, Wall Street, corporate America, the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about. Can he be trusted to do what he says? According to PolitiFact, 84% of Trump's checked statement have been lies. No one can compete with that... but Biden comes closer than any other politician. PolitiFact finds 60% of his checked statement to be lies. Trump is worse but, that bar is too low and it doesn't excuse the fact that most of what Biden says is a lie, some of it said to mislead and some of it said because his brain no longer functions adequately. So, no, Joe Biden's conflicting promises to various groups cannot be-- should not be-- trusted.

Grace Panetta, writing for Business Insider over the weekend, warned that it would be a mistake to buy into the hype that Biden is the most electable of the 2020 candidates. It's the narrative his creaky campaign is pushing, but he isn't the most electable at all. His big poll numbers come from name recognition among voters who are least likely to be following the primary carefully and from two important cohorts of Democratic primary voters that prioritize defeating Trump above all else: African American voters and voters in their 70s and 80s, much of the same coalition that decided Hillary was the most electable candidate.

When his wife tried to make a case for him last week, she didn't claim his pathetic healthcare plan was any good on the merits-- it isn't-- she just said issues don't matter and we should defeat Trump. In effect: just sign on the dotted line and we'll work out the details later. In general, that approach appeals to people whose educations didn't go beyond high school more than it does people who went to college. Like many rich people, Biden doesn't understand Medicare and doesn't understand Medicare-For-All. He opposes Medicare-For-All and has offered to compromise away Medicare benefits in order to lower budget deficits. If he is-- God forbid-- elected president, that is exactly what he will do.

Biden's wife, reported Panetta, "acknowledged that even if Biden's plan isn't the best one and voters don't like it, they should hold their noses and vote for him anyway." Addressing Elizabeth Warren and Bernie supporters, Mrs Biden said, "Your candidate might be better on healthcare than Joe is, but you have to look at who is going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say 'I personally like so-and-so better,' but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.'" That's all they got... but is it enough?

Nope. His policy stances across the board are basically nothing but tepid, conservative, ineffective and incrementalist approaches to healthcare, Climate Change, immigration, Wall Street, criminal justice, wealth inequality and everything else. And his putrid record will haunt the primary campaign and if he wins, will give Trump all the weapons he needs to defeat him.

The electability argument has always been bogus. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were seen as the least electable when they first ran. Jeb Bush, then Scott Walker and Marco Rubio-- and then Hillary Clinton-- were seen as the most electable in 2016. Panetta: "As political scientist Seth Masket pointed out, hypothetical Quinnipiac University general election polls from February 2016 showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton handily defeating Trump by five percentage points, tied with Sen. Ted Cruz, and losing to Sen. Marco Rubio by seven percentage points. But Republicans nominated Trump anyway, and won."

In her argument for why Democratic primary voters should pick Biden over other candidates, Jill Biden cited the head-to-polling showing Biden leading Trump as the main reason undecided primary voters should back him over other candidates.

"You've got to look at the polls... and if they're consistent and they're consistently saying the same thing, I think you can't dismiss that... if your goal is to beat Donald Trump, we have to have someone who can beat him," she said.

Most recent poll-- last week-- for the first primary (New Hampshire) shows Biden trailing Bernie by a wide margin

Not only has the conventional wisdom on electability been wrong many times before, but hypothetical general election polls, like the ones Biden's camp is relying on, haven't historically been a very good predictor of who actually wins elections, as FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out in June.

At this point in the 2016 election-- late August 2015-- head-to-head matchups showed, on average, Clinton beating Trump 50% to 39%, a margin of victory of 11 percentage points. In the end, Clinton defeated Trump 48% to 46% in the popular vote and lost the electoral college.

In 2016, FiveThirtyEight also conducted a broader analysis of general election matchup polls from every presidential election from 1944 to 2012. They found head-to-head matchup polls conducted a year before presidential elections were, on average, 11 percentage points off the final result.

For example, former President Bill Clinton hardly seemed electable in the later months of 1991 when he was 21 percentage points behind George H.W. Bush in the polls, but ended up beating Bush by 5.6% in the popular vote after the US went into a recession.

Brand new polling from Colorado shows Bernie ahead of Biden and this graph shows them doing equally well against Trump

As one Hillary mouthpiece admitted: "Aside from the logic, telling us to settle now is way too early. There is no need to settle." And remember, Biden inspires no one. "Much like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden’s Democratic primary campaign has thus far cloaked itself in an aura of inevitability," wrote Bhaskar Sunkara Friday. "You might not like Joe Biden. He might say racist or sexist stuff from time to time. His gaffes might be occurring at an alarming rate. He might have uninspiring policy ideas. But he’s going to win the primary anyway, so you better get used to him." That's how many interpret his wife's case for voting for him.

The states that matter most in 2020 are not red Biden bastions like South Carolina; they are in the industrial Midwest, where Bernie is shown to consistently beat Trump by around 10 points

Sunkara reminds his readers that "Biden’s fundraising picture also looks less rosy than it did back in May. He’s still the preferred choice of big party donors, but grassroots enthusiasm is receding. After raising an impressive $4.6m online on this first day of his campaign in April, things have slowed to a trickle. As Politico reports, Biden’s median online daily fundraising by the end of June was just $67,000 a day, considerably below Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is an especially important benchmark for Biden. They seem to be competing over much the same base-- working class, diverse, not college educated-- and either would benefit from the other’s downfall. Despite a narrative earlier this summer of campaign dysfunction and imminent collapse, recent polls have showed that the Vermont senator in a steady position within striking distance of Biden. Sanders has a rabid base of volunteers, superior online fundraising infrastructure, and his existing support may even be undercounted by most polls.

Yet the media narrative continues to paint Sanders as a fringe pariah and Biden as the inevitable 2020 candidate. It’s reminiscent of the 2016 Republican primaries, in which Donald Trump was considered an unserious candidate whose support was continually underestimated. The serious commentators kept waiting for an establishment wave of moderate Republicans to make first Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, and then even Ted Cruz happen.

The case for Biden’s invincibility is especially baffling-- he’s been running for the Democratic nomination (and losing) since the 1980s. It simply boils down to Obama coalition supporters (particularly black and brown voters) going with the most familiar face to rid of Trump era upheavals.

But electability is just one element of what voters are looking for, and Biden is running on nothing else. He has failed to adequately address his past positions in favor of Medicare and Social Security cuts, his engineering of loathed free trade deals, or his opposition to important desegregation measures.

While other candidates are galvanizing people around Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and calls to redistribute wealth and power from the 1% to working Americans, Biden is offering nothing. Poke one hole in his electability bubble and his campaign looks ready to implode.

This early in the race things are constantly changing-- many people are still undecided and won’t start paying attention until much later on-- so we would do ourselves a lot of good not to live and die with every poll. However, if there is one lesson from the 2016 general election worth remembering it’s this: most people might have not liked Donald Trump, but he gave those who did a real reason to turn out on Election Day. He was a candidate with very obvious convictions running against someone who seemed to focus group and triangulate her every position.

Joe Biden is Hillary Clinton 2.0. Perhaps Trump’s time in office has been enough of a disaster that idea-avoidance will work this time. But if voters want to be inspired, they’ll turn elsewhere or just stay at home again.

One more thing on Biden this evening: his toxic brand of bipartisanship has always meant one thing: the Right winning... every.single.time. Branko Marcetic, noting that "if worship of the U.S. Constitution is an American civic religion, with the Founders as prophets and Capitol Hill as a place of worship, then bipartisanship is its holy sacrament," reminded us that "For Biden and his generation of Democratic lawmakers, bipartisanship has long been hailed as a worthy end in its own right, no matter the result. He has pledged that a new day will dawn once Trump is removed from the White House. 'This nation cannot function without generating consensus,' Biden said in May. 'You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.' But as moderator Chuck Todd told Biden at the first Democratic debate, 'It does sound as if you haven’t seen what’s been happening in the United States Senate over the last 12 years.'"

An increasingly far-right GOP has ruthlessly obstructed Democrats while dangling cooperation to lure them rightward. The outcome has been a disaster for progressives. The parties have cooperated to water down or kill left-leaning measures and advance a right-wing agenda, from shredding the New Deal to ramping up deportation, turning the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into graveyards of progressive policies. Democrats increasingly understand that, if they want to generate consensus, they’ll have to do it some other way than meeting a right-moving GOP in the “middle.”

... Joe Biden's political career is an exemplar of the price the Democratic Party paid as the Right slid into the dark reaches of the political spectrum.

As overt racism faded in polite society after the 1960s, those committed to beating back the advance of civil rights found proxy issues to dog whistle a racist tune: crime, drugs, welfare and busing. They found a willing partner in a 30-year-old freshman senator: Biden.

Biden hailed from Delaware, whose culture and borders straddled the Mason-Dixon line and whose political and economic life was dominated for decades by the Du Pont family that had helped jumpstart the rebellion against the New Deal. (As Biden would later assure a Republican Rotary Club in South Carolina in advance of his 2008 presidential run, Delaware, a slave state, had only “fought beside the North... because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”)

As conflict over court-ordered busing roiled his home state, Biden led a crusade against the civil rights measure, later boasting that he made it politically acceptable for other liberals to oppose it. He built alliances with Republican racists like Sen. Jesse Helms (NC) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (SC), the record-holder for longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour attempt to stall the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During the Reagan administration, Biden, Helms and Thurmond would help usher in an era of mass incarceration, working together to establish racist crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

Biden also led the way on budget-slashing: In 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (IA) and Nancy Kassebaum (KS), Biden put forward a budget “freeze” that cut deficits by $100 billion more than Reagan proposed and eliminated scheduled increases to Social Security and Medicare. Biden also ranked among the sizable number of Democrats who gave their stamp of approval to signature Reagan victories like increased military spending, privatization and lower taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was cutting his teeth in this same punishing era. In 1980, Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas after raising car license fees to fund highway repairs and trying to rein in the timber industry. The loss taught Clinton to eschew challenging corporate power and, instead, embrace what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg termed “the politics of ultraconsensus.”

While Clinton’s presidency is remembered as a time of partisan warfare, bipartisan consensus was a quiet fixture throughout. Clinton brought in his own personal Rasputin in the form of political operative Dick Morris, who laid his strategy out in a memo: “fast-forward the Gingrich agenda” to make “Republican issues less appealing” and take the wind out of their sails. Unbeknownst to Clinton, Morris also created a back channel to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS), a former client, whom he giddily told: “We’ll pass everything.”

“Everything” meant measures like welfare reform, a balanced budget, cuts to Medicare and an immigration overhaul that helped create the deportation state currently operated by Trump.

Biden was an important player in these bipartisan deals. As Senate Judiciary Chair under Clinton, Biden led the passage of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and worked to make sure Clinton would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” With Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (PA), Biden lamented “the polarizing partisanship and presidential politics that have permeated the issue” and insisted that a “tough, bipartisan welfare reform bill is easily within reach.” In 1996, the Senate passed welfare reform (what Lott described as “the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan”) thanks to the votes of 51 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

“These were great monuments to consensus in Washington,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? “They were just downstream of racism.”

Bipartisanship reached its apogee after September 11, when Biden swiftly became one of the most prominent Democrats to hitch himself to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks created a stunning uniformity of opinion, and Biden, up for reelection in 2002, would soon be heavily criticized in the Delaware press for a speech that appeared dovish. Biden told reporters they should count him “in the 90%” of voters who backed Bush. He stacked a hearing on Iraq with pro-war voices and made regular TV appearances parroting the administration’s talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, like 28 other Democratic senators, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

In 2008, Vice President Biden found a home with “postpartisan” Obama, who, Perlstein says, “was wedded to the myths of consensus in a way that a lot of his supporters hadn’t realized at the time.”

Obama had risen to stardom with his 2004 convention speech denying the existence of a “red” and “blue” America, a feeling that suffused Democratic politics. Nary a 2008 primary debate went by without Sen. Hillary Clinton (NY), for example, pledging something or other of a bipartisan nature: a “bipartisan process” to tackle Social Security, a “bipartisan way” on immigration reform, even “bipartisan diplomacy” headed by “bipartisan emissaries.”

But once president, “Republicans used Obama’s own longing for consensus and bipartisanship against him,” says Frank.

Obama ran aground upon a decidedly partisan opposition that took advantage of racist sentiments against him. He tried for months to secure minimal Republican buy-in on Obamacare so he could slap a “bipartisan” label on it, only for “moderate” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) to use it as leverage to endlessly delay and erode the bill. Obama ramped up deportations as a bipartisan gesture, and the GOP continued to obstruct immigration reform.

Nothing spoke more to Obama’s futile attempt to reach common ground with Republicans than his 2011 attempt at a “grand bargain” on cutting the deficit. Biden was dispatched to negotiate with a radically anti-tax, anti-government GOP. He capitulated to every Republican demand, including cuts to food stamps, Medicare and Social Security, while agreeing to rule out new taxes. Ironically, it was only thanks to the Tea Partiers’ obstinacy that the deal did not pass.

The public was not so lucky in 2010, when Biden made a deal with Sen. McConnell to extend unemployment insurance in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the estate tax. The deal was so lopsided that it outraged even conservative Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and prompted an eight-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. Two months later, in the midst of affectionately paying tribute to McConnell at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for the senator), Biden pointed to the deal as “the only truly bipartisan event that occurred in the first two years of our administration.”

“We both got beat up, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” Biden said. “The process worked.”

He explained to the audience that, whether they were liberals, conservatives, Tea Partiers or Blue Dogs, little actually divided members of Congress.

“We basically all agree on the nature of the problems we face,” Biden said, as McConnell, leading a historically radical campaign of obstructionism against the Obama administration, looked on.

A continuing faith in compromise may well be the last gasp of a dying era.

“A lot of the things that made bipartisanship sound attractive are now vestigial,” Perlstein says. “Like a lot of neuroses, it was a response that was useful for dealing with trauma that was present and important at the time, but has outlasted its usefulness.”

Or, as Robin says, bipartisanship is “a mourning for a neoliberal accord between Democratic and Republican party elites.”

Today’s Democrats increasingly recognize the folly of seeking progressive change by partnering with a GOP that’s fundamentally opposed to it. A new generation of Democratic lawmakers is taking a combative, unflinchingly progressive approach reminiscent of the 1979 class of freshmen GOP legislators that included Gingrich.

As Ocasio-Cortez told journalist Ryan Grim, “The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ [after Trump]. For us, it’s never been normal, and before that, the bipartisanship was shitty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, [the Defense of Marriage Act] and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything.”

These young progressives are backed by social movements whose adherents have no desire to cooperate with nativists and corporatists. Together, they are seeking to remake the existing governing consensus in their image, just as Reagan managed to do four decades prior. The irony is, they’d be following the Right’s own road to success.

“The rise of the Right is the closest thing we have to an example of a political success story in our time in America, and it was largely achieved by smashing consensus,” Frank says.

But MacLean warns it would be a mistake to believe that obstructionism alone is a path to victory. “The radical Right is winning now because its chief architects played a very sophisticated, well-funded, integrated long game and built a vast infrastructure that is well-aligned to achieve their agenda,” MacLean says.

For inspiration, today’s progressives might look back to the anti-slavery movement, which went from a relatively small band of uncompromising, “radical” activists to controlling the presidency and Congress.

“Abolitionists were never anywhere near a majority in the North or anywhere else,” says Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “They were a vanguard.”

Abolitionists worked at both the grassroots and official levels to enact change, whether through legislation and court decisions or direct action and education. They made pioneering use of cutting-edge technology such as the printing press, the railroad and the telegram to spread their message. Their efforts helped lead Abraham Lincoln to drastically shift his thinking, jettisoning ideas like gradual emancipation and instead embracing black citizenship.

“Abolitionists and radicals were able to shift the pendulum to the left, and were able to make moderates inhabit radical ground,” says Sinha. “In the end, it wasn’t the abolitionists who abolished slavery,” Foner says. “It was more moderate people like Abraham Lincoln. But without the abolitionists, there’s no Lincoln. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Political shifts require years of movement building, but change ultimately happens suddenly. Thirty years after the abolitionist movement took off, there were nearly 2 million more slaves in the United States. Three years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

“The abolitionist movement lasted for a long, long time, and for a long time failed abysmally,” Foner says. “Radicals have to not give up.”

The time is looking ripe for another hegemonic shift. The Trump administration has sparked a wave of political activism and organizing by Americans previously disengaged from politics. A bevy of socialist intellectual organs and figures have risen to newfound prominence, their arguments cited by mainstream news outlets and shared quickly and easily over the internet, much like the cheap, ephemeral books and magazines passed around by conservatives in the mid-20th Century. Workers are showing a renewed militancy, from the teachers who went on strike in red states across the country to the flight attendants who helped end the government shutdown in January.

Polls suggest the public has moved left, supporting everything from Medicare for All and the Green New Deal to a much higher minimum wage. Even as Trump stokes a racist anti-immigrant campaign, polling shows a public more pro-immigrant than ever.

Republicans will demonize these movements. The Democratic establishment will try to ignore them. But as the ranks of today’s radicals grow, and the more a concerted movement to remake the country expands, the harder it will be for even the most committed centrists to hew to their vision of consensus. As Biden told the audience at the McConnell Center eight years ago: “Reality has a way of intruding on one’s tightly held view.”