Bernie Sanders' Populist Passion Could Profoundly Impact the Iowa Caucus
This past weekend, the self-described newspaper "of record" decided that Bernie Sanders might possibly be a "credible challenge" to Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses. That was the verdict of a Sunday article in The New York Times (NYT).
In fact, the NYT - some eight months before people assemble in gyms and rooms throughout Iowa to decide the Democratic nominee for president - gave an official green light to the mass media (which had generally been ignoring Sanders as a candidate) to state that the senator from Vermont is "gaining momentum."
It's key to remember how important horse-race-like coverage of presidential campaigns is to generating viewership and profit for major media outlets. It would not be difficult to conflate ESPN with CNN in this regard: Sports and elections are covered very similarly.
How significant is the transition from the dominant media mostly ignoring Bernie Sanders as a presidential candidate to now taking him somewhat seriously, as indicated by the NYT article? To gain perspective on that, it is worthwhile to revew a key dynamic in the mass media coverage of the last presidential race Hillary Clinton in which Hillary Clinton ran.
After Barack Obama handily beat the heavily favored Hillary Clinton (who actually came in third after Obama and Edwards) in the 2008 Iowa Caucus, the mainstream media press reached a consensus: Obama won because his campaign had a better strategy for organizing supporters and getting them to the caucus sites.
Remember that caucuses are a form of direct democracy. There are no ballots to intervene. Literally, a person's body is his or her ballot. The number of physical voters bunched together in a designated spot for a candidate equals the number of votes for that candidate. The voting in caucus state primaries is transparent.
Obama's upset victory in Iowa planted the flag for his eventual Democratic nomination. His triumph became the basis for the mainstream corporate media conventional wisdom that Obama won the nomination due to a superior caucus state strategy. That, in part, is probably true.
What the babbling political pundits of 2008 didn't emphasize, however, was the importance of the emotional appeal of the candidate to the Iowa Caucus voters. The Republican primary in Iowa has generally recently leaned to the right (think of Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee - the two most recent GOP winners), because religious and far right-wing supporters are deeply emotionally motivated.
Clinton is still widely favored to win next year's Iowa caucuses, according to a Des Moines Register Poll posted on June 1. That may still be the case when the time comes for Iowans to caucus. However, it is quite possible that Clinton supporters might not be as motivated to leave their homes on a usually frosty winter evening - to participate in a process that may last three hours - as those who are fervently attached to a candidate who is willing to express outside-of-the-beltway populist thoughts and positions.
Obama's 2008 campaign was run more like a movement than a cookie-cutter campaign. It created strong emotional bonds with Obama's candidacy - as well as expectations that went largely unfulfilled as a movement candidate transitioned into a DC-insider president.
An article from The Nation reposted on Truthout this weekend, which has nearly 10,000 Facebook likes (as of this writing), declares, "Bernie Sanders to Billionaires: 'You Can't Have It All!'" Such statements invigorate voters who are tired of Washington catering to the wealthy and corporations.
The New York Times makes this observation in Monday's article on Sanders in Iowa: "Sanders is ready to rip into the oligarchs and plutocrats with a fury Democratic presidential contenders have rarely mustered since the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt bid for a second term."
In addition, the NYT quotes remarks FDR made during his 1936 second-term campaign:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering....
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
Bernie Sanders and FDR are certainly not clones - and while the Depression era shares some characteristics with today, it also was a unique historical period. And of course, the NYT's words do not presage a Sanders win in Iowa. After all, the Hawkeye State caucuses are months away.
However, it is important to emphasize that impassioned voters are more likely to brave Iowa winter weather to spend a chunk of their evening voting with their bodies for the candidate of their choice than those who simply indicate that they prefer a candidate in a poll.
Given such an analysis, Sanders could well become the upset story in 2016 in Iowa.
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