Imagine this: Donald Trump vs. Bernie Sanders in 2020 – Joe Biden has been president for two years. And Biden will be the Democratic nominee for 2024, assuming he runs for reelection. Biden is very much the mantle carrier for the Democratic Party; and it’s becoming more and more natural to see him as such.
But it wasn’t long ago that Biden was just one of many candidates in a crowded field, vying for the Democratic nominee. Actually, Biden often looked like he was on the outside looking in – especially in the dark days before his 2020 primary victory in South Carolina. Biden could have lost that nomination. Very easily. Imagine if he had, how different things may have been. Imagine someone else taking the nomination, someone like Bernie Sanders, for example.
Bernie’s past campaigns
Bernie Sanders entered the 2020 race as something of a left-wing cult hero. He’d come out of nowhere to become a major player during the 2016 primary, where he almost upset the establishment pick, Hillary Clinton. While Sanders eventually lost the 2016 nomination, his candidacy was viewed as a progressive success for having injected left-wing issues into the primary.
For example, Bernie 2016 introduced Medicare for All to a wider audience; Bernie 2016 made taking big dollar donations from big money corporations uncool. In a party that was becoming increasingly technocratic, increasingly removed from the working-class that the party was – in theory – calibrated to help, Bernie, with his rants against billionaires and income inequality, restored some working-class credibility.
He gave the party some grit, some sense that it was still connected to the everyday American. He lost of course. The Democratic Party is a party by and for the professional-managerial class, and Hillary was their girl. But Bernie changed the conversation.
Bernie’s 2020 campaign wasn’t quite as cool. He was like the underground punk band who had been signed to a major label. The campaign wasn’t like some insurgency this time around, it had more of the feel of a legitimate, standard political endeavor – a big-time politician running a big-time campaign. And regrettably, by 2020, Bernie had adopted some of the more unfortunate social habits of the left, meaning, he went a little woke.
Whereas Bernie’s 2016 campaign stood above the trivial identity politics of the left, Bernie’s 2020 campaign dove right in, making full use of social media to do so. In the end, Bernie finished second with 26 percent of the delegates (Biden won with over 51 percent). But what if Bernie had pulled it off; what if Bernie had been the 2020 nominee?
Bernie as the 2020 nominee
The 2020 general election would have, of course, been drastically different had it featured Bernie v. Trump. Remember that Biden was in large part able to secure the Democratic nomination because he successfully marketed himself as being the only guy who could beat Trump in a general election. And remember that the 2020 election was a straight-up referendum on Trump; that was really the whole game.
Could Bernie have offered the average American a satisfactory alternative to Trump? It’s hard to say. Many Americans view Bernie as a bona fide socialist. And in 2020, progressives were going haywire, rioting in the streets, calling for the abolition of police forces.
As a result, much of the population was understandably wary with respect to the left-wing agenda. Bernie could well have exacerbated that wariness. Perhaps Bernie could have beaten Trump – but it would have caused for a closer contest than Biden v. Trump, which despite Trump’s denial, Biden won handily.
Yet whether ending in victory or defeat, Bernie as the 2020 nominee would have pushed the progressive agenda further into the mainstream, suggesting to the Democratic establishment that working-class values had political upside.
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Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
