It's Just Hard Work

David Sirota has been running a series of posts on the Senatorial bid of Rep. Bernie Sanders, (Democratic Socialist - Vermont).  As I read it, Bernie Sanders has two lessons to teach the Democratic Party.

First, that one can be an economic populist without the negative out-group Dixiecrat pandering to prejudice that flatters itself as "cultural conservatism".  And before all of the "centrists" and Republicans out there start parroting the Club For Growth talking points about how Vermont is just another ultraliberal East Coast Volvo-latte-hippie dystopia and shouldn't really count, let's do some math.

• Vermont has a Republican Governor and Lieutenant Governor.  The Republican Governor won the 2004 election by a margin of over 20 points. 

• Bernie Sanders outpolled John Kerry by 8.5 points statewide while splitting the non-Republican vote with a Democratic candidate and a candidate from the truly leftist Vermont Liberty Union party.  Sanders outpolled the Democratic candidate for the House by 60 percentage points statewide.

• Sanders won every precinct in Vermont but three.  In two of those precincts, both Kerry victories, the Democratic candidate split the non-Republican vote deeply enough for the Republican candidate to win a plurality.  The third was a rural precinct in which George Bush beat John Kerry 86.54% to 13.46% (45 votes to 7 votes).  In that precinct, Sanders lost to the Republican candidate 23 votes to 26 votes, with three votes going to the Democratic candidate.

• Sanders won in 4746 of the 4847 Vermont precincts in which George Bush beat John Kerry and in the one precinct where Bush and Kerry tied.  In all but three of those, Sanders beat the Republican candidate (his closest competitor) by double digit margins: he won ten precincts by more than 20%, fourteen precincts by more than 30%, and eleven precincts by more than 40%.  Remember, those are precincts where George Bush won while  Sanders split his vote with two non-Republican candidates, and Sanders didn't just beat his Republican opponent. Sanders destroyed his Republican opponent.

[Source material here and here.]

If the Republican voters of the South and Midwest are somehow terrifically different from the Republican voters of Vermont,  one does wonder if those differences are really the sorts of differences to which the Democratic Party should really be panderingcatering.  And that brings us to the second lesson.

The second lesson is more fundamental, less about strategy or tactics than it is about worldview.  From an interview of Sanders by In These Time:

As a leader you do what you can do. For Vermont, I use my office to do what other members of Congress do, trying to bring money back home and to vote the right way. But, unlike many other members of Congress, we also use our office to educate and organize. When people say Vermont is a progressive state, they have to understand that it wasn't always that way. There are a number of factors involved in that, but one of them is that we have held hundreds of town meetings, both congressional and campaign, in smaller towns and larger cities throughout the state. In Vermont we held the first congressional town meetings in the country on corporate control over the media and the USA Patriot Act. At a meeting last week in Springfield, Vermont, more than 250 people came out to talk about poverty. We use our office to educate and organize and to bring people together to discuss some of the most important issues facing this country. When people get the opportunity to talk about the real issues, it becomes clear how vacuous the present agenda is. I have never met anyone in Vermont who thinks it's a good idea to give tax breaks to billionaires and cut back on health care and education. Nobody. It's only when political consciousness is very low and people aren't talking about the real issues that somebody with a straight face can present the Bush agenda.

The lesson here is that responding to calls that the Democratic Party stand for something with the rote "The majority of the American people feel differently" misses the point entirely; that response is cowardice, which is always destined to lose.  It is the job of a leader to represent the interests of the people that he or she represents, and those interests are well served by educating the people.  That takes legwork, outreach, time, and most of all, constant effort and a constant demonstration that you are on their side.

The Republican Party knows this.  They spent thirty years and hundreds of millions of dollars in non-election efforts trying to reach out to the American people and change their  minds.  The conversion of the word "liberal" into an insult is just the obvious face of this effort.  Of course, the Republicans have chosen the low road of lying about their real agenda and using the worst, least generous impulses of their target audience to motivate their base. 

Rep. Sanders knows this as well.  He's chosen the high road.   It's possible.  It's just hard work.

- paperwight

[Updated 4th bullet to note that one of the precincts identified as a Bush win was a Bush-Kerry tie.  Sanders outpolled his Republican opponent by well over 23 points in that precinct:  the analysis holds.]