How It All Came Apart for Bernie Sanders
How It All Came Apart for Bernie Sanders
By
Alexander Burns and
Jonathan Martin
Updated 10:51 a.m. ET
The Sanders campaign appeared on the brink of a commanding lead in the Democratic race. But a series of fateful decisions and internal divisions have left him all but vanquished.
Senator Bernie Sanders and important members of his inner circle made a string of fateful decisions that left him ill positioned to win over skeptical Democrats.Erin Schaff/The New York Times
In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.
The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.
But the suggestion met with resistance.
Some senior advisers argued that it wasn’t worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.
Crucially, both
Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.
The warnings about Mr. Biden proved prescient: Two months later, Mr. Sanders is now
all but vanquished in the Democratic presidential race, after Mr. Biden resurrected his campaign in South Carolina and built an overwhelming coalition of
black voters and white moderates on Super Tuesday.
While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the
delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination. His efforts to regain traction have faltered in recent weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has frozen the campaign, and perhaps heightened the appeal of Mr. Biden’s safe-and-steady image.
In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events — most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign.
Mr. Sanders had been “on the brink of winning,” Mr. Tulchin argued, “until the most unprecedented event in the history of presidential primaries occurred.”
But interviews with more than three dozen Sanders aides, elected officials, activists and other people who worked with his campaign revealed a more extensive picture of his reversal of political fortune. Though Mr. Sanders climbed to a position of seeming dominance by mid-February, he and his inner circle also made a series of fateful decisions that left him ill positioned to win over skeptical Democrats — and sorely vulnerable to an opponent with Mr. Biden’s strengths.
Mr. Sanders proved unable to expand his base well beyond the left or to win over African-Americans in meaningful numbers. He failed to heed warnings from traditional party leaders, and even from within his campaign, about the need to modulate his message and unify Democrats. He allowed internal arguments to fester within his campaign, an ungainly operation that fragmented into factions beneath the only two real decision makers — Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane.
Though outwardly amiable, Mr. Sanders’s inner circle fractured between some long-serving counselors and relative newcomers, like Faiz Shakir, his campaign manager. Mr. Shakir and others regarded pleas from Mr. Tulchin and another pugilistic aide, David Sirota, to go on the attack against Mr. Biden as both futile and annoyingly predictable, while Mr. Shakir’s internal critics saw him as exceedingly territorial.
Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, at an event in Essex Junction, Vt., this month.Erin Schaff/The New York Times
There were also serious operational mistakes:
In South Carolina, the campaign effectively deputized a former Ohio state senator and loyal surrogate, Nina Turner, to direct strategy, rather than empowering a political strategist to run the pivotal early state. In private conversations, Mr. Sanders often touted his support from some younger African-Americans, seemingly missing the bigger picture.
And for all of Mr. Tulchin’s alarm in January about South Carolina, on the eve of the primary he was reassuring Mr. Sanders that a public poll showing him down over 20 percentage points in the state was “an outlier for good reason.”
In an email sent to Mr. Sanders and a group of senior aides,
Mr. Tulchin reminded the senator that their internal polling had him trailing Mr. Biden by only four points. Two days later, the former vice president would win South Carolina by nearly 30 points. 
Pollster’s Email to the Sanders Campaign About South Carolina
Internal polling showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. with a “narrow lead” in South Carolina, Bernie Sanders’s pollster told him.
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Perhaps the most significant factor, as with every presidential campaign, was
the candidate himself, and the stubborn ideological and stylistic consistency that both endeared Mr. Sanders to his supporters and limited his ability to build a majority coalition larger than his own progressive movement.
Mr. Sanders’s campaign declined to comment for this article.
It was
Mr. Sanders’s persistent lashing of the “political establishment” that concerned Representative Peter Welch, a liberal Democrat and fellow Vermonter who was one of just a few members of Congress to endorse Mr. Sanders’s campaign.
Mr.
Welch said he had reached out to the campaign last month to implore Mr. Sanders to ease up on that rhetoric, which Mr. Welch believed sounded exclusionary to ordinary people backing other candidates. After all, Mr. Welch said, there were “a lot of voters who are just everyday voters, who decided to vote for other Democrats.”
Mr. Sanders greeted supporters at a field office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in February. Hilary Swift for The New York Times
An Inner Circle Divided
It was late January when Zephyr Teachout, a liberal law professor allied with Mr. Sanders, wrote a column in The Guardian alleging that Mr. Biden had “a big corruption problem.” Mr. Sirota, the Sanders aide, who is known for his voluble and combative online persona, quickly blasted out her column to his large email list. A new phase of conflict between Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden seemed to be underway.
But Mr. Sanders put a stop to it. “It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way,” Mr. Sanders
told CBS News.
In private, Mr. Sanders’s campaign went further, according to two people familiar with the internal turmoil. As punishment for stirring the controversy, Mr. Sirota, who is based in Colorado, was barred from traveling for the campaign outside of visits to its Washington headquarters.
The conflict over Ms. Teachout’s column was part of a long-running debate within the Sanders campaign about what approach to take with Mr. Biden.
A small group of advisers — including Mr. Tulchin, Ms. Turner and Mr. Sirota — regularly pleaded with Mr. Sanders to attack the former vice president.
But Mr. Sanders resisted, giving speech after speech scorching unnamed establishment Democrats but declining to pursue Mr. Biden directly. He ruled out several lines of attack against the former vice president because they touched on Mr. Biden’s role in the Obama administration, which Democratic primary voters revere.
Mr. Shakir and a second senior aide, Ari Rabin-Havt, took Mr. Sanders’s side and repeatedly reminded other campaign officials that Mr. Sanders was the ultimate decision maker on the campaign. In conversations with associates,
both men agreed that it might make sense to criticize Mr. Biden in a sharper way. But they said Mr. Sanders could not be persuaded to do so: He and Jane liked the Bidens personally, and their word was final.
The fissures within the campaign leadership extended beyond how to deal with Mr. Biden.
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As Ms. Warren relentlessly courted Ms. Ocasio-Cortez last fall, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s advisers had to prod Mr. Sanders’s aides into having him call her 
— a conversation that eventually led to her endorsing him.
on Super Tuesday three days later. He reached for a Civil War analogy to explain the muscle-flexing strategy. Abraham Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation, Mr. Weaver said, until after Union troops had routed the Confederacy at the bloody battle of Antietam. 
Facts. We should still vote for Biden though. As much as I dislike Biden he is better than trump. Judges and healthcare alone is enough of a reason to vote for Biden in November. We just need to regroup and start to get more progressives in Congress, and in state/local government.
