Win or lose, Sanders will change Democratic Party
News flash: Bernie Sanders is likely to lose the Democratic nomination for president. As disappointing as that outcome would be for his ardent supporters, the Vermont senator already can claim a win.
News flash: Bernie Sanders is likely to lose the Democratic nomination for president. As disappointing as that outcome would be for his ardent supporters, the Vermont senator already can claim a win.
His challenge to front-runner Hillary Clinton has defined the issue agenda for the party, forcing her to move left. His success shows that the pendulum is swinging away from the pro-corporate centrism that has been national Democrats' dominant ideology for nearly 30 years.
Sanders has won 19 states and more than 9 million votes by railing against global free-trade pacts, calling for the breakup of big banks, and advocating for free public college tuition and single-payer health care.
"Bernie has shown that there is a big audience for non-incremental change," said Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party, a liberal group active in 10 states that backs Sanders. "It's the end of the view that the right place for Democrats to be is one millimeter to the left of Republicans."
Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, was a proponent of the latter approach, arguing that the party was losing presidential races because it was viewed as soft on crime and national defense and captive to unions and liberal interest groups. He was elected in 1992 as a self-styled "new" Democrat.
By all accounts, Sanders can't overtake Hillary Clinton's lead in delegates to the national convention in Philadelphia. She has 94 percent of the delegates required for nomination, meaning that she could lose all the remaining primary and caucus states by wide margins and still emerge victorious - so long as she keeps the allegiance of her supporters among the super-delegates, who are party insiders unbound by popular votes.
Sanders vows to continue fighting at least through the final primary June 14 in the District of Columbia. He has said he can still win the nomination by persuading super-delegates to switch to his side based on the enthusiasm he has generated, particularly among young voters. In addition, Sanders wants to exert influence over the party platform to be enacted at the convention.
"Right now, we are focused on the next five weeks of winning the Democratic nomination," Sanders told CNN last week. "If that does not happen, we are going to fight as hard as we can on the floor of the Democratic convention to make sure that we have a progressive platform that the American people will support."
Now, some Democratic leaders are raising concerns that Sanders' quest might hurt efforts to defeat presumed GOP nominee Donald Trump in the fall, by forcing Clinton to continue battling on two fronts at once while the real estate tycoon consolidates support.
Clinton has shown deference to Sanders. After all, she continued campaigning in 2008 even when it was clear that then-Sen. Barack Obama would win the nomination.
"People on the left want him to keep going, though a lot of us think he should be as positive as possible," said Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist with Hilltop Public Solutions in New York. "It's important to not have him bashing the likely nominee."
In recent weeks, the Sanders campaign has accused the Clinton team of improper fund-raising, and he has continued to hammer her for refusing to disclose the contents of her highly paid speeches to Wall Street banks after she left her job as secretary of state in the Obama administration.
If Sanders goes too far in prosecuting his case, he could take some of the shine off what Katz sees as his big accomplishment. "It's about pushing the values forward," she said. "Democrats haven't really looked at where we are, what it means to be a Democrat, since Bill Clinton and the era of triangulation. Sen. Sanders has made it OK to be progressive again."
In recent polls, vast majorities of Democrats say the competition of the primaries has made the party stronger, while a slice of Sanders supporters says it will not vote for Clinton.
Tom Eiseman of Medford Lakes said Sanders should cede nothing. "He has a lot more support than she has, despite what the media keep reporting about the super-delegates she's supposed to have locked up," Eiseman said at a recent Sanders rally in Piscataway, N.J.
"They're not locked up," he said. "Bernie has a much better chance to beat Trump. The media keep asking, 'When is he going to drop out?' Why? He's got a chance all the way to the convention. We fight to the end."
Marvin Brownstein, a Communications Workers of America union steward from South Plainfield, Middlesex County, said, "There are still issues with Hillary that might change the minds of her delegates. Bernie Sanders should take this fight to the convention floor. It ain't over till it's over."
Sanders' continuing slog has cut into one of a nominee's most precious commodities: time. While Clinton has shifted her rhetoric toward Trump, she has had to campaign in upcoming primary states such as Kentucky, for instance, instead of general-election battleground states.
"It's enabled Donald Trump to pivot, because he's not worried about the next primary and can put together the infrastructure you need to have," said T.J. Rooney, a strategist and former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party who backs Clinton. Her campaign has not had the "luxury" to focus as much as they'd like on the fall.
But Rooney believes that Sanders has earned the right to carry on and does not think the harm is great. For one thing, he noted, the Republican-Trump merger has been rocky in its first weeks. "I would take our distractions over theirs anytime," Rooney said.
For her part, Clinton has urged voters to remember the economic gains of the 1990s, when she was first lady, while distancing herself from the era in some respects.
She also has repudiated some of the signature policies of her husband's administration, including Wall Street deregulation. Clinton also has called for an end to "excessive incarceration" that some blame on the decade's crime policies and has come out against a pending free-trade deal with Asian nations. The former president, like other centrist Democrats, was a big advocate of free trade.
Sanders often says he's part of a revolution in politics. If he goes on to lose the nomination, that notion will be put to the test.
"How deep are the shoots that have been planted here?" said Cantor, of the Working Families Party. "He opened the doors, but it's on us to walk through them, to continue fighting for the issues he brought forward."
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Staff writer Dan Geringer contributed to this article.
