The Sanders Strategy Session Conversation That Didn't Take Place Last Year

[forjusticethunders]

40. "Strategy"

Out of many reasons I ended up voting Hillary, that one is part of it. The campaign itself is in many ways a job interview for the presidency, and Bernie bombed it, over and over and over and over again. It's about hiring the right people (not perennial loser Devine and Reddit brogressive Jeff Weaver), formulating a strategy based on real data, communicating with voters on all levels and listening to their needs and concerns. Making everything focused on rallies and online excitement was a LOSING STRATEGY, one because rallies = / = votes, and two, rallies like that tend to create a false impression of where your campaign is at, and leads to thinking like "I'm losing because the process is rigged", not "I'm losing because I'm doing something wrong".

Of course, Bernie had some real, fundamental issues beyond just his campaign (ideological purity and selfishness, no real connections with POC from his time in Congress outside a few instances like the Florida emergency meeting, poor communicator on a personal level) but he could have overcome them, but he didn't, if anything it got worse. Bernie needed to tie Latinos at worst nationally if not outright win (for example he did well in the Mountain West among Latinos, but Texas and New York...ughhhhhhhh) and he needed to get AT LEAST 35-40% of the black vote (which I think was feasible for him based on polling if he wasn't so damn tone deaf on our issues so often especially since Hillary honestly wasn't doing much better, but she's built up so much political capital with African Americans because the Clintons were the light at the end of the tunnel after the Reagan/Bush years that it didn't sink her the same way it would have sunk another candidate, honestly I should write an OP wrt Bernie and the black vote).

Anyway, since Bernie is losing the primary essentially because he's losing black people 80-20 nationally, that was a failure in strategy. Yes he needed the early caucuses for momentum, but he was going to face a bloodbath on Super Tuesday and he needed to do as much damage control as possible, and he didn't.

Strategy also goes into preparedness. It's really amazing how he walked into that NYDN interview and didn't sound prepared. Yes it wasn't AS bad as it was portrayed, but in this day and age, you need to be detail oriented and concrete; that approach might win a GOP primary but not a Dem primary. A lot of us, myself included, have kind of bought into the whole "If Canada can do it, why can't we", and while we *can* do it, there needs to be a clear path, consideration of the political environment, sure tearing it down and starting over might be bette in the long run, but it's also dangerous and disruptive to real people and real lives, and that lack of consideration for that disruption seems to always bedevil leftist movements.

The nomination was there for a progressive challenger, but Bernie screwed it up, and what's worse, the "movement" is defensive and childish and refusing to accept that fact, which will make future progressive challenges more difficult.