Sanders in South Carolina — A Post Mortem of a Post Mortem
Angela Nagle and Michael Tracey have written a lengthy and meandering post mortem analysis of why the Sanders campaign failed in 2020. It’s far too long for me to address it in it’s entirety but the largest individual portion focuses on the pivotal South Carolina primary which they essentially describe as a close race if not for chaotic mess and mismanagement. Let’s take it piece by piece.
The myopia of the activist Left was most fatal in the crippling blow that it inflicted on Sanders in the South Carolina primary. Notwithstanding the multifold campaign failures already outlined, there is still a plausible counterfactual scenario wherein Sanders overcomes all these hurdles to win the nomination. But this scenario was contingent on him not getting completely blown out in South Carolina.
Like many political dissections, Angela Nagle and Michael Tracey (AN&MT going forward) prefer to attribute lots of abstract ideological forces as causes for bad effects but honestly, after reading it I’m still not sure what the “activist Left” actually is or who’s a member. It appears they mean some kind of PC crowd or those steeped in identity politics but if that’s the case I’d just prefer they said so. Maybe those two terms carry too much baggage and not using them is the safest way to avoid push back. Instead they use the definition of “the highly educated institutional activist and media world”. Who exactly is that and how exactly did they have even marginal control over the Sanders campaign?
Sanders was never going to win South Carolina no matter how adept his staff. The culture there wouldn’t allow it. Avoiding a blow out is another thing, but since the candidates other than Biden and Sanders had negligible shares, even combined, even without the Super Monday exodus towards Biden, it was still going to be a two man race and one that would never be close. Sanders had invested far more than Clinton in SC and had gained some traction and recognition among black,southern voters who’d never heard of him, but Biden and the Clintons were already widely known.
SC is among the lowest of low information voters southern states. In NC and GA in 2016 when I asked campaign activists if their state would go as SC did, they seethed at the very notion that they were like those yahoos in SC. Now add in that Biden was Obama’s VP, just as Hillary was his SOS. The old Dem machine and network of preachers that always determine who win in SC were still solidly for the ones with bigger name recognition and ties to Obama. It’s surprising Sanders did as well as he did.
Just days before the vote on February 29, internal campaign polling data suggested that Sanders was a mere 4 percentage points behind Biden. If this had held true, and Sanders either won narrowly or kept Biden’s margin of victory in the single digits, it’s far from certain that the other “establishment” candidates, Buttigieg and Klobuchar, would have so quickly coalesced around Biden before Super Tuesday. In that case, the Sanders strategy of clinging to a tenuous plurality coalition may have worked.
It couldn’t hold true. It wasn’t true. Sometimes internal polling is ruthlessly honest. Sometimes it becomes about not being the bearer of bad news and in this case it was badly out of sync with all the external polling, which is just what 538 does — combine the external polls under several models.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-primary-forecast/south-carolina/
But the strategy never got a chance to work, because Sanders’s South Carolina operation was bogged down by astounding dysfunction. After Sanders’s devastating 29-point defeat in the primary, we (the authors) heard from several South Carolina staffers and associates about shocking levels of ineptitude, complacency, waste, and even fraud in the organization there. The most basic elements of campaigning — such as hiring minimally competent personnel, distributing absentee ballots, and doing standard outreach to relevant local officials — had devolved into maddening impossibilities.
Gripers gonna gripe — especially after a big loss. I saw it in 2016 and was partially one of them when Monday morning after the game arrived.
I volunteered or worked for many months on Sanders campaign in SC in 2016. When I talk about their culture of low info voters that includes any potential hires for the campaign. Desperate for workers we hired minimally competent people and tried to train them, sometimes to no avail. One guy I trained briefly to knock on doors kept talking about voting for Bernie Mac. Seriously. A couple of guys hired at higher levels of field office managers were just goofs that spent time on office decorations and were soon fired for sexual harassment. There simply weren’t deep pools to pull from and those that had been around and politically active a while were already with Team Clinton who everyone assumed would be it.
(In truth, Clinton, with her southern firewall, didn’t make a big SC effort and bused the same skeletal crews to special events in different parts of the state.)
Part of the explanation for this lies in the 2020 iteration of the Sanders campaign being predicated on multiple concessions to bad-faith critics. Immediately upon his official entry into the race last February, Sanders apologized for the 2016 campaign having been “too white and too male-oriented.”
That’s essentially the “Bernie Bros” meme and unfortunately the lie was working. Maybe he should have challenged rather than mea culpit but he couldn’t just ignore it.
To make amends and preempt any future identity-related attacks, the 2020 campaign staff was heavily diversified. And at least in the case of South Carolina — in retrospect the most important primary state of the 2020 cycle — many of these personnel were hobbled by remarkable incompetence, while internal campaign criticism became impossible.
Not in South Carolina it wasn’t. I worked there. If there was any lacking in diversity in 2016 then it was the lack of whites. They didn’t need to compensate. I worked for a state wide canvassing crew lead by nothing but black women managers. Most of the door knockers were black. At the field offices there were more young white males but those weren’t lacking for black managers, either. Again, there was no need to diversify to correct for the sins of 2016, at least not in South Carolina.
Much of the day-to-day logistics of the Sanders South Carolina campaign were run de facto by Nina Turner, a talented orator and popular media surrogate, but someone whose skill set was clearly not suited to bolstering the image of a socialist from Vermont among southern black voters. For one thing, Turner’s political background was in metro Cleveland, which provides no necessary insight into best practices for winning over elderly, churchgoing black Democrats in the Deep South.
This is just silly. Turner’s oratory style is pure black preacher as she admitted the one time I met her in person. It doesn’t take much experience or rarely acquired insights into winning over elderly, churchgoing black Democrats in the Deep South. It’s God is on our righteous side, you should be supported for past injustices and if they have a problem with an old white man (as some female Hillary supporters I met at the doors did) then Biden is one, too, except with a much sketchier history on race issues. That’s one of the things Turner pointed out on air.
This is one of the problems I have with big backers of Nina Turner who confuse great rhetorical skills with managerial ones. If she had a failing, it wasn’t in not being able to connect with church-goers. It was in managing an organization. As I recall, she hadn’t exactly shined at Our Revolution either.
In November 2019, Turner installed Jessica Bright as state director. Former staff members said Bright, who served as a Hillary Clinton delegate at the 2016 national convention, was hired in large part because her mother had filled the seat of Clementa Pinckney — the state senator killed in the 2015 Charleston church shooting. The idea was that such a transactional arrangement might compel the mother to endorse Sanders. “She couldn’t spell, she couldn’t speak coherently, and her mother ended up endorsing Biden,” one anguished former staffer recalled.
If true, this was clearly a foolish move, and for all the wrong reasons, but while a state director might make the difference in a closer race, this one was never going to be that. I hope that AN&MT at least made an attempt to confirm Bright’s inadequacy by talking to her because in 2016, because it was dominated by black women, there was no shortage of disgruntled white staff who felt they’d do better. I’m assuming the complainers were white because AN&MT are claiming Bright couldn’t be removed because it might look racist. See next paragraph.
“But you can’t say anything,” one staffer recounted thinking, “because you’d be called a racist.”
You can say something if you’re black. If Bright was so blatantly incompetent then why would no black staffer say so? There were plenty of them. Besides, Bright could have been eased out into a less critical functional position.
Not only did basic tasks go unfulfilled, phone-banking and canvassing data were outright fabricated, multiple former staffers alleged, and sent to the national campaign headquarters to give the false impression of good progress being made in the state.
Again, if true, then why remain silent? That’s grounds for firing. Why did these whistle blowers wait until after the primary to come out?
Communicating rationally with the twenty- and thirtysomething campaign staffers who dominated the South Carolina operation, this person said, was virtually impossible — almost like some kind of impenetrable generational and ideological divide had been erected. “I felt like I was in a daycare facility. These kids were just so clueless, and so full of themselves,” the person lamented. “It was a really dystopian feeling to work there, it was not like anything I’d ever been involved with.”3
I find this claim highly suspicious. In 2016 the staffers were not that young and the volunteers certainly weren’t. Why would it have changed radically in 2020? Yes, the younger ones might be full of themselves because that’s what many young people do. Also, they’re being trained to believe things like yard signage doesn’t matter which pisses off the supporters who come in for some.
This staffer also found it “ominous that all of our rallies were attended by white people, even though we had this large black staff.”
There you have it — a large black staff and yet none of them unhappy enough with Bright to call her out. The rallies being predominantly white was true in 2016 too (I was at at least 6 in SC) and while I didn’t like it, I don’t find it ominous or even surprising, either. It seems to me the norm for rallies unless it’s a black candidate or for an issue that cuts across racial divisions, i.e. a women’s march. When I searched for rallies dominated by blacks most were either Obama or Jesse Jackson in his much earlier run for president. Or BLM,which was more often a march.
Precipitating Bright’s appointment in the fall of 2019, just as efforts in the state theoretically should have been ramping up ahead of the all-important primary, was the ouster of the previous state director, Kwadjo Campbell. Campbell had engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with another left-wing organizer, or so the rumor went — as though that should have been of concern to anyone other than schoolmarmish busybodies, whether true or not. But by November he was removed, and the South Carolina campaign descended into further turmoil.
The authors are implying it was without cause, or at least without good cause. We don’t know that. It’s a rumor. Maybe there was sexual harassment if we’re rumor-mongering. BTW, affairs with subordinate staff are often a no-no, especially since they can be construed AS sexual harassment.
He also had drug charges in his background and he was a city councilman with no experience at state-wide campaign leadership so not necessarily the greatest asset. Like I said, there’s not a deep pool to pick from who aren’t already in the Obama/Clinton/Biden axis. All Nina Turner said was to tell the Associated Press that, “Campaigns aren’t for everybody, and we wish him well.” That has to mean something. The disruption may have hurt but it also may have been unavoidable and not the fault of Turner or Bernie 2020 at all.
All of this unfolded in the context of a campaign whose launch video featured imagery of Sanders hugging a feminist protester in a “pussy hat,” and after several years of public #MeToo accusations that ran through the whole culture of progressive politics.
The accusations may have been BS but BS if ignored tends to grow and hence we now have calls for putting Bill Gates on trial for Covid-19 and other crimes against humanity. And this is irrelevant to South Carolina besides unless someone like Campbell did harass.
Such chaos, drama, and ineptitude might have been excusable for an upstart campaign operating on a shoestring budget. And it might have even been defensible in 2016, when Sanders had barely broken onto the scene as a viable candidate. But for this to be the case in 2020 — after four years to plan, unlimited cash inflows from a gargantuan pool of largely working-class donors, and all the other manifold advantages Sanders enjoyed — indicated that something was fundamentally defective in the campaign’s internal culture, and by extension the wider political culture which it inhabited.
Maybe. Maybe they should have done a post mortem of SC 2016 before any new hires like Turner in 2020. Or maybe they did and the authors just didn’t ask campaign leaders for feedback. I didn’t see anything in their piece saying they did. Journalism 101 there.
Over four years, this strain of turbocharged identity politics had turned the activist Left into an unnavigable minefield, which in the end made it more hospitable to destructive personalities and more alienating to ordinary members of the very demographics that the whole exercise was meant, in theory, to include.
Self-destructive IdPol has been going on much longer that that, and although I see the authors claiming it undermined Bernie when he supposedly adopted it, after 4 years of being in his feed I see no great shift away from his 2016 campaign agenda or towards the “overly-PC institutional activist Left” you are blaming here, it seems without any real evidence from anything IN his feed or what he campaigned on daily — M4All and free college. I detest IdPol so if there had been much there I would have noticed it, just as I did notice (and dislike) his capitulation towards Russiagate nonsense. IOW, I never felt compelled to call him out on being too PC. Sure, there were a few token calls out against Trump and Trump racism and xenophobia but how could he not at least a little? Before 2016 Trump’s rhetoric had no actions to certify it. Now it does.
After the South Carolina fiasco, Sanders went on to lose heavily black states across the South by even bigger margins than he did in 2016, and his campaign’s window of opportunity had been emphatically slammed shut.
After SC it became ok to vote for Biden, the nearly presumptive nominee, who didn’t have the same baggage as the Clintons did. Well, he does, but it’s not nearly as well known. It also has a lot to do with the tilt towards older black voters showing up more and the assumption Biden was the safer bet against Trump. What I just now mentioned in passing, could likely be the biggest factor in Sanders losing.
I find it disturbing and odd that the authors didn’t even touch on it in their post-mortem. People were too frightened to vote for Bernie if the polls showed he only had a 7% advantage over Trump and Biden had 9%
Sanders defied expectations with his success when he ran against a highly competent establishment candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton, who had enormous support in the media and within the party.
Sorry, but I can’t help but laugh at the idea of “highly competent” there. She lost to grifter reality TV star and pathological liar in spite of that enormous support whereas Sanders lost without any of that support. The authors might have mentioned that, too.
A Self-Marginalizing Movement
The story arc of the whole Bernie phenomenon rests on what seems like a major contradiction. Sanders defied expectations with his success when he ran against a highly competent establishment candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton, who had enormous support in the media and within the