Bernie Sanders on the 2020 elections, his political future

Bernie Sanders was gratified, Even if he's a little amused, hearing Barack Obama call Medicare for All a "good new idea" in September. The idea has recently become very popular among Democratic politicians, even those who are at the center of the road and aspiring to the presidency. In recent polls, 70% of Americans said they support it. Of course, Medicare for all is not a new idea. It was one of the pillars of Sanders' presidential campaign in 2016. He has been talking about it for over 30 years.

For a 77-year-old man obsessed with the popularity of his ideas and his candidacy – "Harry, have you seen my crowds?", Has he ever asked Senator Harry Reid at the time, as a in the heart of the 2016 campaign – Sanders sometimes finds such opportunities to take advantage of his new influence in the Democratic Party. But above all, he is uncomfortable. He speaks privately as he does in front of a microphone, except with much more sarcasm. He continues to get angry at the establishment's liberals, including the rejection of the way he sees the world, which he personally takes and judges personally. (He thinks that their positions and motivations can rarely be dissociated from their funding.) His frustration with the press has only grown. "Do you mean that the writers of the interior of the Beltway may have missed the point here?" He said to me recently, his eyebrows raised, when we sit down to speak.

And he still thinks that he should be president. He does not say that out loud, exactly. "I am not one of those multimillionaire sons whose parents told them that they would become president of the United States," he says. "I do not get up in the morning with the burning desire to be President." He is nevertheless almost certain that he is already the second most important politician in the country, and the logic of running in 2020 seems obvious to him: His ideas are the best for the country, a majority of Americans will be agreeing to expose themselves to them, no other national politician has proven to be as effective and as effective as him, and no one seems better. positioned to actually win. "If there is anyone else who can, for whatever reason, do a better job than me, I will work hard to elect him, he said. But "if it turns out I'm the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I'll probably show up." He thought about it all year as he toured the country. A long-time friend of Sanders describes his position as follows: "At this point, what does he have to lose?"

A plausible answer to this question: a lot. "In many ways, the world has caught up with it," says Nina Turner, a former senator from the state of Ohio at the head of Our Revolution, the political organization stemming from his campaign. But even some of Sanders' relatives – who all agree with this assessment – are not necessarily certain that another presidential campaign is the best way to defend his cause. "Bernie is not responsible for anything," says a longtime ally. "He thinks everything is for him" and not always a wider movement.

Even the decision not to make a decision has caused anxiety, both for Sanders personally and for anyone who might run against him in the primaries. He is now the doyen of the American left – the outgoing leader, so to speak, of the most energetic segment of the national electorate – and everyone is watching to see how he spends his substantial political capital over the past four decades. , recently accumulated.

A week before The inauguration of Trump, Sanders was steaming. He had returned to Washington to fight, but he found his colleagues unable to internalize what was wrong. When 13 Senators in the Senate passed a measure to lower the price of drugs through Canadian imports, it was United States today that they did not have the "courage" to do the right thing, promising to hear it. Behind the closed doors of the Democratic caucus, the reactions of his colleagues were swift. Four of the Senators who had crossed Sanders were centrists re-elected in the states that Trump had just won. They have already been under pressure from their right; Sanders could not afford to train his broad and energetic audience against him. For the first time he frightened them – and this too was new to him. The prospect of exercising this type of power opened up new possibilities for influence but also potential pitfalls. Sanders retired and retired to his Senate office on the third floor to clarify with his advisers what his new role should look like.

His first step was to agree to become a Senate team player, which means building relationships with powerful party members. He had already accepted the invitation of minority leader Chuck Schumer to join the Senate management team. He also hired Ari Rabin-Havt, a former senior assistant to Reid, and they quickly found an opportunity to persuade his colleagues to hear him: he was striving to protect Obama's legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. . Sanders had never concealed his dissatisfaction with the law or his preference for a single payer health system. But he saw in health care the decisive fight for Trump's mandate and offered Schumer to help organize rallies this winter. He spent much of the first half of 2017 traveling to the states represented by key Republican senators in order to encourage voters to save the ACA.

This, in turn, earned him enough goodwill among skeptical party figures to at least open up relationships. "Bernie has long believed in the organization, but he ran solo," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who recounts that she has worked with Sanders more than ever in her memory. With the support of Schumer, Sanders joined the chairman of the National Democratic Committee, Tom Perez, on a "union" tour that, although unwelcome by the public, forced the couple to meet and interact for the first time. "The 2016 Democratic Party's injury heals in the context of opposition to Trump," said Jeff Merkley, the only senator who supported Sanders in the primaries. "You finally have the Democratic Party coming back to its Roosevelt roots."

Meanwhile, Sanders has experimented with different ways to use his popularity as a club against the president. When he sat down for the first time to recalculate his life after the 2016 campaign, a major priority was a redesign of his digital media operations. He hired Armand Aviram, a former producer of NowThis News, and the cameras are now following him everywhere. in 2017, the team released 550 short videos for Facebook and Twitter. They are extremely popular – town halls on Facebook can earn millions of views – and Sanders is constantly asking his staff for updates on his audience and sharing their numbers. The project is much more ambitious than any other politician in Washington. (In April, aides from several Senate offices told me that they did not know how Sanders was coming out of it.) In fact, the only person in Washington who seems to care so much about the creating its own media ecosystem is Trump.

It is this public, and the pressure it can exert, that Sanders often attributes to pulling out on specific issues. "Not only Hillary Clinton, neither the media of the establishment, nor all the American editorialists: they said:" Bernie Sanders is crazy, these ideas are extreme, they are marginal, no one there believe, this is not what the United States is supposed to be on the market, "he tells me by putting his index finger on the table when he talks about the speech of The presidential announcement that he delivered in May 2015. Now, "virtually all the issues I've talked about" – He enumerates basically his complete campaign platform – "today's". now, it is the majority, and today, in many cases, a large majority of the American people ". He pleaded for a reduction in the influence of super-delegates in the process of appointing the party chairman. was codified in August. And he managed to divert the national debate on health care not only from the repeal of Obamacare, but also from Medicare for all. After the first serious Republican attempt to repeal the ACA was defeated in July 2017, he began courting his colleagues to his own measure, which for years had been widely viewed within the party as unrealistic and ambitious, not to mention the reprimand of Obama. He also played outside: a video of a Canadian doctor explaining the health system of his country was seen more than 30 million times on the Sanders Facebook page. When Sanders introduced his measure to the Senate last September, 16 Democrats co-sponsored him, including Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.

None of this to say that Sanders, still independent, and the Democratic Establishment have changed their opinions a lot. His advisers say the party still does not appreciate how respectfully he treated Clinton. He never mentioned his emails! – or how useful it was to energize young voters after the primaries. Clinton's supporters find this analysis laughable to the point of becoming an offense. In Washington, Sanders supporters within the party are not lacking, those who see him as a grumpy narcissist with a complex of victims, or a helpless white old man with few legislative achievements, or someone who deceiving in thinking of his success must do with anything other than being the alternative to Clinton. Even some sympathetic activists in Sanders see him exercising political power in health and tax debates and want him to play a bigger role in the party's most difficult struggles – for Trump's ban on religion Muslim or the Dream Act, for example. "He has never been quite comfortable with his opposition to Trump, even if he does everything in his power," said one of his Senate colleagues. "It is more comfortable to put the democrats uncomfortable." This argument makes crazy Sanders.

Earlier this summer, Sanders celebrated the release of the 2016 memoir of former campaign manager Jeff Weaver. The book was already controversial in Washington: it's called How Bernie won. In his brief remarks at the party, Sanders agreed. "In many ways, we won the elections," he said. A few hours earlier, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Just about every Democrat who was not part of this book festival (and many others who were present), this day was a particularly demoralizing reminder of all that they had lost.

I ask Sanders What would be different from his presidential campaign this time around, he runs, and he laughs. "It's almost personally embarrassing to tell you how little we knew about it," he says. Later, he describes his candidacy for the presidency as "five doctorates completed in six months".

In January, Sanders summoned his restricted circle to Rabin-Havt to talk about his future. Weaver and Turner were present, as well as half a dozen other councilors. The wife of Sanders, Jane, called. Participants presented in turn, explaining that if Sanders again chose to run for president, the dynamic would be quite different: the argument "Bernie is just too eccentric, too little tested" would be put aside . Trump in post, and Sanders would probably enter the primary this time as a leader, not fun. They defined the choice: if you want to focus on your legacy and influence the party, we understand. But if you want to do that, they told him, "Go away." The campaign could not afford to be like the last, which only started when Sanders' chief strategist, Tad Devine, was fed up with the senator's remarks. dragging his feet, let it filter out that an ad was coming to force his hand. Sanders listened, told his advisers that he had not yet made a decision and ordered them to do whatever was necessary to prepare him for "Go" in case he got there.

The team has therefore developed a political plan for 2018 that could best position for the 2020 race. Sanders has now visited 34 states since the 2016 election, of which 22 voted for Trump. In the 20 days leading up to the mid-term, he has traveled 13, traveling more on behalf of mid-term candidates than any other likely candidate for the presidency, with the exception of Joe Biden.

It's not hard to see how someone in Sanders' place might be a little discouraged by the November results: the high-ranking candidates he's backed with the most vigor, such as Ben Jealous of Maryland and Randy Bryce of Wisconsin were lost. Many candidates he had supported during the primaries, like Tom Perriello (Virginia) and Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan). (He did not support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the biggest election success of the party's Sanders wing, during his main campaign). Our revolution, which aimed to support progressive candidates in 2018, had a mediocre result; although he had some negative successes, he failed to overthrow a single seat in the House. There is no doubt that Sanders and his organization have helped to fuel progressive campaigns and popularize his positions among new and current candidates. But paradoxically, the results of the mid-term elections – the biggest change to the left of the American electorate since Richard Nixon's resignation – could have made Sanders' presidential campaign seem more difficult.

Sanders' advisers acknowledge that his path for the Democratic nomination is similar to Trump's in 2016. Faced with what should be a historically important area, Sanders could start with his most loyal followers of the last time and win a plurality in Iowa caucuses. followed by a slightly larger one in New Hampshire Elementary School. From there, councilors hope that its number could increase as the field shrinks. "There are 25% of party members going nowhere, and I think 25% in a primary school is very good," says a former councilor. But everyone recognizes that the strategy is difficult – "That's the only thing you can say and draw a plausible path to nomination," said David Axelrod, Obama's political architect – and everything will depend on the emergence considerable rivals and chipping her support base. In January, Sanders' team looked at the ground potential with him, focusing on the possibility of Warren and Biden getting into the race. (An October CNN poll showed Biden 20 points ahead of Sanders across the country, although other polls indicate a lower margin.) Sanders made it clear he also mistrusted Booker, whom he considered a powerful messenger. In the months that followed, his associates closely monitored the maneuvers of a wide range of potential candidates, wondering if Warren intended to portray himself as "Bernie-light," smiling at the prospect of a match against Michael Bloomberg.

Everyone on Sanders' orbit recognizes the difficulty he's had in talking beyond the issues of economics and political corruption. "The 2020 challenge will be to ensure that [he] can make the class message understand in a way that does not give the impression of leaving out identity issues, "says a Sanders advisor. To this end, he established public relations with Reverend William Barber and Al Sharpton, as well as Randall Woodfin and Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the young African-American mayors of Birmingham, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi. But he continues to say things that exacerbate his problems. In April, he was retaliated because he seemed to call Obama a "charismatic figure," and more recently, black lawmakers bristled at what they saw as Sanders' attempt to brag about the Andrew Gillum's first victory in the Florida governor's race. Then, while the results were compiled in Florida and Georgia, Sanders struggled to call electors uncomfortable voting for "racist" black candidates, although he used the word to describe the campaigns of some GOP candidates. At a conference in May by the liberal think-tank Center for American Progress, Sanders' speech was called "Focus on Criminal Justice". But when his office sent his prepared remarks, it looked like a modified version of his old speech.
The title was "Break the oligarchy".

Sanders' advisors are most concerned not to understand how difficult another race will be. The only primaries will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they told him. Staffing will be complicated. In recent months, his allies have talked about roles for 2020 with dozens of past and potential campaigners. Many fear that the main change he is talking about is creating a stronger digital team. (As long as Sanders' restricted circle includes Weaver, many of the 2016 senior staff members will either retire from the run or Weaver will eliminate them, even polarizing to the standards of the political campaign agents.) And the race will almost certainly be more negative this time around. In July, more than 200 centrist legislators, members and Democratic donors met in Columbus, Ohio, to figure out how to defeat Trump and Sanders.

But Sanders can not believe that a 2020 race will be more cynical or negative than the last. According to his experience, the attacks against him and his wife were so cruel that he did not ask his advisers to conduct a customary "self-search" that could reveal new vulnerabilities. "Look, you do not even need [opposition research], "he tells me." If I were a choir boy, it would not matter, because they lie all the time. "But Clinton's team has never done any television commercials against Sanders who has attacked him personally, and even his relatives are concerned that the potential material may be considerable.Strings clips and TV essays date back many years – in 2015, an article he wrote in 1972 that contained a The sentence on a woman who "fantasized about being raped by three men simultaneously" resurfaced and became a brief political statement – a quick point – or managed to convince him to publish a complete book of his taxes. appearances on RT, the Russian government-funded network, during the 2016 campaign, and his team's reluctance to consider Robert Mueller's conclusion that Russian agents would have supported his campaign at one point born.

When I ask Sanders if he wants something different, he quickly says, "I'm sure there are a million things." But, just as quickly, he goes back. "You always … I do not … nothing, you know, jump on me."

October 2nd Sanders' day began with an email from a counselor advising that if he checked the information, he would see that Amazon had just raised his minimum wage to $ 15 an hour for employees US. This is the kind of victory he is still not used to celebrating, and later in the morning he wondered if this was his biggest achievement.

The activists had been fighting for years for a higher minimum wage at Amazon, and Sanders had recently used his fame to draw attention to this topic. On a problem like this, he told his team, it would be useful to stop thinking like a senator and start thinking first and foremost as someone with a huge platform. In July, he had broadcast live a public meeting with workers from Disney, Amazon, American Airlines, Walmart and McDonald's; in August, Disney World announced its intention to increase its minimum wage to $ 15. In September, he introduced a bill in the Senate, following a similar bill introduced last year by the representative of California, Ro Khanna, with the aim of putting pressure on Amazon knowing that by signing it he would give her new attention. They named this version the Stop the Bad Employers Act by removing the subsidies – "Stop BEZOS".

When the Liberals feared the proposal would turn against her, the Sanders team said it misunderstood: the bill was not supposed to become law. "You use the opportunity you have in the context that you have to work," says Sanders. "For the moment, nothing good will happen for the workers of this Congress, so we have to go outside." This month, he introduced the Stop Walmart Act and called the new majority in the House of Democrats to adopt a national minimum wage of $ 15. .

And yet, as proud as it is to have found a way to reduce income inequality – under the Trump government, nothing less – Sanders finds his newfound glory deeply unpleasant. He spoke with friends about the pressure of being, in his opinion, the most popular politician in the country. He travels constantly but can not go anywhere without being harassed. He keeps the cameras too close, cuts the questions. "It's hard to walk the street without people coming to see you," he says. "I can not give an interview that does not have the possibility of a question" to take ". "Oh, we can trap him, embarrass Sanders." His decision to immature himself at least partially in the democratic establishment is a kind of sorrow. He believes he has the responsibility to shape the party in his own image, but at what point do these negotiations make him a mere politician?

Whenever Sanders is questioned about his age, he blushes, lights up a bored smile, bends his head to look over his glasses and opens his eyes wide. The question, he tells me, is much more eye contact than usual, becomes annoying. "If we say, 'My God, I have a director of communications here who is a woman,' oh my God, you would go mad. I would be looted all over the country: I'm a sexist guy. "Oh my God, we are working with African Americans!" I do not know: lalalala, "he says." And yet – again! – I think ageism is a real problem, okay? And I think when we look at the individuals, we look at their totality, agree? There are, you know, people aged 50 who have retired for some reason, people with terrible diseases, agree? Age is a factor! But that is one of the many factors!

"I thank God, you know, I do not remember the last day – honestly – when I missed work," he continues. Opponents make his age a problem only when they can not compete on certain issues, he says. "What people have the right to know: is the candidate in good health? Does he have the energy to do a very stressful and difficult job?

Some close allies of Sanders think his route to the White House has never been so clear. But other friends warned him that his first day was likely to be his best. They gently pushed him to consider the symbolic power of passing the torch to a young leader – as well as the influence he would exert on the major races if he strategically refused to support him. "His message obviously resonated a few years ago," says Tom Harkin, the former Iowa senator Sanders had consulted before his last campaign. Now, says Harkin, the other Democrats must recognize that "Bernie's message is reinforced by what Trump did."

It probably depends on Warren, whom Sanders called "my favorite senator". In 2016, according to advisers, the prospect of a campaign on the part of Warren almost prevented Sanders from not participating. Now, some of Sanders' allies watching her maneuver around 2020 are seeing her trying to nudge her. Neither of the two senators expressed any interest in giving way to the other, and both ignored the Allies' requests to meet in person and reach an agreement. But given the complexity of launching a campaign, Sanders will have to make his decision in the coming months, otherwise the calendar will allow him.

"The question the story will answer, depending on what it decides to do, is this: will it be Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan?" Says Khanna. "Is there going to be the person who sets the ideology for someone else to win?" Sanders is almost certain that even as president, he would not be satisfied – activism is a constant struggle, he tells people, and it is a classic political mistake to believe in such an end portion. But for the first time in his career, he sees the country changing course. The revolution is "already launched," Sanders tells me, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "The genie is out of the bottle."

* This article was published in the New York Magazine issue of November 26, 2018. Subscribe now!