John Fund of National Review Online highlights a campaign pitch from supporters of Democratic presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders has a succinct and biting response to all the establishment Democrats who are freaking out over the prospect of a cranky socialist leading the party into battle this November. They are wrong, he says. Indeed, only he can be the savior of the party.
“The only way that you can beat Trump is by having an unprecedented campaign, an unprecedentedly large voter turnout,” he says. Faiz Shakir, his campaign manager, claims that Sanders has such a great appeal to young people and alienated voters that they “will vote in percentages that they have never voted before.”
That’s just swamp gas, counters James Carville, the now retired Louisiana political consultant who helped engineer Bill Clinton’s 1992 election by summarizing his strategy as “It’s the economy, stupid.” Carville isn’t mincing words when he says that Sanders is peddling a turnout theory akin to a belief in unicorns. “If you’re voting for him because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize heretofore sleepy parts of an electorate, then politically, you’re a fool,” he told MSNBC on Saturday as Sanders was sweeping Nevada.
Ruy Teixeira, a voting specialist at the Center for American Progress, agrees. “It is truly magical thinking to believe that, in a highly polarized situation, only your side gets to increase turnout,” he wrote in the Washington Post this month.
Indeed, a new study of non-voters by the Knight Foundation looked at 12,000 “chronic non-voters in America, across the country, and in key battleground states.” They concluded that if they all went to the polls, Democrats would increase their popular-vote margin and lose the Electoral College even more decisively than they did in 2016.