MetroNews Presidential Preview: Senator Bernie Sanders

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Over the next few days, MetroNews will share a preview or guide to each of the five remaining major Presidential candidates–Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.

The goal of these pieces is to provide insight on what the candidate’s supporters and experts in the fields of economics and politics are noticing about the Presidential race.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is fighting on to win the Democratic nomination for President.
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is fighting on to win the Democratic nomination for President.

The independent Senator from Vermont, seemingly a long-shot last summer, is first on our list. Though he trails former Secretary of State and U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates, he sits atop the lastMetroNews/Repass Poll by a significant margin in the West Virginia Democratic Primary.

Sanders enters the race

Senator Sanders may seem like an enigma, but he has been relatively well known in liberal and progressive circles for years–earning himself the nickname “The Amendment King” for his dedication to amendments in Congressional legislation during his time in the U.S. House of Representatives and now in the U.S. Senate.

Sanders’s message has focused mostly on economics and social justice–placing him far to the left of Hillary Clinton, who some progressives and liberals view as too moderate.

Supporters of Senator Sanders have been particularly vocal this election cycle–especially as his campaign transformed him from long-shot insurgent last summer to viable competitor by March of this year.

Mavery Davis, a CPA living in Charleston, supporter and volunteer for the Sanders campaign, said fellow supporters he has spoken with like Sanders’s integrity. They feel like they know exactly where he stands on the important issues with relatively little, if any, ambiguity.

“It’s what he stands for,” Davis said in a phone interview. “It’s the policies that he’s been fighting for. They know, based on his record, that he’s not going to promote a progressive policy and then not fight for it.”

Davis pointed to Sanders’s involvement with the Civil Rights movement as a particularly strong selling point for him.

“He’s been really close to the only candidate that I can identify that has done and fought for the things that he’s campaigned on,” he said.

On the economy

But, seemingly, Senator Sanders and former Secretary Clinton are not far off on issues of civil rights, mass incarceration, and social justice. Where Sanders seems to have struck a particular chord is on a decidedly left-wing economic policy. He describes it as “Democratic Socialism,” which is practiced in many of the Nordic states in Europe. But self-avowed socialists actually take issue with that description. Sanders does not believe in the state controlling the means of production. Rather, he supports heavily regulated capitalism and a strengthened welfare state.

In a way, that’s part of his appeal on the left, and in some cases even on the right. Sanders has done exceptionally well with rural voters–acting as a strong advocate for unions and displaced blue collar workers that see their political voice diminishing and their economic prospects dwindling.

“You have people who are trying to find someone different, someone who they don’t feel is controlled by Wall Street and the party bosses and somebody who is going to reach out and help them,” Greg Noone, a political science and law professor at Fairmont State University and the Director of the National Security Intelligence Program at FSU, said in a phone interview.

Noone said that, despite their many differences, Senator Sanders and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump actually have a lot in common in how they are appealing to economic populists–especially on the issue of trade. However, Noone thinks that Sanders’s record indicates that he actually has a vested interest in fighting for the “99 percent.”

“I think Sanders is actually genuine,” he said. “Whether you like the guy’s politics or not, I don’t think there’s a lot of people who are political observers that will say that Sanders is not genuine. He is genuine in what he’s saying. He’s genuine in the fact that he is really trying to rally the 99 percent.”

The message on trade seems to have resonated with workers–particularly in the manufacturing industry–who have seen jobs leave the United States. WVU’s Director of the Bureau of Business & Economic Research John Deskins said that it’s much harder to sell the electorate on the benefits of free trade when the disadvantages are so much more visible.

“The world is ultimately going to be better off–we can ultimately produce more overall–if each country specializes in what it does best,” Deskins said. “But it’s understandable where some anti-trade sentiment comes from.”

That sentiment, Deskins said, is obvious. Free trade lowers cost for the consumers, but it can have a negative impact on jobs if industries pack up and move somewhere else.

“Free trade is almost always a good thing in the long run for an economy overall, but the winners are everybody,” he said. “Everybody benefits from cheaper goods–from being able to consume more. The losers–for industries that leave the country, the people that lose their jobs–are very concentrated and we can really see that pain much more easily and much more clearly than the broadly spread benefits.”

This also resonates at a time when income inequality–the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest–continues to widen and threatens to surpass pre-Great Depression levels of the 1920’s.

This is perhaps what has made Wall Street such a popular target for the Sanders campaign.

“In recent years, the banks on Wall Street have gotten much bigger,” Deskins said. “The United States, historically, had a lot more commercial banking activity than investment banking activity, and banks were much smaller. There were a large number of banks in the United States. But now we’ve seen tremendous, tremendous concentration in terms of size and in terms of scope.”

One of Sanders’s favorite refrains is that it’s “Time for Wall Street to bail out Main Street.” That has particularly resonated among young voters, where Sanders has won overwhelmingly.

But Deskins said the financial systems that make up Wall Street have a vital role to play in the economy. The problem, he said, is the aforementioned size and power of those financial institutions that play a role in helping borrowers find access to money.

“The Wall Street banks that are left are very big and very influential, and if they suffer it can cause a great deal of suffering in other parts of the economy,” Deskins said.

“I mean think about it, these banks have a lot of power–a lot of influence,” he said. “There is some incentive for the leaders in these banks to take on too much risk, and if they do take on too much risk and they lose it can send serious repercussions through other parts of the economy.”

Focusing on West Virginia, Greg Noone said he wasn’t sure if anti-Wall Street sentiment was the only factor playing into Sanders’s seeming popularity in the state.

“I think a lot of people here in West Virginia feel they’ve been left behind–feel that there’s a recovery but they’ve been left behind,” he said. “They feel that the coal industry is winnowing down. Even fracking is winnowing down.”

Can he win a general election?

One curious facet of the Sanders campaign is that he polls worse in the Democratic nomination contest as a whole than he does in the general election. In matchups against Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich, Sanders polls better–sometimes significantly–than former Secretary Clinton.

The particularly interesting matchup is Sanders-Kasich. Though general polling is still relatively inaccurate at this point in the cycle, the data indicates that Kasich–despite his deficit in the GOP contest–is the best suited to defeat Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Sanders doesn’t fair as well against Kasich as he does against Cruz and Trump, but still polls better state-by-state and nationally against Kasich then Clinton does.

But Greg Noone isn’t sure that Sanders’s general popularity (he has the highest favorable ratings of all five candidates left) is really accurate.

“Really when you start peeling the onion, Bernie hasn’t sponsored a whole lot of legislation,” he said. “His points are very valid. His conversation is one that draws people in, but Bernie is not necessarily someone that you can, at the end of the day, envision sitting in the Oval Office.”

Supporters like Davis suggest, if Bernie isn’t the Democratic nominee, he’ll need to see a token of good faith from the Democratic Party before he willingly casts his vote for Hillary Clinton–like seeing Sanders or popular progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on the ticket as a Vice Presidential candidate.

“That’s actually what it would take for me to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election; if I see some sort of sign that they are taking the more progressive wing of the party seriously,” he said.

Foreign policy

One of the more forgotten issues in this race has been foreign policy. Increased interest in foreign policy has coincided with attacks like those in Paris, Brussels, and San Bernadino, Calfiornia.

Greg Noone doesn’t expect it to play a major role in a general race, but Davis said Sanders’s foreign policy is one of his best selling points.

“He appears to have a lot of foresight,” Davis said. “He’s the type of person who is a leader through his actions.”

The American Conservative is a blog published by The American Ideas Institute that argues for “fiscal responsibility, prudent foreign policy, and protection of civil liberties.” In their 2016 foreign policy report card of the then remaining seven candidates, Sanders scored the highest in their grading criteria with a “B” grade.

Sanders received high marks for his stance on the Iraq War and Russia, but low marks for voting to intervene in Libya in 2011.

Davis said Sanders’s commitment to opposing the Iraq War remains a strong selling point for him.

“In his speeches to Congress, he mentioned several times that we don’t know what kind of power vacuum is going to crop up over there if we go over and do what we did,” he said.

The likely outcome

Though Senator Sanders has made the Democratic race far more interesting, he still faces long odds of winning the nomination due to the Democratic party’s rules of proportionality. Those odds took a turn for the worse after Hillary Clinton’s 15-point margin of victory in the New York Democratic Primary.

It is unlikely that Sanders can overtake Clinton in the pledged delegate count before the convention. He would need the support of Democratic super delegates to win the nominaton–something Greg Noone doesn’t believe is plausible.

With that said, Sanders has surpassed President Barack Obama in terms of small, grassroots donations–averaging around $27 per donation. He is well-funded and prepared to take his delegates and have them seated at the Democratic National Convention in hopes of moving the Democratic platform left.

Even if he doesn’t win, many others have postulated that Sanders has essentially already won by doing what seemed virtually impossible a year ago–assailing Hillary Clinton from the left and becoming a viable contender at the same time.

In West Virginia, both the demographis and political mood may favor a Sanders victory. If that’s the outcome, and West Virginia Democrats and non-party affiliates choose the unorthodox Jewish Senator from Vermont, it aligns them with the other 42 percent of voters in the Democratic primary who have made a fairly simple claim.

They are tired of business as usual.

For more, read our other stories on: John KasichDonald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.