Letter to a Bernie Supporter

I can totally get how exhilarating this moment must be for you.

I want to honor your excitement to have found a political leader you can believe in with Bernie Sanders. He truly is gifted, for he sees many changes that are required for America to fulfill our promise and articulates them in a way that moves millions. He is bold. Fearless even.

Kudos to you for having built a strong enough political movement that you have a chance to enact real changes. As a movement, you have called forth the next wave of change leaders and the bonds you forge in the campaign will be something you’ll always share.

My 34-year old self would have been right there holding hands with you in Bernie’s Revolution.

At that age, I got passionately involved with the Dennis Kucinich for President campaign in 2004. He represented my progressive dreams and aspirations in a way a politician never had. He was bold. Visionary. And, as it turns out, way ahead of his time.

My disappointment that the rest of the country didn’t take him seriously enough taught me an important lesson: society has to be ready for when a groundbreaking political leader comes along.

Which leads me to why Bernie is going to run into some very tough headwinds.

The core of Bernie’s economic message is democratic socialism, which promises not just reform but really a whole new economic model for our country.

There are a lot of Americans who are scared to upset the economic apple cart with dramatic changes in one of our most contentious and perilous moments we’ve faced.

I actually do agree with you that democratic socialism offers many improvements on what we have. However, trying to shift out the economic engine that is capitalism in a dramatic fashion is equivalent to trying to do engine work on a car while it’s driving. It’s risky and it needs to be very carefully done.

And it’s going to create a lot of societal friction and probably backlash.

Right now, we have about 50% of our population that is justifiably worried about losing our democracy altogether from a second Trump term. Much of the country is in fear and simply wants some stability after the last three years of conflict and chaos.

It’s easier in a chaotic time to do our best to shift people’s minds and not force change too quickly, which is more likely to create a reaction. Trying to force someone to change faster than their natural pace often leads to judgement, accusations, blame, and even hatred. And that ruptures the fabric of trust of human connection and pits people against each other.

Which brings us back to Bernie’s campaign.

I totally get how it must feel so great to have this crazy, beautiful uprising around his campaign — you are finally breaking through the consensus trance.

Just being able to talk about democratic socialism as a viable option is bound to change things for the better as people look more seriously at the European societies that have implemented it. I also agree with you that it’s important the we let go of our hyper-capitalist fixation which is causing so much harm, injustice and inequality.

But democratic socialism is a big leap from where we are, at least psychologically. Only 47% of Americans say they would consider a socialist candidate and your average American doesn’t see a difference between democratic socialism and socialism.

So, the very core of Bernie’s economic and political message has a strong negative association for the majority of Americans. They think of oppressive regimes. They think of losing their freedom. They think of losing their wealth to Big Government.

Trump knows this and he has assembled a $1-billion-dollar Death Star misinformation campaign that is frankly terrifying in its power. Envision a swarm of tens of thousands of hate-and-fear-ads micro-targeted to exactly the right people on Facebook. Every day.

No candidate in the history of our Republic has ever faced a more destructive, ruthless, and unethical attack machine, designed only for winning without preserving any decency in the process. Psychologically, lies are more powerful and spread faster than truth.

The Trump machine will be a deluge of powerful, micro-targeted lies.

That’s all to say that our eventual Democratic candidate will be entering a literal war zone with an opponent who is not constrained by the law, decency, or the truth.

And that, my friends, is the political battle of our lives.

Which returns us to democratic socialism. Trump’s Death Star will be designed to elicit fear in people. People’s core fear is that someone is going to upend what is good in their life and make it worse, particularly around money. Most Americans associate socialism with Cuba and the Soviet Union. Not Denmark. They associate socialism with a big, oppressive, ineffectual government that suppresses individual freedoms and makes the country poorer.

You probably do not have that association, but Americans as a whole do.

By hammering on just the associations people have with the word socialism, which Bernie has talked about all along, including saying favorable things about socialist countries and their leaders, Bernie’s favorability ratings will take hit after hit.

He cannot easily run from a socialist label and it will gradually drag him down.

Trump will pour hundreds and hundreds of millions into attack ads that stir pocketbook fears in any Americans who fears socialism even slightly. That is 100% guaranteed.

Which brings us back to now, the moment when you are getting close to propelling Bernie to the Democratic nomination.

I honor your energy and power. I respect how far you’ve come.

I simply want you to consider redirecting the momentum and power now from Bernie into Elizabeth Warren’s campaign because she may well offer a higher likelihood to make the real changes you want.

Why?

As the revolutionary message and fiery rhetoric has built in Bernie’s campaign it also fostered quite a bit of negative energy directed at people who didn’t fall in line. It started to show up as anger towards others. Attacks on Facebook pages. Condemnations. Even threats. The us-versus-them and my-way-or-the-highway energy has been difficult to deal with, even for a lot of progressive allies.

Most Democrats I know haven’t said anything publicly but have some pretty deep reservations about the Revolution as a result.

The truth of the matter is that Bernie’s campaign is trailing a legacy of mistrust with people outside it. The class rhetoric has alienated people in places of power. The bold stances have triggered the anxieties of moderates.

And this low trust is a real barrier to everyone coming together and creating the united army that will be required to win.

There’s also the issue of money. The Democratic candidate is heading straight into a $1 billion blitzkrieg of misinformation and Bernie has already refused to accept the $1B of help Bloomberg has offered. Bernie does this out of noble motivations, for sure, but it is very risky. What if the Revolution can’t overcome the torrent of lies because it’s all built on $18 donations that are being outspent every single day?

Is purity more important than preventing Trump from retaking the White House?

Overall, this combination of Democratic mistrust and less campaign cash is not a great recipe for a success, especially when you are promising Americans, 60% of whom report being better off than three years ago, a major economic change in which they could lose money and in which they have been defined as part of an Establishment that must be overthrown.

Solidarity on the left will be dramatically tested by the Republican attack machine. If there are deep resentments or fissures on our side, those will be easy things to exploit, either by Trump or the Russians, who are clearly involved again. Fears can be easily stoked with targeted ads.

So this is a long-winded way of encouraging you to consider a scenario that I believe has a higher likelihood of success for your revolutionary aims.

What if you and your dedicated, activated progressive friends supported Elizabeth Warren and helped her stay viable in the coming months?

The most important reason is that the highest-likelihood outcome now is a contested convention (see www.fivethirtyeight.com ratings, currently at 69%).

If a contested convention happens and Bernie is short of a majority, he actually helped to designthe rules that push things to a second round of voting. He can’t contest this process with any integrity since he helped to create it.

So in order to win, he will MOST likely have to pull delegates from someone else and it’s very unlikely that Biden or Bloomberg will get on board with that, much less those already won by Buttigieg or Klobuchar. Basically, the only potential coalition he has is with Elizabeth Warren.

It’s good to remember that there are plenty of people out there who would not vote for Bernie if Warren were to drop out. Which means at least some of the delegates she would otherwise accrue would accrue outside of a progressive coalition.

In other words, Warren can gather delegates from votes that would not otherwise go to Bernie.

And Bernie would absolutely need those delegates in a scenario where he can’t reach a majority of delegates on a first vote since the superdelegates are mostly not Bernie backers. Otherwise, Biden and his allies would align against Bernie and get the majority needed for the nomination. While that might seem suicidal for the party, it is likely what would happen because Bernie is not allied with any other candidates who are winning delegates except for Warren.

There are also a lot of people putting money in Warren’s campaign right now ($29M in February) and not all of that would go to Bernie if she dropped because Bernie was the second choice for only 40% of her supporters in a late February poll. That means that Bernie would effectively lose the votes and money of 60% of her supporters (around 7–8% nationally) UNLESS she runs all the way to the convention and keeps them committed to a progressive coalition and could either drop direct them on a second vote.

It’s important to understand why there are a lot of pro-Warren people who wouldn’t back Bernie now. For many Americans who lean progressive, Warren is a lot easier to get behind. For them, she is Bernie without the baggage of socialism and the reputation of Bernie Bros. They don’t like the class warfare language. They are turned off by revolutionary rhetoric.

In short, just because they lean progressive in their values doesn’t mean that they are excited by Bernie.

This is also why it’s likely either Warren will play a key role in a contested convention either to support Bernie’s nomination OR, on the flip side, there are scenarios where it could also be that Warren ends up better positioned to lead the coalition.

If one of those scenarios came to pass, such as Bernie + Elizabeth delegates not equaling the moderates, Bernie might decide to get behind Warren at the top of the ticket for the sake of a unifying ticket that the moderates could support. In that case, she would undoubtedly give him a prominent Cabinet seat if not a VP role. He would be a close and trusted advisor to the candidate, who is his ideological sister.

Warren is more acceptable to moderate Democrats because she’s been a Democrat for a significant period of time. While she is aligned with the vast majority of Bernie’s platform, other Democrats see her as less threatening.

If you and enough other Bernie supporters were to migrate at least some support to Warren, particularly in states where she is just below the 15% viability threshhold, we could better ensure that we would emerge from the Democratic Convention with a strong progressive coalition with either Bernie or Warren at the top of the ticket.

On the plus side, if Warren did become the candidate, she would be able to unify the rest of the Democratic party, plus many independents, and also mobilize people around the historic opportunity of having the first female president. As a lawyer, she would prosecute the case powerfully against Trump on behalf of the women he has wronged as well, as she demonstrated in the Vegas debate.

So I don’t see that as a loss for the Revolution but actually could make the goals more attainable because they are less threatening to the country.

Going into battle, Warren would also not be saddled with the socialist label. And she would have at least $1 billion of extra money from Bloomberg to drown out Trump’s lies.

Plus, she would have Bernie right by her side, and the Revolution behind her but in a new form. Bernie supporters and more mainstream Democrats could, by unifying around Warren, forge an important and stronger alliance going into the political battle of our lives.

While that scenario may not be your first choice, it’s good to think about how things can unfold since a lot is on the line

I imagine it’s a stretch for you to consider such a coalition with Biden at the top of the ticket, much less Bloomberg. But I think, if you’re honest, you could get on board with Warren as the standard-bearer.

At the end of the day, I ask you to consider that if we are unable to truly unify the party, it could very well lead to a humbling defeat and not only the loss of the Presidency but also the House as more moderate Democrats run away from the top of a losing ticket. Losing the House would mean we would lose our last bulwark against the autocracy Trump is driving us towards.

That’s a very serious and dark scenario and personally, my analysis leads me to think that we have to plan carefully to avoid it.

For multiple reasons, we are more likely to have a good chance at a unified ticket with Elizabeth Warren as a strong and viable candidate in the months to come.

If the scenario unfolded where she ended up heading the ticket (perhaps through Bernie advocating it), we would still have a chance to not only advance the major reforms needed but also have the chance to put the first woman in history in the White House.

It would actually make for a great story for our children and grandchildren to say that we stopped a would-be despot who represented the worst of the last era and in doing so, we helped to usher in a new era, where the most powerful person on Earth would be a woman for the first time in 5000 years. And she would be advanced a bold progressive agenda for all — a new era for humanity.

That’s an epic story. That’s a history-defining moment.

It’s the economic revolution PLUS a gender revolution.

Electing a female President is something that would matter deeply to the 3.5 billion women and girls of the world. They would finally know that they can aspire to any seat of power. And that may be one of the most significant things we can do for the planet to turn things around in time.

In short, I believe a Warren-led ticket could be a real win for the policy goals you want to achieve. To get to that scenario, some supporters behind Bernie would have to realign with Warren to keep her winning delegates in contest after contest.

Even if you’re not sure yet, keeping Warren alive and viable and gaining delegates keeps the option open. Getting her delegates provides another progressive ally with negotiating leverage in the high likelihood of a contested convention.

We can’t know how things are going to pan out, but going into a contested convention with a stronger progressive block of delegates can only lead to better outcomes.

So I encourage you to vote for her and support her to stay viable, particularly in states where she’s polling just below 15%. Let’s keep alive this option and see if it becomes a way for everyone to win if things do head for a contested convention.