The Nation: Time for Sanders to Hone the Electability Argument
“One concern moderate Democrats have is that Sanders’s long support of left-wing causes might make him vulnerable to opposition research. Former Clinton adviser Peter Daou provides a useful retort. “I spent a good chunk of time in 2016 poring over the #Bernie oppo book,” Daou tweeted. “There is nothing in it that isn’t already in the public sphere. So when people claim there are big surprises … They’re making it up.” A recent CNN poll shows Sanders has the highest net favorability of any Democratic candidate.
“Writing in Jacobin, Megan Day and Matt Karp make a compelling case that Sanders can specifically argue that he’s in the best position to win back the Obama voters who went for Trump in Midwestern swing states, as well as draw out Obama voters who stayed at home and energize nonvoters.
“Day and Karp note that “in the 206 counties that went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Trump in 2016, Sanders has out-fundraised all of his competitors—by a long shot. By September 2019, he pulled in 81,841 individual donations from 33,185 donors in these flipped counties. That’s roughly three times as many as Biden, Warren, or Pete Buttigieg.”
“More broadly, they contend that “American nonvoters, including nonvoters in the battleground states, are disproportionately young, non-white, and working-class. Bernie is distinctly popular with all of these groups, suggesting that he is by far our best shot to mobilize this vast slumbering army in a general election against Trump.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/sanders-blackout-electability-over/