By David Kamioner | December 17, 2019
Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is in solid second place right now as a primary candidate — behind frontrunner Joe Biden’s 2020 Democrat primary lead in national polls — and is leading in the Real Clear Politics poll average in New Hampshire.
In Iowa, Sanders is only three points behind Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.
Sanders’ newfound strength seems to come from the polling bleed of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — who is faltering in all polls.
This is good news for President Donald Trump, as the further Left the Dem nominee is, the easier time he will have in November 2020.
And nobody in the Dem field is further Left than Sanders, the self-described socialist and former great supporter of the Soviet Union.
But it is still over a month until the February Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary — and that time sequence is an eternity in a political process in which one momentary slip-up — think Howard Dean’s “scream” in Iowa in 2004 — can lift or doom a campaign.
While Sanders is doing well right now, Warren is from right next door to New Hampshire, as is Sanders — and she’ll put her emphasis in the end game.
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She well knows that the only survey that matters is the last one taken in the voting booths on Election Day of 2020.
“The latest NPR-PBS-Marist national survey released Sunday found Biden with the support of 24 percent of respondents, Sanders at 22 percent and Warren at 17 percent, with the Vermont senator leading among progressives, independents, men, nonwhite voters and young people,” The Hill reported. “Sanders has a 20-point lead over the next closest contender among voters under the age of 45.”
That last number is not particularly good news for Sanders — as young voters are strident and energetic in their ideological fervor but traditionally turn out in low numbers at the polls.
However, the potential of a Sanders nomination on the Democratic side, and Trump’s gain by it, has so alarmed the Dem Establishment that former President Barack Obama is rumored to be contemplating a public statement against Sanders if the Vermont senator’s surge looks unstoppable.
Obama recently warned against “woke” “purity tests” in the Democrat Party and is positioning himself, with his wife’s political future in mind, as a moderate voice in the Dem universe.
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Think about that.
Barack Obama, previously the most left-wing president in American history, now can legitimately be considered a moderate in the current Dem ideological context.
Combine that with the aforementioned boom by Bernie Sanders — and you have the state of today’s Democratic Party.
This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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