Opinion: Pete Buttigieg’s bad take on Bernie Sanders
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic candidate for president, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on April 16. By Greg Sargent Greg Sargent Opinion writer covering national politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer April 24 at 4:19 PM The other day, Pete Buttigieg took heat for seeming to compare supporters of Bernie Sanders with supporters of President Trump.
In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg said Mr. Sanders’s left-wing proposals were no longer as provocative as in 2016 — “people were refreshed by the novelty of that boldness” — and expressed skepticism that a self-described democratic socialist in his late 70s could win a general election. There are two separate claims here. The first is that Sanders’ success in the 2016 Democratic primaries was driven by the “novelty" of his agenda’s general “boldness.
There is probably some truth to all of those explanations — obviously, they can overlap in various ways — and it’s clear that the “novelty” theory is far less convincing. Right now, Sanders seems to command the support on average of slightly more than 20 percent of Democratic primary voters nationally. That’s down from the 43 percent he ended up winning in 2016, but as FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver points out, you’d expect that to be down, given how much more crowded the field is.
Buttigieg has sometimes suggested that he has a better understanding of voters from left-behind rural and industrial areas than other Democrats. Like other candidates from the industrial Midwest, he sometimes treats winning those voters as mainly a matter of refraining from sneering at them the way those other coastal elitist candidates do.
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