Sanders and the Left After Super Tuesday

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Published on Wednesday, 16 March 2016 23:45

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1234 .... March 17, 2016
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Sanders and the Left After Super Tuesday:

Why there is still hope and why the Left should rejoice and push forward

Brad A. Bauerly and Ingar Solty

While some have become skeptical, there are those -- from The Nation via Politico and Tom Cahill (U.S. Uncut) to Robert Reich -- who are now saying that this is not the end of the line for Bernie Sanders U.S. presidential bid.

And it is indeed true that we should remind ourselves that ever since the 1980s the Democratic party leadership has scheduled the primary season in ways that voters in more conservative states would go to the polls first in order to prevent leftist grassroots candidates from challenging the neoliberal party establishment. Keeping that in... mind, it's also true that pretty much all the upcoming states are way more favorable to Sanders than most of the ones that have already voted.

And it's also true that only those will now despair who had somewhat unrealistic hopes with regard to what was actually possible Tuesday night. After all, despite all the Sanders momentum etc., another historic upset like the one in Michigan was unlikely.

Regardless of how critical one is of how the corporate media prefers to talk about polls and electability instead of about actual political issues, regardless of how the 2016 U.S. presidential election is taking place in a highly dynamic and ultimately unpredictable "populist moment" and regardless also of how incredibly wrong therefore FiveThirtyEight and other influential polling institutions were when it came to predicting Michigan, one must admit that the FiveThirtyEight predictions have been quite accurate in most of the previous states so far. And despite the come-from-behind momentum resulting from the Michigan boost, one could simply not expect another upset in the states that voted Tuesday night. FiveThirtyEight's predictions of Sanders victories, just based on their polls, were