I’ve a lot of discourse online about how the Democratic Party held back Bernie Sanders from becoming president in 2016 & 2020 during the primaries. But my question to that is, are primaries not decided by the voters to get the most delegates? If the people didn’t vote for him, how is that the Dems’ fault?
A counter I see for that is that Dems endorsed his primary opponent to sway the vote. I dont really think that would have much impact on committed voters. Trump got almost no help in the primaries in 2016 and still won.
Is this narrative true and I’m just oblivious?
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this and this is just my understanding of how to answer this question
You may or may not realize that most voters don’t usually go out well in advance and research all potential candidates, selecting the one they feel represents their values the best. Many of them don’t even check in to the conversation until the primaries are over and they can make a simple red vs. blue choice. Among voters that do participate in primaries, they mostly rely on information they learn about those potential candidates by watching advertisements, endorsements from other well known politicians, clips from debates, news and social media coverage, etc.
Creating that information (ads, debates, news coverage, social media, etc.) requires two things: money and momentum. Money comes first, and is disbursed according to the process the other commenter described-- the party talks with its donors and collectively they decide who to fund.
In Bernie’s case, he was systematically deprived of money by the DNC as described above, in addition to his moral philosophy of not taking money from big donors. Instead, he funded his campaign through small donations-- which he earned a LOT of-- but he still had fewer funds to generate advertisements, to host events, to “get the word out”.
Without this funding and support, Bernie couldn’t generate momentum as effectively. The fact that he is as popular as he is despite the lack of support from the party illustrates how popular his platform is, but that isn’t enough to get disengaged voters interested. Further, in his case, other party members actively wanted him to NOT be the nominee, so there were fewer endorsements, more intentional maneuvering by the party to convince voters to vote for other candidates, etc.
In essence, the idea that having the purest moral and policy philosophy is the most important element to winning the nomination is naive: it takes money and support from institutions, or else no one will ever even know what that pure philosophy is.
Lots of great points here. I supported Bernie in those Primaries because long before he was looking at the presidency, he was the first politician that made me think “THIS guy is looking out for ME.”
It’s very likely that others who hadn’t heard of him before then, didn’t get to hear enough to think he could beat Trump.