In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton in this year’s presidential election, some contended that the Democratic Party chose the wrong candidate. Rather than going with Clinton, whose coziness to financial elites and the party establishment left her vulnerable to Trump’s populist attacks and created the much-discussed “enthusiasm gap” among Democratic voters, they argued that Bernie Sanders would have been the better choice. Unlike Clinton, he offered a left populist vision that could have countered Trump’s nativism, racism, and misogyny, while responding to the profound economic anxieties to which the Democratic Party establishment had proven so tone-deaf.
Without getting into the merits of this argument, what is remarkable about it is the fact that it is a plausible argument to make. Just a year ago, the idea that anyone other than Clinton could be the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer would have been almost unthinkable. Even more inconceivable was the idea that a rumpled, self-described “democratic socialist” from Vermont would galvanize tens of millions of voters and come dangerously close to derailing Clinton’s anointment.
And yet this is precisely what happened. Not only did Sanders give Clinton a serious run for her money, but he pulled the political discussion to the left during the primaries. He forced Clinton to at least mouth support for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Keystone XL pipeline, along with backing some half-measures to guarantee “debt-free” college, put a “public option” for Obamacare back on the table, and “get tough” on Wall Street.
But for all the surprises about Sanders’s candidacy, one thing was entirely predictable: the fact that Sanders ran for president as a Democrat. Although he toyed with the idea of mounting an independent, third-party campaign, he ultimately felt that he had no choice but to contest the Democratic Party nomination. As he explained at an MSNBC town hall meeting in March 2016:
[First] in terms of media coverage, you have to run within the Democratic Party. Number two, that to run as an independent, you need, you could be a billionaire. If you’re a billionaire, you can do that. I’m not a billionaire. So the structure of American politics today is such that I thought the right ethic was to run within the Democratic Party.
Sanders’s points were well taken. Few countries have a two-party system as deeply entrenched as the United States, and it is one of the only industrialized democracies without a well-established labor or socialist party. In almost any other country, Sanders would likely have run as a standard-bearer for such a party. But in the American context, that option was unavailable.
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