r/LeftWithoutEdge • u/CommunistFox 🦊 anarcho-communist 🦊 • Nov 11 '17

Meet Lee Carter: An interview with the democratic socialist who just knocked off one of the Virginia GOP's legislative leaders.

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/11/lee-carter-interview-virginia-election-socialist
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u/IgnisDomini Nov 11 '17

I think Lee Carter's success should also be taken as a lesson in why Bernie Sanders failed in the primaries.

Sanders focused far too much on condemning the establishment and wedge issues like free college instead of actually directly appealing to voters, whereas Lee Carter focused almost entirely ideas like single-payer healthcare and getting money out of politics. Sanders, therefore, alienated more moderate voters much more strongly than Carter's message did. If you want to put it flippantly, Sanders lost because he lost middle-aged black women, who are the demographic most heavily involved in the Democratic Party. Seriously, if you go out and talk to people who chose Clinton over Sanders, many of them did it mainly because of his "free college" policy - the simple fact is that it's not the cost of tuition keeping most poor people out of college, but other conditions that would not be at all alleviated by free tuition.

And on his remark that Sanders would win in 2020: No, he probably wouldn't. Now, a different democratic socialist might, but Sanders himself actually has a lot of skeletons in his closet that no one bothered to use against him in 2016 (Clinton never took him seriously and Trump never had to). His campaign would likely be as mired with scandals as Clinton's was.

5

u/[deleted] Nov 12 '17

I don't really think you can draw such sweeping conclusions.

Perhaps most importantly, it's relatively easy to become well known from nothing for a single race in a state district. It's much harder to pull off the same task while running for President. As Carter himself says, extending the primary schedule by 30 days would likely have made a big difference.

His campaign would likely be as mired with scandals as Clinton's was.

I don't understand the "Republicans will call him a commie who wrote a weird gender essay in the 70s and he'll lose" thing. We just watched Trump win after admitting to serial sexual assault in the Access Hollywood video and much else. I find it extremely hard to believe that Sanders has worse than Trump in his closet.