[rad-green] Democratic Establishment's Real Fear Is a Bernie Win. Worry from many in corporate media is not that Sanders will lose to Trump, but that he will win.

*https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/03/did-chris-matthews-reveal-democratic-establishments-real-fear-bernie-win
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/03/did-chris-matthews-reveal-democratic-establishments-real-fear-bernie-win>Common
Dreams          March 3, 2020Did Chris Matthews Reveal That Democratic
Establishment's Real Fear Is a Bernie Win?Notice that the central worry
from many in the corporate media is not that Sanders will lose to Trump,
but that he will win.by Jeff Cohen*

[image: MSNBC host Chris Matthews opines on the state of the Democratic
primary ahead of the Nevada Caucus last month. (Image: screenshot/MSNBC)]

*MSNBC host Chris Matthews opines on the state of the Democratic primary
ahead of the Nevada Caucus last month. (Image: screenshot/MSNBC)*

Mainstream news outlets keep pounding home the same message—that the
"Democratic establishment" or "Democratic moderates" are worried sick that
Bernie Sanders can't beat Trump. They worry about a Trump landslide, and a
"down-ballot disaster" in Congressional races.

Democratic insiders, we're told, fear a re-run of 1972—when progressive
antiwar candidate George McGovern lost 49 of 50 states to Richard Nixon.
Given our divided electoral map, with nearly 40 states safely blue or red,
such a scenario in 2020 is thoroughly absurd.

That didn't stop now-ex-MSNBC host Chris Matthews—who abruptly resigned
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/03/about-time-womens-groups-applaud-resignation-msnbc-host-chris-matthews-after-decades>
Monday
night after having had an on-air, Sanders-induced crack-up in recent weeks—from
offering this prophecy in mid-February: "I was there in 1972 at the
Democratic convention when the people on the left were dancing in glee. . .
And they went on to lose 49 states in their glee. So that could happen
again. So clearly. That’s what I see. It could happen again."

Let’s put aside that mad prediction. Or Matthews' paranoid Cold War comment
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/26/chris-matthews-and-twilight-boomers-pro-corporate-establishment>
 linking Sanders somehow to public executions in New York's Central Park.
Or his comparison
<https://deadline.com/2020/02/msnbc-chris-matthews-bernie-sanders-nazi-germany-invasion-france-1202866277/>
 of Sanders' triumph in Nevada to the finality of the Nazi conquest of
France.

And let's recognize that even a crazed TV character—like the fictional Howard
Beale in the "Network"—is capable of blurting out an important truth once
in a while. On the eve of the Nevada caucus, Matthews let the cat out of
the bag <https://twitter.com/people4bernie/status/1231310971546693632> about
the true fears of many in the Democratic establishment:

I'm wondering whether the Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be
President. Maybe that's too exciting a question to raise—they don’t like
Trump at all. Do they want Bernie Sanders to take over the Democratic Party
in perpetuity? If he takes it over, he sets the direction of the future of
the party. Maybe they'd rather wait four years and put in a Democrat that
they like.

Notice that the worry here is not that Sanders will lose, but that he will
win. And proceed to transform the Democratic Party. And presumably the
country.

Matthews was not expressing fear of 1972. It was more like fear of 1932.
That's when Franklin Roosevelt (a Sanders hero) triumphed and—propelled by
labor and socialist movements—transformed society with a New Deal
benefiting working people.

The corporate media's "Bernie can’t win" drumbeat should arouse skepticism
among news consumers. First, because political outcomes are difficult to
predict—especially after an unstable reality-TV star and a young African
American (middle name "Hussein") won the White House. Second, because few
have been more wrong for so long in their predictions than mainstream media
pundits and their pals in the Democratic establishment.

"In 2000, the cautious candidate of the Democratic establishment, Al Gore,
was sure to win. He didn't. In 2004, they told us the ever-vacillating John
Kerry was the most electable. He lost. In 2016, media and party elites
pushed hard for Hillary Clinton against the Sanders challenge, insisting
she was the candidate who could beat Trump. She didn't."

In 2000, the cautious candidate of the Democratic establishment, Al Gore,
was sure to win. He didn't. In 2004, they told us the ever-vacillating John
Kerry was the most electable. He lost. In 2016, media and party elites
pushed hard for Hillary Clinton against the Sanders challenge, insisting
she was the candidate who could beat Trump. She didn't.

As a newspaper of the corporate Democratic establishment (and endorser of
Gore, Kerry and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries), the *New York
Times* has long repeated the "Bernie can't win" mantra. So I give the
*Times* credit for publishing an important opposing view last week in a
guest column by analyst Steve Phillips of Democracy in Color: "Bernie
Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here's the Math
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/opinion/bernie-sanders-polls.html>."

Phillips cites head-to-head polling that shows Sanders beating Trump
nationally and "outperforming Mr. Trump in polls of the pivotal
battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania."

Phillips says the changing electorate (even from 2016 to 2020) and the
particular
way that Sanders won the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada
augur well for Sanders as the candidate who best matches up against Trump:

In all three early states, he received twice as much support from voters
under 30 than his closest competitor. In Nevada, he received about 70
percent of the vote in the most heavily Latino precincts. . . This will be
the most racially diverse electorate ever, with people of color making up
fully one-third of all eligible voters. The share of eligible voters from
Generation Z (18-23-year-olds) will be more than twice as large in 2020 as
it was in 2016.

More than other contenders, Sanders has shown he can inspire the two
fastest-growing, anti-Trump sectors of the electorate—youth voters and
Latinos. Writes Phillips: "In Michigan and Wisconsin, which were decided in
2016 by roughly 11,000 and 22,700 votes respectively, close to a million
young people have since turned 18." He notes that "160,000 Latinos have
turned 18" in Arizona, a state Trump won by only 91,000 votes.

I coproduced a documentary in which we interviewed working-class whites
<https://vimeo.com/292721963> in the Rust Belt of Ohio, longtime Democrats
who'd voted for Obama, voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and
then jumped to Trump (often out of anger over NAFTA). These are the
so-called "Obama-Trump voters"—and no Democratic nominee is likely to win
more of them back
<https://twitter.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1227068915982925824> than
Sanders.

The progressive senator is also "most likely to reclaim those Democratic
voters who defected to the Green Party"—the "Obama-Stein voters." As
Phillips points out: "The increase in votes for Jill Stein from 2012 to
2016 was greater than Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan and
Wisconsin."

As the South Carolina primary showed, one crucial voting bloc that Sanders
has so far had trouble inspiring is older African Americans—although he
beat Biden among blacks under 30, according to an *NBC News* exit poll.

If mainstream media spent less time on horse-race analysis and dubious
predictions,
and more time accurately presenting the candidates' records, perhaps almost
every voter of every color would know that Sanders was a brave civil rights
activist
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bernie-sanders-civil-rights-movement-activism>
 at the University of Chicago—a student leader in the then-renowned
Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), who "sat-in" and was arrested
protesting discrimination against African Americans.

The pictures of young Bernie in action
<https://www.google.com/search?q=bernie+sanders+civil+rights+arrests&oq=bernie+sanders+civil+rights+arrests&aqs=chrome..69i57.10046j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8>
 are dramatic and important to see.

At least as important as seeing Trump swing a golf club—or watching the
latest anti-Sanders smear from TV pundits carrying on
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/29/cnn-host-michael-smerconish-rebuked-comparing-sanders-surge-spread-coronavirus>
 the Chris Matthews tradition.

Jeff Cohen <https://www.commondreams.org/author/jeff-cohen> was associate
professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent
Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR
<http://www.fair.org/index.php>, and former board member of Progressive
Democrats of America <http://pdamerica.org/>. In 2002, he was a producer
and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC News). He is the author of *Cable News
Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/097606216X?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>* - and
a cofounder of the online action group, www.RootsAction.org
<http://www.rootsaction.org/>. His website is here: http://jeffcohen.org

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