All your berning questions about Bernie Sanders answered. Share with Bernie-skeptic friends and family!
Isn’t Bernie too extreme?
Bernie’s signature policies, like Medicare for All, a $15 an hour minimum wage, free college, and increasing taxes on the rich are within the mainstream of public opinion, with polls showing they’re supported by a majority of Americans. His agenda is so popular that other candidates have followed his lead.
Trump disingenuously campaigned on supporting Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid because even he knew that there is “long-standing, cross-partisan voter support for a strong social safety net.”
Voters in many red states have approved ballot measures raising the minimum wage, and even a majority of Republicans support raising taxes on the wealthy!
But can he beat Trump?
Bernie beats Trump in almost every single national head-to-head poll, “outpolling [Trump] in 67 of 72 head-to-head polls since March.” Bernie also beats Trump in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania - the states on which Trump’s razor thin Electoral College victory hinged.
Bernie, like any other Democratic candidate, will benefit from strong anti-Trump sentiment. A majority of Democratic voters say they will back the eventual nominee, whoever that may be. But Bernie “has the highest net favorables of any presidential candidate with Democratic voters” and is the only candidate who can mobilize a potentially large, decisive, new bloc of younger and infrequent voters.
There were approximately 100 million nonvoters in 2016 - disproportionately “young, non-white, and working-class.” Pew Research projects that in 2020 people of color will make up “fully one-third of all eligible voters” and that “Generation Z (18-23 year olds) will be more than twice as large as in 2020 as it was in 2016 (10 percent versus 4 percent).” In the battleground states of “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.”
Exit polls from the primaries so far show that Bernie is the leading candidate with those groups. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Bernie “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.”
Won’t they call him a socialist?
A majority of registered voters already know that Bernie identifies as a democratic socialist, yet he still beats Trump in almost every poll.
Bernie has explained that democratic socialism simply means continuing the work of FDR’s New Deal, which gave us Social Security and minimum wage laws. Bernie wants to ensure the economic rights of all citizens, like “the right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.”
Republicans are the “political party that cried wolf” - they’ve attacked every Democratic policy and candidate as socialist for so long that the effectiveness of the attack should be viewed skeptically.
But will he able to get anything done?
Bernie is offering a new theory of change by inspiring people with a clear, bold vision, and motivating a grassroots movement to mobilize on behalf of his agenda.
The President also has the power to appoint heads of cabinet agencies, regulators, and judges. Bernie has committed to appointing a diverse cabinet that will fight for working families and nominate judges who will stand up to corporate power.
Without signing a new law, the next president can use executive authority to “lower prescription drug prices, cancel student debt, break up the big banks, give everybody who wants one a bank account, counteract the dominance of monopoly power, protect farmers from price discrimination and unfair dealing, force divestment from fossil fuel projects, close a slew of tax loopholes, hold crooked CEOs accountable, mandate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, allow the effective legalization of marijuana, make it easier for 800,000 workers to join a union, and much, much more.”
Will he be able to work with Republicans?
Bernie has worked with Republicans throughout his career, since his time as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, where “few disputed that his policies resulted in an efficient and responsive city government.”
When Bernie chaired the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, he worked with John McCain to successfully enact bipartisan reform to the veterans’ health system, enabling “the VA to hire more doctors and nurses at nearly 1,000 hospitals and other medical facilities across the country.” And over the past two years, Bernie has been working with conservative Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen.
It’s true that Bernie won’t work with Republicans to help corporations get tax breaks or start unnecessary and endless wars.
But what about the “Bernie Bros”?
Bernie’s message is about love and compassion, and building a decent, humane society, where people don’t have to work two jobs to get by or face bankruptcy because of a medical emergency. Harassing behavior is not consistent with Bernie’s message and he’s disowned anyone doing so in his name.
Bernie has the most diverse coalition, with strong support from women and people of color. In fact, “young women actually make up more of Bernie’s base than men.” And Bernie won more votes from women and Hispanic voters than any other candidate in Nevada.
How are we going to pay for it?
Good question! Bernie has detailed financing mechanisms for all of his major proposals. For example, Bernie’s plan for free college for all and cancelling all student loan debt would be financed “by placing a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades – 50 cents on every $100 of stock – a 0.1 percent fee on bond trades, and a 0.005 percent fee on derivative trades.” This Wall Street speculation tax has been imposed by some 40 countries throughout the world, like Britain, South Korea, Germany, and France.
But we must also ask, what is the price of inaction? “A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about climate change will almost certainly cost far more.”