As Soviet Union-honeymooning, Sandinista-supporting, Fidel Castro-praising, full-on socialist loon bag Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) emerges as the undisputed front runner for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination, it nonetheless seems that the median American is rather lukewarm about the possibility of supporting someone for the presidency who holds such historically fringe views.
According to a Gallup survey released yesterday, “[m]ore than 90% of Americans say they would be happy to vote for a presidential candidate their party nominated who would be black, Catholic, Hispanic, Jewish or a woman; 80% would accept evangelical Christians, homosexual men, and lesbians; 60-70% are willing to embrace a presidential candidate who is under 40, over 70, a Muslim or an atheist; but only 45% say they would vote for a socialist for president,” the Jewish Press summarized.
“Gallup’s bottom line conclusion is: The self-declared socialist Sanders could count on 76% of Democratic voters, 45% of Independents and … only 17% of Republicans,” the Press noted.
As Gallup noted at the top of its report, socialists are the “one group tested” who “receive[] majority opposition.” After all, “[l]ess than half of Americans, 45%, say they would vote for a socialist for president, while 53% say they would not.”
The is fairly brutal news for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and it goes a long way toward explaining why various levers of the DNC’s broader party apparatus have recently sounded the alarm about a possible Sanders nomination.
“The only thing, the only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party. That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days. … So I am scared to death, I really am,” former top Bill Clinton strategist James Carville said earlier this week while likening Sanders to the far-left Corbyn, as The Daily Wire reported.
“There’s a certain part of the Democratic Party that wants us to be a cult. I’m not interested in being in a cult. I’m 75 years old. I’m just not a very cult-y person,” Carville continued.
Similarly, former Obama-era secretary of state and failed 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry had to deny a recent report that he was considering jumping into the 2020 Democratic presidential race in a purported last-ditch attempt to stave off an impending Sanders nomination.
“NBC News reported on Sunday that Kerry ‘was overheard Sunday on the phone at a Des Moines hotel explaining what he would have to do to enter the presidential race amid “the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole,”‘” The Daily Wire also noted earlier this month.
Sanders has a lifelong history as a rabid socialist activist, and Paul Sperry argued at the New York Post in 2016 that Sanders is actually best described as a “diehard communist”:
In the early ’70s, Sanders helped found the Liberty Union Party, which called for the nationalization of all U.S. banks and the public takeover of all private utility companies.
After failed runs for Congress, Sanders in 1981 managed to get elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, where he restricted property rights for landlords, set price controls and raised property taxes to pay for communal land trusts. …
In 1985, he traveled to [Nicaragua] to celebrate the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. He called it a “heroic revolution.” …
Sanders also adopted a Soviet sister city outside Moscow and honeymooned with his second wife in the USSR. He put up a Soviet flag in his office, shocking even the Birkenstock-wearing local liberals. At the time, the Evil Empire was on the march around the world, and threatening the U.S. with nuclear annihilation.
Then, in 1989, as the West was on the verge of winning the Cold War, Sanders addressed the national conference of the U.S. Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to “the triumph of Soviet power in the U.S..”