In the wake of Tuesday’s ‘Acela Primary’ results, trailing campaigns are re-assessing their livelihoods, and whether they should stay in the game through the next round of primaries, in Indiana and California.
Bernie Sanders, for example, is hacking hundreds of campaign jobs, laying off field workers in primary states rather than re-assigning them. He claims that the downsizing has more to do with a shift in focus to the remaining primary states, but typical campaign procedure would require reassigning ground workers to delegate training or general election duties (or sending them to remaining high-delegate states, like California).
But while Sanders claims, unironically, that he’s downsizing for efficiency, it may be his poll numbers and not his staff count that is causing the change; Sanders is losing his target demographic, working class voters. As recently as Sunday, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders was concerned that a lack of interest among poor voters was behind his chronic difficulties, even in states where income inequality was among the electorate’s top concerns. “Poor people don’t vote,” bemoaned Sanders. “That’s a sad reality of American society.”
Tuesday night, however, according to the Washington Post, Sanders lost Democratic voters with incomes less than $50,000 by 11 points. He lost “middle income” voters by 9 points. Hillary Clinton, it turns out, is the real champion of the poor – at least, the Democratic-leaning ones.
And it may be because they recognize Bernie Sanders’s Santa-like policies would have a dramatic impact on their lives. Sanders’s trade policies, for example, might help American workers temporarily, but financial experts claim they would have a dramatic impact on the global poor. With such dramatic tax hikes, it’s likely Americans recognize that “soaking the rich” will not produce anywhere near the revenue Sanders needs to enact his grand plans. Even his health plan could end up costing, literally, an arm and a leg. And his free college plan? When his wife had the chance to make college more affordable, she jacked up tuition – not quite “supporting the downtrodden undergraduate.”
According to a statement sent to supporters Monday night, Sanders’s campaign is changing direction, looking forward to the “14 issue-oriented campaigns” to come, rather than the primaries, and pledging to take all of his remaining delegates to Philadelphia for the DNC. If they can’t vote, they can at least, he says, make changes to the party platform. One of those changes might be a call for mandatory voting, if he still thinks that will help whoever succeeds him to the progressive mantle.
