Would Bernie Sanders Have Won?

Opinion|Would Bernie Have Won?

As the Democratic Party debates where to go after its 2024 drubbing, we’re going to spend the next two episodes of the show featuring two very different perspectives on the way forward.

After Trump won the election, Bernie Sanders released a blistering statement saying, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

And Bernie’s advisers and allies have been making their own versions of this argument and jockeying for the positions that would help them rebuild the Democratic Party around this vision. Some have floated Bernie’s 2020 campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. And Faiz sent me an email after the episode with Patrick Ruffini, the Republican pollster who’s been tracking the movement of working class voters to the G.O.P., saying there was a friendly debate he wanted to have here: That Bernie, or at least Bernie-ism, is the obvious answer, and Democrats simply refuse to see it. And the fact that they refuse to see it says something very telling about the party.

At the same time, I’ve heard from a lot of Democrats who are annoyed, to say the least, about this attack from Sanders’s world: Democrats abandoned the working class?

Biden has been the most economically populist president of the modern era. He’s been the most pro-labor president of the modern era. And what did it get him — or Harris? And if democratic socialism, if Bernie-ism, is the answer to winning back these voters, why don’t you see democratic socialists winning in red districts?

So this is a rich conversation, and it’s a very real debate among Democrats right now. And Faiz Shakir, whom I’ve known for years, is a great person to have on to talk about it. He has seen the Democratic Party from every vantage point. He didn’t just work for Sanders. He’s worked in senior positions for Nancy Pelosi, for Harry Reid, for the A.C.L.U. He co-founded ThinkProgress, and he’s currently the executive director of the pro-worker nonprofit media organization More Perfect Union.