S

enator Bernie Sanders lowered 
the microphone from his mouth 
to his hip, meandered over to the 

right side of the podium and looked out 
over the crowd packed into the Diag. 
The sun was just peeking from the 
tops of the Hatcher Graduate Library. 
Sanders stood there, holding his voice 
and his body still for nearly 10 seconds. 

He lifted his right arm, paused again, 

and unfurled one of his favorite lines:

“Nelson 
Mandela, 
one 
of 
the 

great heroes in modern history, said 
something that was very profound and 
appropriate for today. And he said, 
‘Everything seems impossible until it 
is done. Everything seems impossible 
until it is done.’ ” 

He continued: “In other words, if we 

were here 70 years ago and somebody 
said, ‘You know what? The day will come 
that we’ll have an African American 
President, people would’ve said ‘Don’t 
be ridiculous. Don’t be crazy, it’ll never 
happen. America is too racist a country. 
The day will come when gay marriage 
will be legal in America – ‘Don’t be 
crazy. That will never happen.’ The 
day will come when we have women 
governors and Senators all over this 
country — ‘Don’t be crazy. That can’t 
happen.’ ”

The crowd gained energy with each 

repetition.

Sanders went on to name major 

hurdles in this contemporary struggle 
for equality: Wall Street, insurance 
companies, drug companies, the fossil 
fuel industry, among other regular 
punching bags on the campaign trail.

“But, you know what, they are not 

the major impediment to progress,” 
he said. “The major impediment is the 
limitations of our own imagination.”

Sanders’s voice bellowed with a 

trademark fervor. The moment marked 
a tenuous one in the Sanders campaign, 
mere days after the axis on which his 
candidacy rested turned on its head. The 
Michigan primary, to be contested three 
days later, had suddenly heightened in 
urgency.

His speech came on the heels of an 

unexpected blow on Super Tuesday — 
one which saw former Vice President 
Joe Biden, perhaps improbably, lift 
his campaign from its depths to win 

10 of 14 states. Biden won seven of 
those states by double-digit margins, 
including Virginia and Alabama, which 
he won by 30 and 47 points, respectively. 
Those margins helped boost his lead 

in total delegates to 82, and spurred 
his projection in the FiveThirtyEight 
Democratic Primary Forecast to an 
89 percent chance to win a majority of 
pledged delegates. 

Sanders spent the days prior to 

Tuesday’s primary careening around the 
state, from Flint to Dearborn to Grand 
Rapids. It was announced only late 
Saturday evening that Sanders would be 
joined in Ann Arbor by Rep. Alexandria 
Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., undeniably his 
most popular surrogate among the Gen 
Z crowd. Together, they spent much 
of Sunday speaking to their plan: to 
reconfigure what is and isn’t possible in 
American politics through a resurgent, 
energized base of younger voters.

The symmetry of that relationship 

— the youngest member of Congress 
aligned with one of its oldest — conveys 
a degree of clarity about the democratic 
socialist movement and the sanctity of 
its moral convictions. It weaves a tale of 
resilience and longevity, perseverance 
and vision.

We hope this is the present, but it’s 

most definitely the future. Get on board 
or be left behind. 

“(Sanders) stands for what I think 

(is) 
right 
... 
both 
politically 
and 

morally,” LSA freshman James Aidala, 
a leader among the Students for Bernie 
organization at Michigan, told The 
Daily. “I think that everyone should 
have health care. Everyone should have 

a wage that they can live off of, if they 
work a full 40 hours a week. So he just 
speaks to me on basically, you know, all 
kinds of levels, that he is somebody who 
can run the country the right way.”

What’s 
left 
unsaid 
in 
Sanders’s 

invocations of Mandela is that in order 
to truly reconfigure the structure of 
American society, Sanders — or someone 
of his ideology — must first ascend 
to those positions of power like the 
presidency. Idealism without requisite 
authority can only go so far.

Through that lens, Sanders’s 14-point 

loss three days later to Biden in Michigan, 
a bellwether state in both the primary 
and the general election, reflected an 
electorate increasingly unwilling to 
take those leaps. According to exit polls 
in Michigan, Biden won a majority of 
white voters and a majority of Black 
voters. He won among voters with an 
advanced degree and he won amongst 
those without a college degree. Ninety-
four percent of voters said they’d trust 
Biden in a crisis. He won union voters. 
He won voters who said healthcare was 
their most important issue. The win was 
diverse and thorough.

And one statistic told the tale of the 

night and the entire cycle: Among voters 
under 30, 82 percent supported Sanders. 
Among voters 65 and over, 73 percent 
supported Biden. 

The former category accounted for 

just 15 percent of all voters. The latter 
made up 23 percent.
I

n the cool Ann Arbor air on 
Sunday, 
a 
protester 
walked 

around the Sanders rally holding 

a large sign reading “Every Socialist is 

a Dictator”. Clad in a top that said, “The 
Anti-Socialist Social Club”, he engaged 
some rally attendees in debate. 

Many Republicans today liken Sanders 

to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, 

pointing to their 

policies in Cuba 
and Venezuela. 
Among 
Democrats, the 
fear of electoral 
repercussions 
ignites a craving 
for pragmatism 
— 
a 
trait 

antithetical 
to 

Sanders’s zero-
sum approach.

In 
a 
July 

2019 
speech 

at 
George 

Washington University, Sanders likened 
his democratic socialist vision to that of 
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 
New Deal in the 1930s. In doing so, 
Sanders tried to counter the Republican 
portrayal of “socialism” as taboo, a 
tactic that’s been used for decades. 
Roosevelt did not define himself as a 
socialist but Sanders has self-identified 
as a democratic one for the majority of 
his career. During his speech, Sanders 
referenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: 
“This country has socialism for the rich, 
rugged individualism for the poor” a 
line used to dispute the depictions of 
him as a radical and emphasize the class 
disparity central to his campaign. Still, 
the 
long 
negative 
connotation 
of 

socialism in the United States begs 
the question as to whether Sanders 
can win the presidency — let alone the 
nomination — as a democratic socialist. 
Whether the stigma alone is too much to 
overcome.

But, perhaps spurred by Sanders’s 

national rise over the past five years, the 
tides of that perception are changing.

In 2018, more Democrats had a positive 

view of socialism than had a positive 
view of capitalism according to Gallup, 
with 57 percent of Democrats holding a 
positive view of socialism and 47 percent 
holding a positive view of capitalism. But 
this shift in opinion among Democrats 
doesn’t translate to a shift among the 
public as a whole. In a 2019 poll, the Pew 

Research Center found that 55 percent 
of Americans overall have a negative 
view of socialism, with 42 percent 
having a positive view. However, this is 
an increase since 2012, when 60 percent 
had a negative view of socialism and 
only 31 percent had a positive reaction — 
an increase likely owed to Sanders and 
his rise. 

The classic 18-29 age group has the 

most positive view of socialism, with 
50 percent labeling socialism as either 
“very positive” or “somewhat positive.” 
This is the group Sanders courts most 
often. LSA sophomore Anna Nedoss, 
a leading organizer with Students for 
Bernie, detailed Sanders’s operation: a 
summer and winter school for training 
students in the art of campaigning. Both 
schools were aimed at teaching students 
how to organize their college campuses 
and build support for Sanders. The 
program was the only one of its kind in 
the Democratic field. 

As mentioned, Sanders leans heavily 

on those who buy into his brand 
of democratic socialism the most: 
millennials and the Gen-Z generation. 

Aidala chuckled when asked what 
democratic socialism means to him. 

“Sorry, it’s just everyone keeps asking 

that,” he followed. “It’s to make people’s 
lives better. It is to help our most 
vulnerable wherever we can … you can 
call it what you want, but a lot of people 
could use health care and education 
right now. So if that’s socialism, or that’s 
bananas, either way. I like both.” 

In each interview with a Students for 

Bernie leader, Marx and Lenin were 
not brought up. Socialism in Venezuela 
and Cuba was not held up as shining 
examples — no expropriation of land, no 
nationalizing of oil companies, no price 
controls. For LSA freshman Alex Nobel, 
another leader in Students for Bernie, 
it was simple and succinct: “My view 
of democratic socialism is government 
helping people, instead of corporations, 
putting working people ahead of the 
rich.” These descriptions of democratic 
socialism and its policies sound akin to 
Roosevelt’s New Deal policies — which 
Sanders would be happy about — rather 
than policies of politicians like Chavez 
and Castro.

But this heavy lean on young voters 

to advance the ideals of democratic 
socialism to the White House is unstable. 
During Super Tuesday, turnout among 
voters under 30 didn’t top 20 percent 
across the 14 states voting. That’s 
unworkable and is likely a major factor 
behind Sanders’s tepid Super Tuesday 
result. Sanders needs to add more voters 
over 50 to the bandwagon — voters that 
consistently turn up and vote. But that 
demographic isn’t too positive about 
socialism: 38 percent of 50-64-year-olds 
and 35 percent of those over 65 think 
positively about it. 

Seemingly, it’s the label alone that’s 

holding him back. The democratic 
socialism umbrella of policies includes 
such trademarks as Medicare for All, 
the Green New Deal and free college. 
Those policies are widely popular 
among Democrats according to a Marist 
poll. Sixty-four percent say Medicare 
for All is a good idea, 86 percent say the 
Green New Deal is good and 76 percent 
like free public college, too. Yet Sanders, 
who is the only candidate left touting 
these policies, lost 10 states on Super 
Tuesday to Biden, who supports none 
of these policies. Ray, a longtime Ann 
Arbor resident, made plans to vote for 
Sanders: “I don’t think Bernie’s about 
socialism at all. I really, I very much 
doubt it. There’s no way Americans 
would do socialism.” While Ray sees 
through the stereotype of the word and 
supports single-payer healthcare and 
free education for those who want it, 
the Democratic establishment doesn’t 
seem to think the rest of the public can 
— at least in numbers that could win an 
election. 

But 
that 
generational 
disparity 

still represents the central chasm in 
the Democratic Primary, a numbers 

game that leaves Sanders’s bet to turn 
out young voters in unprecedented, 
revolutionary 
numbers 
increasingly 

flimsy. 
The 
latest 
poll 
from 

Quinnipiac 
highlighted 
that 
gulf 

between older and younger voters. 
Nationally, 80 percent of those over 65 
support Biden and 71 percent of those 
under 35 support Sanders. Based on 
turnout numbers, Sanders’s lone hope 
at reclaiming momentum and any 
feasible path to the nomination requires 
bridging that gap.

As rally-goers and pedestrians filed 

in and out of the Diag, some heading 
out of the chilly evening before the end 
of Sanders’s remarks, a voice yelled 
out above the fray with one parting 
message: “Tell your grandparents to 
vote for Bernie.” 
A

fter 
all 
the 
pomp 
and 

circumstance of the last week 
— Sanders parading around 

the state for days, staking the future of 
his campaign on an upset in Michigan 
— NBC News called the state for Biden 
shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday night. 
Neither candidate offered a speech, 
precautions taken to combat fears over 
Coronavirus. 

Many prognosticators used Michigan 

as the final nail in the Sanders 
campaign’s coffin, some pronouncing 
the nomination of Biden a foregone 
conclusion.

It also offered an indirect indictment 

of Sanders, who defied the polls to win 
the Michigan Primary in 2016. 

In some ways, the bleak outlook 

makes the dynamics of Sunday’s speech 
on the Diag even more pertinent. 
Ocasio-Cortez, likely the future of the 
democratic socialist movement, pre-
empting Sanders’s speech.

Standing near the steps to Hatcher 

Graduate 
Library, 
Ocasio-Cortez 

referenced a 1984 speech by Rev. 
Jesse Jackson, who had recently 
endorsed the Sanders campaign. The 
younger cohort of students stood 
closer to the stage. Many of the older 
attendees held back beyond the fence, 
listening from afar.

“Michigan, we have goliaths in our 

country today,” Ocasio-Cortez said, 
amid fervent roars. “The goliath of 
the fossil fuel industry. The goliath 
of big pharma. The goliath of the role 
of big money in politics. These are 
powerful, powerful forces. And we 
are David. We are David. David, all of 
us, the little guys.” 

Then she offered a warning to the 

movement, one which superseded 
the here and now of Bernie Sanders 
and the presidential race.

“What David had to do before he 

confronted Goliath was to shed his 
unnecessary clothes,” she said. “... 
Because in order for us to grow, well 
rather in order for us to win, we have 
to grow. We have to grow. We must 
be inclusive. We must bring more 
people into this movement.”

Wednesday, March 11, 2020 // The Statement
4B
5B
Wednesday, March 11, 2020 // The Statement

BY MAX MARCOVITCH AND FINNTAN STORER, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENTS

‘Tell your grandparents to 
vote for Bernie’: a call left unanswered

Seemingly, it’s the label alone 

that’s holding him back.

The latest poll from Quinnipiac highlighted 

that gulf between older and younger 

voters. Nationally, 80 percent of those 

over 65 support Biden and 71 percent of 

those under 35 support Sanders.

