Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
5 — Tuesday, April 14, 2020

ANIK JOSHI | COLUMN
EMILY ULRICH | COLUMN

S

en. 
Bernie 
Sanders, 

I-Vt., will not be the 

Democratic 
nominee 

for president in 2020, just as 

he wasn’t the nominee in 2016. 

The 2016 run was the first time 

a number of left-wing ideas 

were reintroduced in the public 

square and they (and Sanders) 

consistently 
polled 
well. 

Though Hillary Clinton won the 

race, some Sanders supporters 

saw a moral victory and many 

saw better odds for him in 

2020; he was seen as one of the 

frontrunners from the first day 

of speculation surrounding this 

race.

How did it all fall apart? A 

primary reason is that people 

drew the wrong conclusions 

from the 2016 primary and thus 

went into 2020 with a misshapen 

strategy. 2016 was a unique 

primary for the Democrats — no 

one except Clinton was really 

in it. She immediately cleared 

the field as the Clintons have 

been bastions of Democratic 

politics since the 1980s, and 

there was no reason for people 

to risk crossing her when, in 

all likelihood, she would come 

out on top. Hillary and more 

broadly, the Clintons, were well-

liked within the party apparatus 

but she was thought to be better 

liked by the voters within the 

party than she actually was.

In other words, she was 

something of a paper tiger which 

Sanders (and his campaign) 

readily 
took 
advantage 
of. 

Photos 
of 
Sanders’s 
2015 

announcement of his first run 

are incredible in how sparsely 

attended they are. Within a year 

of this conference, Sanders was 

able to summon ten thousand to 

an arena with three days notice. 

Sanders 
wasn’t 
especially 

known but he was also not 

especially hidden — he had been 

on The Daily Show back when 

Jon Stewart was hosting it.

Sanders won more than 20 

contests in the 2016 primary 

but still lost by millions of 

votes nationwide. Because he 

was seen to have performed so 

strongly, there was immediate 

speculation 
about 
his 
2020 

plans. As the most left-wing 

candidate 
since 
George 

McGovern in the 1970s, Sanders 

was seen by many to be a 

frontrunner from nearly the day 

he entered the race. However, 

it faded slowly and eventually, 

former 
Vice 
President 
Joe 

Biden effectively locked up the 

nomination after a triumphant 

victory in South Carolina and a 

strong Super Tuesday showing.

The problem with Sanders’s 

2020 campaign was that it was 

built off the presumption that 

he did well in 2016 because 

people liked him. While this 

was part of it, a much bigger 

part of his support seemed 

to come from those seeking 

“ABC,” or “Anyone But Clinton.” 

The 
problem 
with 
building 

a 
strategy 
centered 
around 

having an incredibly unpopular 

person as the frontrunner is 

that it only works when there is 

an incredibly unpopular person 

as the frontrunner. There was 

one of those in 2016 but there 

wasn’t one in 2020 and as a 

result, Sanders saw far worse 

results.

Beyond this, the Sanders 

campaign was built on an 

expectation that the splintered 

field would endure far longer 

than it actually did. President 

Donald Trump was able to win 

the nomination in 2016 because 

there was no single anti-Trump 

candidate. There was former 

Gov. of Ohio John Kasich, Sens. 

Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco 

Rubio, R-Fla., and so many 

more. None of them were able 

or willing to exit the race and so 

they continued splintering the 

vote. That wasn’t a problem on 

the Democratic side this year. 

Right before the start of Super 

Tuesday a number of moderate 

candidates who would have 

split Biden’s vote dropped out, 

including 
former 
Mayor 
of 

South Bend, Ind., Pete Buttigieg, 

and 
Sen. 
Amy 
Klobuchar, 

D-Minn. After this, Biden held a 

Texas rally where many former 

candidates 
(including 
ones 

that had dropped out earlier) 

endorsed him. This support, 

combined with Biden’s strong 

Super Tuesday showing ensured 

he would be the nominee.

Looking forward however, 

not all is lost. Biden will 

probably have a more liberal 

platform than either of the 

previous times he was on the top 

of the ticket. Consequently, his 

governance will in all likelihood 

be to the left of Barack Obama. 

But, if Sanders (or someone 

subscribing to his theory of 

politics) is to run and win, they 

must first accept that both a 

strategy of having an unpopular 

avatar 
for 
middlebrow 

liberalism and a strategy of 

counting on a splintered field 

are good ideas in theory, but 

don’t tend to hold in practice.

T

here have been four global 

recessions 
to 
date: 
1975, 

1982, 1991 and 2009 with 

2020 currently being added to this 

list. The economic downfall that we 

are experiencing due to the COVID-

19 pandemic is predicted to exceed 

any of the previous recessions. Over 

ten million Americans applied for 

unemployment 
benefits 
in 
March 

alone. The number of jobs lost due 

to COVID-19 in the last two weeks is 

comparable to the total jobs lost over 

a span of two years during the Great 

Recession. The intense restrictions 

placed on businesses are leading to 

not only a deep but also long-lasting 

downturn in the economy. Every 

region of the world is experiencing 

this financial crisis. However, there is 

one business that seems to be booming 

during this cataclysm — Amazon.com, 

Inc.

People are lenient to spend money 

right now, but the money that is being 

spent is concentrated in online delivery 

businesses. While most companies 

are laying off employees, Amazon.

com Inc. is expected to hire 100,000 

new employees in order to meet the 

consumer demands for home deliveries. 

The convenience of having groceries, 

toiletries, dog food, etc., arriving at 

your doorstep is appreciable, especially 

during a pandemic.

However, convenience comes with a 

cost, and Amazon employees are paying 

the toll. 

While most of the world is motivating 

people to stay home and flatten the 

curve, Amazon is encouraging the 

opposite. The company raised wages 

$2 an hour and offered overtime at 

double the hourly rate. Instead of 

doing everything to protect its workers, 

Amazon is going against government 

shelter in place orders and jeopardizing 

employee health. At some locations, 

employees 
are 
working 
without 

masks, proper gloves, hand sanitizer 

or wipes, making Amazon warehouses 

playgrounds for the virus. More than 

50 of their warehouses already have 

confirmed cases of COVID-19. 

The company informs its employees 

only after word has already leaked 

to the press about confirmed cases. 

Many employees walked off the job 

once they heard of confirmed cases 

of COVID-19 in their warehouse, 

leaving the remaining employees with 

twice as much work to do. Amazon 

employees have organized workplace 

walkouts and held protests outside 

the warehouses trying to prove that 

their health is just as essential as any 

package. 

Amazon agreed to pay for two 

weeks of sick time off for individuals 

that were diagnosed with the virus. 

Many employees who believed that 

they needed to self-quarantine due 

to compromised immune systems or 

because they had come in contact with 

others who tested positive were not 

eligible for this paid time off. Owing 

to this policy, many employees worked 

while exhibiting symptoms since they 

had to wait for their test results to 

receive the time off. These employees 

could have been spreading the virus 

abundantly throughout the warehouse 

for up to two weeks. Additionally, 

there is limited access to COVID-19 

tests, making paid time off even less 

attainable. This policy has been mildly 

adjusted to accommodate employees 

who are caring for family members 

with COVID-19. 

The warehouse in Queens, New York, 

had the first publicly known case of 

COVID-19. The company shut down the 

warehouse for two days for cleaning, 

but employees returned to work as 

normal 
shortly 
after. 
Frustrations 

have risen among warehouse workers 

as they continue to move extraneous 

products. It is hard to comprehend that 

the company would risk the health of 

hundreds of thousands of employees to 

ship items such as puzzles or books.

The 
divide 
between 
what 
is 

essential 
and 
nonessential 
seems 

to 
be 
misinterpreted 
by 
Amazon 

headquarters. Home delivery orders 

are surging for all kinds of products and 

fulfilling these orders is asking workers 

to put themselves at risk. Corporate 

profit is being valued over employees 

during this public health crisis. Before 

placing a nonessential order, we must 

consider if the convenience is worth 

the cost.

Before you place your next Amazon order ...
Bernie 2016, 2020 and beyond

Anik Joshi can be reached at 

anikj@umich.edu.

Emily Ulrich can be reached at 

emulrich@umich.edu.

ANNA GETZINGER | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT GETZINGA@UMICH.EDU

CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION

Readers are encouraged to submit letters to 
the editor and op-eds. Letters should be fewer 
than 300 words while op-eds should be 550 
to 850 words. Send the writer’s full name and 

University affiliation to 

tothedaily@michigandaily.com.

SUBMIT TO SURVIVORS SPEAK

The Opinion section has created a space in 
The Michigan Daily for first-person accounts 

of sexual assault and its corresponding 

personal, academic and legal implications. 
Submission information can be found at 

https://tinyurl.com/survivespeak.

