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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Primary Colors: The staying power of Bernie Sanders

matt

Once again, Bernie Sanders will not be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States. As of today, Sanders has won 914 pledged delegates, while former Vice President Joe Biden has won 1,217 of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. The last major primary Sanders won was California on March 3. He has lost Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Michigan, Mississippi, Washington, Florida and Illinois to Biden. By any rational or mathematical standard, Biden will walk away with the nomination, most likely by a larger margin than Hillary Clinton did over Sanders in 2016 considering Clinton had a smaller lead over Sanders at this time four years ago than Biden does today. 

But to all the progressives in the party, this is not a cause for despair. Bernie Sanders is a generation-defining candidate like Bill Clinton in the 1990s or Gene McCarthy in the 1960s. Obviously, I’m biased because I voted for Sanders in the Massachusetts primary earlier this month, but this is a political opinion piece so I can be as biased as I want. 

Despite whatever qualms you may have with his policies, his campaign staff, the “Bernie Bros” or Sanders himself, he has changed the Democratic Party for the better. Every few election cycles, one candidate has the opportunity to lead the Democrats in a new direction whether that be to the left, the center or to the right. McGovern ran on ending the war in Vietnam and instituting a universal basic income in 1972, moving the party significantly to the left for a time.Carter brought the party to the center in 1976, holding beliefs on deficit reduction and religious faith. The party arguably swung to the right in 1992 when Bill Clinton highlighted his tough-on-crime record. 

For better, Bernie fits the mold of a generation-defining candidate, moving the party to the left on healthcare, foreign policy, labor and education. Though it is not wholly evident yet, Sanders has inspired my generation more than any other candidate, and my generation’s first president will most likely have a policy platform akin to Sanders’ than that of Barack Obama. 

Sanders’ policy platform has been adopted by notably younger figures in the party, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and on one issue, Joe Biden himself

This election is unlike any other. With Donald Trump in the White House, primary contests being postponed and a pandemic sinking global markets, there is not a single political commentator from the New York Times to the Tufts Daily who can definitively say they know what is going to happen. The only thing that can be said for certain is that Senator Bernie Sanders — the septuagenarian Jewish democratic socialist from Vermont — has changed the Democratic Party for good — and in my opinion, for the better.