Bernie or Bust Has a Plan B

J. L. Barlow Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 23, 2016

I’m with Senator Sanders. I was with Senator Sanders back in 2008 when I was supporting Congressman Kucinich’s bid for the Presidency. I thought the only VP Dennis could appoint to avoid foul play would have been Senator Sanders. I was with Senator Sanders in 2012 when he was calling for a primary challenge to President Obama. I was with Senator Sanders from the moment he announced his candidacy. I was with Senator Sanders when I traveled more than a thousand miles to hear him speak in Madison, Wisconsin last July. I will be with Senator Sanders in April when we vote here in New York. I will be with Senator Sanders straight through to DC on June 15th, but I’ve been active in politics for a long time, so I temper my faith with knowledge, and I know the hill the campaign must climb to achieve victory is exceptionally steep.

The main stream media and the punditry has told us all to quit. We are not doing that, but it has also conditioned Americans to believe that they have only three lousy choices this fall in the event Senator Sanders fails to achieve victory during this primary. As Revolutionaries we must know and we must make clear to our fellow citizens that this is simply not the case. We must even make it clear to our leader, Senator Sanders, that it is not the case.

According to the popular narrative, behind door number 1 will be Donald Trump, a member of the big club that Senator Sanders has been railing against. Trump is allegedly a “billionaire” and amongst the 195 American families that contributed $650 million in 2014 to buy the Congress. Of course Mr. Trump is also the embodiment of the racism and prejudice that Senator Sanders chained himself to others and was arrested protesting against in the 1960s. 40% of Republicans have said they will not vote for the man, and better than 50% of the American public dislike him, and would crawl naked across broken glass to vote against him.

Behind door number 2 will be Hillary Clinton, who along with her husband has taken more than $150 million from corporate America for doing their bidding in the form of what in any other country would most certainly be treated as bribes. The Clintons have raised more than $3 billion in campaign contributions during their collective time in politics for themselves and the candidates they have supported, and most of that money has come from corporate America. More than 50% of the American public dislike her and will crawl naked across broken glass to vote against her.

Behind door number 3 according to the main stream media is staying home and letting the chips fall where they may, but this election should have demonstrated a very important principle to Sander’s supporters. The reason that the Democratic primary never became a three way race is quite simple. The Democratic primary uses proportional representation. In a proportional representation system where a majority is required to win, no one will achieve victory in a three way race.

However, the Sanders campaign is not the only election during this primary cycle and there is a great deal to be learned from the winner take all contests on the Republican side of the aisle. The Republican primary is a far more mixed bag than the Democratic primary. It uses proportional representation in some states. It uses winner take all, even with a simple plurality in some states. It uses winner take all in the event of a majority in some states. It follows the same requirement to obtain a majority of delegates, but it has also demonstrated that in a three way race, a plurality of the vote with far less than fifty percent can make you the winner.

In 1992 and 1996, with a plurality of the vote, about 43%, Bill Clinton was elected to the White House because most states in the United States use first past the post, simple most votes wins, plurality voting to determine who wins their electoral votes, all of them. This means that in a three way race, a candidate with as little as 36% of the vote could theoretically win the Presidency.

As it stands today, in the event Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump become the nominees of the Republican and Democratic Parties, most Americans will likely stay home. There will be a considerable amount of overlap amongst the 50% of Americans who would never vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. I know that I am in that group of people, and I suspect a large percentage of Bernie supporters will never vote for corruption, racism, or stupidity. Integrity matters to Sanders voters.

Our preferred choice would be a run by Senator Sanders as the Presidential candidate on a third party line in the event he fails to win the nomination. Before his campaign began, Senator Sanders ruled out such a bid. Unfortunately for him, he started a revolution, and it cannot be put back into the bottle. His campaign has exposed the corruption that lies at the heart of the Democratic Party in a way that Ralph Nader who he hasn’t spoken with in more than 15 years could not during his 2000 Presidential campaign.

The corporate talking heads all state repeatedly that Ralph Nader’s campaign, and not the approximately 7 million Democratic voters who chose to vote for George W. Bush, nor the corruption of the Supreme Court, cost Al Gore an election where he won the popular vote.

More importantly, these pundits ignore history to sell the narrative that a third-party vote is a wasted vote that will only cost the candidate from the major parties who would be more acceptable to you the election. In 1948, then Democratic Governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party and formed the State’s Rights Party to run against President Harry Truman. Truman had integrated the military and this was unacceptable to the southern racists in the Democratic Party. The first Dixiecrats ran Thurmond who would later be a Republican US Senator against President Truman.

Before Harry Truman became Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944 to appease the corporate interests in the party, Roosevelt’s Vice President had been socialist Henry Wallace. Wallace and his populism won over allies for the United States all around Latin America during World War II. In 1948, the Progressive Party ran Henry Wallace as its candidate because Truman had failed to whip the votes in Congress to prevent an override of his veto of the Taft-Hartley Act which gutted the National Labor Relations Act to a large degree. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party supported Wallace.

At the same time, the Republican Party ran a very center of the road New York Republican Governor named Thomas Dewey against Harry Truman. With an attack from inside his own party on the left and the right, and an attack from the center by the Republicans, Harry Truman ran against the “Do Nothing” Congress and surprised the newspapers who had already printed that he lost to Dewey. As we all know. There was no President Dewey. If Truman could win that election by carrying his own water, then why the hell can’t Hillary Clinton and her corporate backers beat Donald Trump and a third-party candidate backed by Team Sanders?

The truth of the matter is that she probably cannot beat a strong third-party candidate running against Trump because her unfavorables are too high, but it is also true that Donald Trump with high unfavorable ratings of his own is unlikely to beat a strong third-party candidate either.

This of course assumes that Donald Trump is the candidate of the Republican Party, but that may not be the case. It is quite probable that no candidate will have a majority of the vote on the Republican side at their convention on the first ballot. It is also possible that rules concerning open primaries which allow the exclusion of those delegates from the convention could be used to deny Donald Trump delegates their credentials to the convention. The fix is likely in on the Republican side as well as the Democratic side. The media, the Democratic Party Chair, the front loading of the Southern conservative states in the calendar, and numerous measures to ensure conservative candidates win, not to mention the Super Delegates as a fail safe measure all work to prevent a progressive challenge to the moneyed interests achieving victory inside the Democratic primary process.

On the Republican side, measures are being taken to ensure that Paul Ryan becomes the likely nominee of the Republican Party. If that is the case,in a two party race, the Republican candidate will likely win. Why do I say that? Because even though a large portion of the Republican party will be upset, Ryan has strong enough credentials with many Tea Party Republicans to be acceptable, he will keep their numbers from dropping as badly as the fall off from a Clinton candidacy will have been. Additionally, Trump supporters are not necessarily traditional voters, let alone Republican voters. Trump has drawn a lot of new people into the Republican Party. These non-voters staying home are unlikely to lower turnout for the Republicans.

Once the dust has settled from the convention floor fight on the Republican side, the traditional Republican voter is likely to do what they have always done, and fall in line behind their candidate. In New York State, where the Republicans almost always lose, and rarely spend much money to support state wide candidates, 1.5 million Republicans show up to cast votes for their candidate for Governor in almost every election. Republican voters are a machine. That is unlikely to be changed by the dust up of a convention floor fight, and in American politics, optics matter. A large percentage of voters are no information voters, and no information voters tend to vote for the younger, better looking candidate. In that event, Paul Ryan will crush Hillary Clinton with no information voters.

One of the vital things the Sanders campaign has worked to change is the no information voter. Sanders activists have been educating people about the issues and how to get things done. The Sanders campaign and its supporters have been explaining to people why they never seem to get what they want despite popularity of their ideas. The only way to change the dynamics of the fall in the event the election is a race between Clinton and Trump or Clinton and Ryan is to change a variable, call an audible, and use the power that this revolutionary movement has gathered to do some good.

Voting for more of the same corruption by voting for Clinton, or Trump, or Ryan would not be doing some good. Writing in Senator Sander’s name would not be doing some good. The vast majority of states require a lot of paperwork to be filled out before a write in candidate for President will even have their votes counted. At the end of the day, writing in Senator Sanders name would be a wasted vote. It would be as if you did not vote at all because your vote would not be counted.

Because Senator Sanders has stated unequivocally that he will not run as a third-party candidate for President, and he is a man of integrity, then the best thing the Bernie or Bust movement can do is identify a candidate who shares Senator Sanders values and work just as hard for that candidate and that third-party to win the election with a plurality this fall.

If the Republicans throw the election to Paul Ryan who didn’t even run, it will be easy for a third-party candidate to argue that the primary election system is rigged to favor the moneyed interest on both sides of the aisle. The Clinton and Sanders contest has made it clear how rigged the game is on the Democratic side. A floor fight that results in someone other than Donald Trump becoming the nominee of the Republican Party will prove how corrupt it is on the Republican side. Of course this scenario for Plan B is the hardest road to travel for a third-party candidate.

The easier road would be a Clinton versus Trump race. In Clinton versus Trump, you have a “billionaire” versus the bought and paid for servant of the billioniares. Corporate America versus corporate America with a little racism on the side.

What if I told you there was a party that has never taken corporate PAC money? What if I told you there was a candidate who will be on the ballot in all fifty states this fall whose platform is virtually identical to Senator Sander’s platform? What if a party that supports the $15 an hour minimum wage, universal health care and Medicare-for-all, universal free college tuition, an end to the military industrial complex, the legalization of marijuana, decriminalization of drugs and treatment for addiction instead of the continuation of the prison industrial complex, a party that is opposed to free trade deals, and a party that wants to restore sanity to the tax code and an end to Citizens United exists? That party is the Green Party, and their likely candidate is Dr. Jill Stein.

I have been a Democrat since before I was old enough to vote. At 16, I was advocating for the candidacy of Governor Jerry Brown for President. It was 1992 and he was the best candidate for the job back then. He has changed a lot in the intervening years, but in 1992, he self-imposed a limit of $100 on campaign contributions because money in politics was already the problem issue. This was pre-Internet, so Jerry didn’t stand a chance against the Clinton corporate fundraising apparatus.

In 1992, until he dropped out of the race, H. Ross Perot was leading in the polls for the general election. He was going to win the election because he correctly opposed NAFTA. What most Democrats didn’t realize at the time, because it was completely anti-thetical to everything the Democratic Party has ever stood for was that Bill Clinton was in favor of NAFTA. He didn’t make a point of telling people that he favored NAFTA. It is the only reason he won. If most Democrats had known the truth about Bill Clinton’s position on NAFTA, Perot would have been President, regardless of having dropped out of the race.

I am telling you all of this because the Sanders campaign has demonstrated that despite the media ignoring a campaign. Despite having no big money donors. Despite having no pre-existing organization, a poor unknown candidate can become at the very least a contender in national politics today. This is why I urge all of my fellow Sanders supporters to keep up the good fight straight through to the convention, but have a Plan B.

My suggestion for Plan B is that we all be ready to continue the revolution and work equally hard to inform the public about Jill Stein and the Green Party alternative to the politics of corruption this summer and fall in the event that Senator Sanders fails to achieve victory. Plan A is still a go. Last night demonstrated that Senator Sanders can win big enough to capture the delegates needed to win this thing. We keep working hard, but if we are truly revolutionaries, we must be ready to rally behind a new leader if our preferred leader fails to achieve victory. The cause is greater than any one man or woman. The cause is greater than all of us, so keep digging, keep working, keep fighting, but always be prepared to continue the fight with a new leader if necessary.