They Forgot About Bern

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 The candidate with the most money, most committed supporters, and now the highest early-state poll numbers was dismissed by the Democratic establishment for months. It was a disqualifying mistake.

BY DAVID DAYEN, ALEXANDER SAMMON

With six days until the Iowa caucuses, the political establishment has arrived at a troubling realization: It might be time to take this Bernie Sanders guy seriously. In the past few days, polls have shown Sanders breaking dramatically from the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire. Polls have shown him leading in Super Tuesday states California and Utah, while he’s climbed meaningfully in early states Nevada and South Carolina. 

In the aftermath of Sanders’s ascendancy, various corporate gatekeepers and big-money representatives are scrambling—with little coherence or success—to put together a last-minute campaign to slow him down. The justification for such action, of course, is that the political establishment and their corporate henchmen, self-styled paragons of pragmatism and stewards of lucid, sober thinking, need to protect the electorate from a wild-eyed radical who is dangerously out of touch with America. 

But the last-second freakout tells us less about the Sanders campaign than about those political elites themselves, whose political instincts are so alarmingly wrongheaded that they’ve managed to ignore an obvious risk to their continued status until a week before voting begins. If anyone has revealed themselves as inept to the point of disqualification, it’s the anti-Sanders neighborhood watch. 

Sanders has been in the race since last February, which means he’s spent some 350 days shattering donation records, building a committed fan base of millions, and never exiting the top three in polling, while spending the majority of the race in second place. Meanwhile, he’s run up a long list of high-profile endorsements from prominent politicians and celebrities. This is not someone who snuck up on the field.

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