Is America ready for Bernie Sanders, democratic socialist president?
- US Democrats brace for consequential primary in New Hampshire as leftist Bernie Sanders and youthful challenger Pete Buttigieg fight for pole position
- Contest comes as an anxious Democratic Party struggles to find the right path to defeating Donald Trump
Is America ready for a “socialist” president? A solid plurality of New Hampshire Democrats are, unless every poll is radically off target.
Coming off a strong second place showing in Iowa last week, a win Tuesday would typically anoint Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as the undisputed front-runner.
But party insiders and pundits will resist that label because of another one that Sanders wears – the label that US President Donald Trump relentlessly slams him – and, by extension, the rest of the Democratic field – with: democratic socialist.
“Trump’s going to say ‘socialist, socialist, socialist’ to anyone who’s progressive. I’m sure to him, Franklin Roosevelt was a socialist,” said Andrew Bridger, 72, a retired engineer from Rochester who is deciding between Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren. “People say ‘socialist’ and they think, Cuba and Russia. Some people are called fascist who aren’t. It’s label-type politics.”
An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey released last week found that 53 per cent of US voters hold a negative view of socialism, nearly triple the negative view of capitalism. But the impact on the Democratic primary could be subtle.
Still, the widespread discomfort with the term among independents and suburbanites, and the policies it describes, make “socialist” a potent epithet for Trump and others to hurl. And it’s top of mind for Democratic voters vacillating between a ballot for their favourite candidate, or one they view as more widely palatable.