Fundraising and polls show that many Democrats think the best answer to an angry old white guy with crazy hair, New York accent and flair for demagoguery is, well, another angry old white guy with crazy hair, New York accent and flair for demagoguery.
His campaign
announced a haul of $18.2 million in the first quarter from 525,000 individual contributors. The early favorite Warren (Mass.), has
floundered in both money and popularity.
And undeclared front-runner Biden now looks vulnerable to
accusations he inappropriately touched women, kicked off by
a prominent Sanders 2016 backer who served on the board of the Sanders political group.
Sanders himself remains untouchable, in a Trumpian way.
Claims of mistreatment by male staffers from women who worked on his 2016 campaign. His
resistance to releasing his tax returns. The idea that Democrats need a unifying figure to lure disaffected Trump voters in key states.
Sanders isn’t Trump but their styles are similar: shouting, unsmiling, anti-establishment and anti-media, absolutely convinced of their own correctness, attacking boogeymen (the “1 percent” and CEOs in Sanders’s case, vs immigrants), offering impractical promises with vague details, lacking nuance and nostalgic for the past.