After hitting his ceiling in a primary dominated by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders is targeting an unexpected demographic in an effort to expand his base: Donald Trump’s blue-collar supporters.
On Monday night, Sanders and Trump traded barbs at their respective campaign rallies as a low-scale war between the two intensified. Calling Sanders a “wacko,” Trump told a crowd in New Hampshire that the Vermont senator’s election would entail “massive, massive tax increases,” because he “wants to give everything away for free.” Sanders hit back after a rally in Las Vegas. “Being called wacko by a pathological liar like Mr. Trump makes me think he is getting nervous that the American people are catching on to his pathetic policies,” he said through a spokesperson.
The attack struck a nerve with Trump, temporarily drawing the real-estate mogul’s attention away from his GOP challengers and toward a self-described socialist who is considered a long shot to win his party’s nomination, much less the White House. “Bernie Sanders, who blew his campaign when he gave Hillary a pass on her e-mail crime, said that I feel wages in America are too high. Lie!” Trump tweeted on Sunday. He continued the Twitter assault through Monday, even while he agreed that “wages in are [sic] country are too low” and adopted Sanders’s lament for a squeezed middle class.
The contretemps is unlikely to have a decisive impact on either man’s poll numbers, and it appears to be something of a Hail Mary pass for Sanders, who is stuck in a daunting 25-point polling hole as Clinton continues to consolidate support. But it shows the extent to which both candidates have based their campaigns on an appeal to working-class voters angry that elites in both parties have forgotten about them — and the extent to which such voters represent the point where the far Right and far Left converge. Though Trump and Sanders have drastically different personalities, on important blue-collar issues such as international trade, their messages are more similar than you’d think, as are their supporters.
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“Both [Sanders and Trump] voters feel there are big, powerful forces in their lives that they don’t have any control of, that have a great impact on their lives,” says Republican strategist Stuart Stevens. “These are people who aren’t dedicated at all to a party. They’re dedicated to what they’re feeling.”
“It’s not an unthinkable thing,” Democratic strategist Bob Shrum says of Sanders’s crossover appeal to Trump supporters. “Robert Kennedy could speak to a lot of folks who would otherwise tend to gravitate toward George Wallace. And a lot of folks who voted for Teddy Kennedy in the primaries in 1980 voted for Reagan in the general.”
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Though ostensibly on opposite sides of the spectrum, Sanders and Trump both appeal to non-college-educated whites skeptical of free trade, liberalized immigration policies, and big-money politics. In an ABC/Washington Post poll conducted in July, 69 percent of such voters felt the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy and is unfair to most Americans. Left or Right, this demographic tends to believe that open immigration policies and free trade drive unemployment and low wages while benefiting the rich, something Trump and Sanders are well-positioned to exploit, with Sanders running an angry campaign against the “millionaire and billionaire classes” while Trump berates the “loser” political elites for the “bad deals” they’ve made.
#share#There’s substantial overlap between Trump and Sanders’s views, particularly on immigration and trade. Trump, of course, has made the restriction of Hispanic immigration the centerpiece of his campaign. “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country,” he told supporters at a New Hampshire rally on December 1.
But Sanders is hardly an advocate of open borders — he blasted the idea during an interview with Vox in July. “It would make everybody in America poorer,” he said. “You’re doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that agrees with that.” Though he’s promised to move illegal immigrants “out of the shadows,” he has not proposed a pathway to citizenship or advocated for greater legal immigration.
Sanders and Trump both oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership and often attack the idea of free trade — particularly with China, whose imports are viewed by many disaffected blue-collar voters as a bane to U.S. manufacturing. “They have the same message of economic policies on an international front,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.
Sanders and Trump both decry the outsize influence of money in politics, accusing their primary opponents of being shills for big business.
There are domestic similarities, too. Sanders and Trump both decry the outsize influence of money in politics, accusing their primary opponents of being shills for big business. “Why, over her political career, has Wall Street been a major — the major — campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton?” Sanders asked in November’s Democratic debate. “You know, maybe they’re dumb and they don’t know what they’re going to get. But I don’t think so.” He has promised to take no money from corporations or Super PACs, and he has run his campaign entirely on small donations.
Trump makes much of his self-funded campaign and his personal wealth, arguing that he can’t be bought like his GOP opponents. “[Jeb Bush] raised $125 million, which means he’s controlled totally, totally controlled, by the people who gave him the money,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition on December 3. “You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money.”
So far, though, Trump seems to be the main beneficiary of blue-collar discontent. While 55 percent of the Republican front-runner’s supporters are working-class whites, Sanders’s own support derives largely from whites with a college degree. In part, that’s due to the white working class’s preference for Republicans on economic issues. Despite deep mistrust for elites, in the same July poll, non-college-educated whites said Republicans had better ideas on how to make the economy more fair by a 21-point margin. Among college-educated whites, that gap was just eight points.
“The white working class is not sold that the government is going to be able to solve the problems for them, and at the end of the day, what Bernie is preaching is more government,” says O’Connell.
#related#By pivoting away from concerns over global warming and making direct appeals to Trump supporters, Sanders is hoping to shrink that gap. But most strategists are skeptical — working-class voters who identify as independents often cling tenaciously to one political party, and the advantage they give Republicans on economic issues will be hard to reverse overnight. Even if Sanders is able to peel away enough working-class whites from Trump to propel him to victory in Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton’s enormous support from black and Latino voters in states such as South Carolina and Nevada seems likely to overpower him in the end.
But the fact that Sanders and Trump are now openly fighting over the same voters is a clear indication of the essential similarity between two populist campaigns perched at opposite extremes of the political spectrum. And though it’s a long shot, in a race where Clinton continues to dominate, Sanders’s play for the disaffected blue-collar masses across the aisle may be his last, best hope. “Sanders has a much better chance of getting Trump supporters than Hillary Clinton does,” says Stevens. “I think it’s a smart play.”
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.