Sanders’ Reshaping of the Democratic Party

Zach Toillion
4 min readMay 8, 2019
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

In early 2015, Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders campaigned on a universal Medicare for All system. Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, his rival Hillary Clinton said in a campaign speech that his single payer health care would “never, ever happen”. Today one third of the Senate Democrats and over 170 House Democrats have signed on to a similar measure.

Blasting Sanders as naive and overpromising was a central theme of the Clinton campaign in 2016. In her 2017 book “What Happened”, Clinton’s policy advisor Jake Sullivan mocked Sanders as “wanting to give everyone a free pony”. Almost all of Washington agreed with Clinton, with only Sen. Jeff Merkley (OR) publicly backing Bernie Sanders.

Fast forward a few years later and the Bernie Sanders ideological takeover of the Democratic Party is all but complete. Sanders is consistently ranked as the most popular politician in the country, has been given a role in Democratic Senate leadership, routinely is a top two contender in 2020 Presidential polls, and has seen most of his agenda adopted by Democrats running for President.

After refusing to take corporate contributions for his 2016 campaign, Sanders colleagues and likely 2020 candidates are taking the same stand, Sen. Kamala Harris (CA), Kristin Gillibrand (NY) and Elizabeth Warren (MA) all opted out of taking corporate money from their campaigns as early as 2017, with most other 2020 candidates following suit.

Nearly every measure that was espoused by the Sanders campaign in 2015 and 2016 has majority support. In early 2016, Sen. Sanders proposed expanding Social Security-in April of the following year over 80 percent of Democratic House Members backed the plan. 59 percent of the public backs his Medicare for All proposal as of March 2018. 63 percent of the public is in favor of Sanders tuition free college plan, including a plurality of Republicans. 88 percent of swing state voters oppose cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and 67 percent of people believe payroll taxes should be raised on those making over 118,000 dollars yearly. 61 percent favor new income taxes on the wealthy, and 64 percent believe corporations pay too little in taxes. In a poll conducted in April, support for legalizing recreational marijuana hit 63 percent while support for medicinal…

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Zach Toillion

Libertarian Socialist who writes about politics, economics, philosophy religion & history. Former Newspaper Columnist.