Is Vermont’s socialist senator pulling Hillary Clinton to the left, asks Robert Philpot

At 4.47pm on Wednesday 27 August 2008, Hillary Clinton addressed the Democratic party faithful gathered in Denver. ‘I move,’ she declared, ‘that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by this convention by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic party for president of the United States.’

With those words, Clinton halted the roll-call vote that was to shortly conclude with Obama’s victory. It was the final, though painfully symbolic, chapter in that year’s protracted duel for the Democratic party’s nomination.

A year previously, with polls showing her leading the young Illinois senator by up to 20 per cent among Democratic primary voters, these were words that few – least of all the former first lady herself – ever expected to hear pass her lips.

In reality, after eight years of bitter partisanship in Washington, and with its forces still battling in Iraq and Afghanistan, the chances of a candidate who disavowed the notion of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states and promised he would not lead America into any more ‘stupid’ foreign wars were always, perhaps, rather stronger than those raw numbers suggested.

Next July, the Democrats will meet in Philadelphia to pick their candidate for November’s general election. Clinton’s road to erasing the humiliation of seven years ago, by winning the nomination denied her in Denver, looks comfortingly free of obstacles. For this time, she faces not a telegenic young African-American who held out the prospect of healing America’s racial and political divides, but Bernie Sanders. Seventy-three years old and hailing from Vermont – America’s most liberal, but second smallest, state – Sanders is the only self-described socialist in the US Congress.

When he declared his candidacy in May, the American media – which had provided acres of news coverage for Clinton’s only other declared challenger, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley – treated the announcement with a metaphorical shrug. The New York Times buried the story deep inside its news section and ABC’s World News Tonight offered just 18 seconds of coverage. Clinton’s chummy tweet welcoming Sanders to the race underlined the impression of the former secretary of state’s apparent invulnerability.

But quirky though his candidacy apparently seemed to the media, Sanders is no political neophyte. After a string of electoral defeats – the most heroic of which saw him poll six per cent of the vote – Sanders was narrowly elected mayor of Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, in 1981. His backing for leftwing causes led to his supporters being dubbed ‘Sanderistas’ after the 1980s Nicaraguan revolutionaries. But Sanders’ sound stewardship of the city finally led the state’s voters to take him seriously. Running as an independent, he beat both Republican and Democrat candidates to win Vermont’s sole congressional seat in 1990. Having routinely won re-election with close to two-thirds of the vote, Sanders secured a seat in the Senate in 2006. In 2012, he was re-elected with the backing of 70 per cent of voters.

There are signs that Sanders has the potential to do some damage to Clinton in the early-voting primary states

This winning streak has allowed Sanders – who has an agreement to vote with the Democrats on procedural issues in the Senate – to become the longest-serving independent in Congress. Vermont is, however, one of the few states – if not the only one – which would take to its heart a politician with a self-professed love of Scandinavian social democracy.

But, six months after polls showed him barely registering among Democrat primary voters, Sanders now has what Slate magazine has called ‘Bernie-mentum’. An estimated 5,000 people showed up for his campaign launch in Vermont, while last month saw large and enthusiastic crowds pack his meetings in the first two states to vote next year, Iowa and New Hampshire. In Minneapolis, 4,000 people turned out to hear him, causing the candidate himself to admit he was ‘stunned’ by the reaction. ‘I had to fight my way to get into the room,’ he told one reporter in slight disbelief. Sanders’ vow to eschew fundraising through Super PACs also appears to be paying dividends: his campaign raised $1.5m in its first 24 hours, with 200,000 small donors giving amounts averaging $40.

Sanders’ momentum has also been boosted by his strong showing in a straw poll at June’s Wisconsin Democratic convention, which saw him scoring 40 per cent to Clinton’s 49 per cent. While that result finally caught the media’s attention, it needs to be treated with huge caution. Unscientific and largely consisting of Sanders’ core constituency – liberal activists – the Wisconsin delegates have failed to support the party’s eventual nominee in each of the last four election cycles. Moreover, while Sanders has edged up in the national polls and now appears Clinton’s principal challenger, his 11 per cent score is still dwarfed by her 60 per cent.

Beyond the large crowds, there are further signs, however, that Sanders has the potential to do some damage to Clinton in the early-voting primary states. In New Hampshire, which holds the first primary and thus attracts disproportionate media attention, some polls suggest that he has cut her leads in April and May from close to 40 per cent to just 10 per cent. Iowa, meanwhile, has never been Clinton country: Bill Clinton opted not to contest its caucuses in 1992 while, in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s third-place finish was a defeat from which her campaign never truly recovered.

Embarrassing though defeats in New Hampshire and Iowa next February might be for Clinton, they would unlikely be mortal. New Hampshire has a history of backing maverick outsiders – Gary Hart over Walter Mondale in 1984, Pat Buchanan over Bob Dole in 1996, and John McCain over George Bush in 2000 – something which has, nonetheless, failed to prevent the frontrunner’s eventual victory.

The ‘Sanders surge’ is, however, not without significance. With his attacks on the ‘billionaire class’ and pledges to tackle inequality and increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans, the Vermont senator’s quixotic campaign is mining a rich seam of economic populism. Add to that his vow to reduce the role of ‘big money’ in politics and his dogged opposition to further free trade agreements – including Obama’s embattled Trans-Pacific Partnership – and Sanders is artfully tapping into the concerns of what his advisers term the party’s ‘restive progressive base’. Disenchanted by Obama’s supposedly timid politics – and fearing that Clinton’s links to Wall Street and supposed hawkishness would simply mean a continuation of them were she to replace him in the Oval Office – these liberal voters had hoped that Elizabeth Warren would be their standard-bearer next year. But the leftwing Massachusetts senator appears stubbornly determined not to run.

While Sanders is currently beating O’Malley for the affection of those who would have rallied to Warren, he faces one fundamental hard truth. Not only does Clinton have near-unparallelled fundraising abilities and a huge chit of political IOUs, Sanders shows no signs of eating into her actual levels of support: he is simply consolidating the support of the minority of Democrats who have always been sceptical about her candidacy.

But these liberals can take some comfort. On criminal justice and immigration reform, same-sex marriage, workers’ rights and, most recently, trade Clinton has been edging to the left. Her first major campaign speech in June saw her combative and highly partisan. Clinton’s tactics are not, it appears, simply about quieting leftwing opposition to her nomination. They also suggest that – while banking on her firmly established centrist credentials – she hopes to win next year’s general election less by reaching out to independent swing voters than by boosting turnout among the Democrats’ core constituencies – Hispanics, urban liberals and younger women. To that extent, it is the path to the White House of the man who beat her to the nomination seven years ago, rather than that of her husband, which Clinton seems set to follow next autumn.

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Robert Philpot is a contributing editor to Progress

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Photo: AFGE