Jonathan Martin and Sydney Ember

<h1>DES MOINES, Iowa — The sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Donald Trump in 2020 by careening over a liberal cliff.</h1>

Two months into the presidential campaign, the leading Democratic contenders have largely broken with consensus-driven politics and embraced leftist ideas on health care, taxes, the environment and Middle East policy that would fundamentally alter the economy and elements of foreign policy and ultimately remake American life.

Led by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a democratic socialist who is the top candidate in the race at this early stage, many vocal leaders in the party are choosing to draw lessons from liberal victories in 2018 rather than the party’s breakthroughs in moderate suburban battlegrounds that delivered Democratic control of the House.

These progressive Democrats risk playing into Trump’s hands — he has repeatedly branded them “socialists” — yet they argue that their ambitious agenda can inspire a voter revolt in 2020 that elects a left-wing president.

“Those ideas that we talked about here in Iowa four years ago that seemed so radical at the time, remember that?” Sanders, returning to Iowa for the first time as a 2020 candidate, crowed Thursday. “Shock of all shocks, those very same ideas are now supported not only by Democratic candidates for president but by Democratic candidates all across the board, from school board on up.”

The sprint toward populism amounts to a rejection of the incremental and often-defensive brand of politics that has characterized the party’s approach to highly charged issues for 40 years. Yet when nearly half of voters indicate in polls that they will not support the president’s re-election, many moderates say the cautious strategy in 2018 that helped the party pick up 21 House seats that Trump carried two years earlier should be the playbook for next year.

“What we saw in the midterms is a lot of people from the center and moderate part of the party really win and take back the House,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, alluding to the careful and poll-tested campaigns many Democrats in Republican-leaning districts ran last year. “We need to make sure we’re being as pragmatic as we can.”

This moderate wing of the party lacks an obvious standard-bearer. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who would have run a centrist campaign, begged off this past week; Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Midwestern progressive who favors a within-the-system style of pragmatic politics, also decided not to run. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is running, has presented herself as a centrist but has not yet gained traction.

Should former Vice President Joe Biden enter the race, as his top advisers vow he soon will, he would have the best immediate shot at the moderate mantle. (And if he does not run, Democrats like former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia or Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York might try to seek that role.)

Biden’s candidacy would immediately thrust a fundamental dispute to the center of the Democratic race: Do Americans simply pine for a pre-Trump equilibrium, less chaos and more consensus, or do the yawning disparities of these times call out for a more transformational administration?

Sanders and other Democratic candidates, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are plainly wagering that voters want more than a return to normalcy.

“In 2016 Iowa helped begin the political revolution,” Sanders recalled Saturday at a rally in Des Moines, referring to his near-victory in the state’s caucuses that year. “Now as we move to 2020 our job is to complete that revolution.”

The liberal candidates have dominated the policy debate in the race so far. Warren proposed Friday that the government break up big tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, the latest, and perhaps boldest, proposal to come from her campaign. And Sanders’ platform — “Medicare for all,” free college tuition and an aggressive plan to combat climate change — has grown in popularity, according to polls.

Speaking at the University of Iowa as part of his campaign swing, Sanders also took aim at “establishment Democrats” and won his loudest and most sustained applause by pledging to push through his universal health care bill.

Sanders and Warren, along with a new generation of high-profile progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have emerged this winter as the clearest and most vocal arbiters of Democratic aspirations, if not the immediate congressional agenda.

They are, at least, hastening the tectonic shifts taking place in the party. It was no accident that House Democrats modified a resolution targeting Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — for her controversial claim that pro-Israel advocates carry an “allegiance” to a foreign country — after Ocasio-Cortez, other lawmakers of color and the party’s leading presidential hopefuls rebelled against singling out Omar. The episode marked a striking departure from the down-the-line support for Israel that has characterized the upper ranks of most Democratic primaries.

Relying on wealthy donors has also been standard fare, and unremarkably so, in past White House races. But Sanders elevated the issue of campaign finance in his 2016 race, and his jeremiads against the billionaire class have all but made super PACs verboten in this race; he and Warren are refusing to hold high-dollar fundraisers.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who won her seat after defeating an incumbent Democrat last year, conceded that the first months of 2019 had inflicted “growing pains” on Democrats, but she argued it was merely a necessary side effect in the party’s evolution.

“After we build that muscle, we’re going to flex it,” Pressley said.

Yet Biden, in speeches at home and abroad, has used much of the first part of this year pledging to restore the dignity he believes that the country has lost in the Trump years, promising a restoration rather than a revolution. And, as his supporters put it less subtly, his campaign would represent something else.

“Overwhelmingly, the primary electorate of the Democratic Party wants to win,” Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware said. He argued that Biden could “repair a lot of the ways in which our position in the world has been harmed” while offering a “hopeful, optimistic, positive” vision at home that would heal the divisions he said Trump has exacerbated.

To such moderate Democrats, the most instructive recent election is not that of Trump in 2016 but rather the 2018 midterms, when many of the Democrats who won in battleground House districts and governor’s races were decidedly less confrontational than Sanders.

“The overwhelming majority of seats we picked up were by center-left candidates representing more centrist-type districts,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, adding, “There’s still lots of folks on our side who are OK with compromise.”

Other Democrats are even blunter, fretting that the party risks alienating the broad middle of the electorate at a moment Trump is making no attempt to appeal to such voters.

“You live for the day in politics when the other guy is conceding the majority of the country,” said Larry Grisolano, a longtime Democratic strategist.

Yet for many Democrats — especially younger voters who have largely known only Trump and another once-unlikely president for eight years before that — it is a hopelessly outdated notion that the party must be prudent about whom it nominates and tread only within centrist confines on animating issues like climate change, racial justice and universal health care. These progressives have no more experience with a right-of-center, Reagan-era framework than their parents did with the New Deal.

“We have had enough of the centrist, corporatist Democratic — the type of Democrat that my mom would have voted for back in the ‘90s,” said Jake Peters, a 23-year-old Iowan and Sanders volunteer who drove two hours to see him speak in Council Bluffs this past week. “We just don’t have patience for the platitudes.”

And Trump has emboldened these young activists, heightening the urgency they feel about enacting a progressive agenda and convincing them that Sanders’ blunt-force message about injustice is what’s needed to defeat the president. Chris Kivlahan, 22, who came to the Iowa City rally, described a Sanders presidency this way: “I think if it’s going to happen, now is the time and Trump is the candidate to be running against.”

Democrats in Washington are seeing the tensions within the party firsthand as they try to balance an agenda that their newly elected moderates can support while also mollifying more liberal newcomers who are eager to impeach Trump and pursue far-reaching goals, such as the Green New Deal.

“A lot of young people have come into a world where there was more diversity, more opportunities and where they had use of social media,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland about the expectations of next-generation activists and lawmakers, some of whom serve on the oversight committee he chairs. “A guy like me, I had to fight to even get in the door.”

To tell some of these younger Democrats that a uncompromising progressive platform may be unattainable, let alone who can and cannot be elected president, is difficult given Trump’s victory and the chasm they see between the scale of the problems they will confront and the policies in place today.

And unlike many in the party’s pragmatic wing, these Democrats believe the recipe for success in the general election is not to nominate another seemingly safe candidate like Hillary Clinton, who was unable to galvanize the base and lost crucial votes to a Green Party nominee, but to put forward somebody who will energize reluctant voters.

“Obviously we’ve shown that we’re at a place where we’re OK with nontraditional candidates,” said Riley Wilson, a 29-year-old Nebraskan who crossed the Missouri River to see Sanders. He added: “I think so many people just aren’t involved at all in politics, and I think he would be able to bring some of those people into the fold because they’ll feel like they have options that they haven’t had before, politically speaking.”

And about the Republican strategy, led by Trump himself, to pin the “socialism” label on the Democrats in 2020?

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii said it was mostly just his party’s elite “donor class” that had anything to fear from a sweeping, progressive agenda.

Well, them and the arbiters of conventional political wisdom, he added.

“What we’ve learned from last two presidential elections is that nobody knows anything,” Schatz said of the election of former President Barack Obama and Trump. “The people who write op-eds and stroke their chins and tell us how to win are the people who have been getting it wrong for almost two decades now.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="4ef83e52-3494-45d4-adac-75695289e164" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/us/politics/bernie-sanders-2020-election-democrats.html">The New York Times</a>.

Centrist Democrats Squirm as 2020 Rivals Tilt Left

These progressive Democrats risk playing into Trump’s hands — he has repeatedly branded them “socialists” — yet they argue that their ambitious agenda can inspire a voter revolt in 2020 that elects a left-wing president.

Centrist Democrats squirm as 2020 rivals tilt left

Two months into the presidential campaign, the leading Democratic contenders have largely broken with consensus-driven politics and embraced leftist ideas on health care, taxes, the environment and Middle East policy that would fundamentally alter the economy, elements of foreign policy and ultimately remake American life.

“Those ideas that we talked about here in Iowa four years ago that seemed so radical at the time, remember that?” Sanders, returning to Iowa this past week for the first time as a 2020 candidate, crowed Thursday. “Shock of all shocks, those very same ideas are now supported not only by Democratic candidates for president but by Democratic candidates all across the board, from school board on up.”

Warren proposed Friday that the government break up big tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, the latest, and perhaps boldest, proposal to come from her campaign. And Sanders’ platform — “Medicare for all,” free college tuition and an aggressive plan to combat climate change — has grown in popularity, according to polls.

Speaking at the University of Iowa on Friday evening, Sanders took aim at “establishment Democrats” and won his loudest and most sustained applause by pledging to push through his universal health care bill.

Yet for many Democrats — especially younger voters who have largely known only Trump and another once-unlikely president for eight years before that — it is a hopelessly outdated notion that the party must be prudent about who it nominates and tread only within centrist confines on animating issues like climate change, racial justice and universal health care. These progressives have no more experience with a right-of-center, Reagan-era framework than their parents did with the New Deal.

And Trump has emboldened these young activists, heightening the urgency they feel about enacting a progressive agenda, and convincing them that Sanders’ blunt-force message about injustice is what’s needed to defeat the president. Chris Kivlahan, 22, who came to the Iowa City rally, described a Sanders presidency this way: “I think if it’s going to happen, now is the time and Trump is the candidate to be running against.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/us/politics/bernie-sanders-2020-election-democrats.html" id="08726c85-1628-3a8d-ad2e-be701841fd64">The New York Times</a>.

Centrists Squirm as 2020 Democrats Swerve Left

IOWA CITY, Iowa — The sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Donald Trump in 2020 by careening over a liberal cliff.

<h1>WASHINGTON — The architects of the 2016 insurgent campaign for Sen. Bernie Sanders abruptly parted ways with his 2020 campaign Tuesday, dealing him a surprise blow one week after he entered the presidential race with an emphatic show of fundraising strength.</h1>

The consultants, Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh, said in a statement that they were “leaving because we believe that Sen. Sanders deserves to have media consultants who share his creative vision for the campaign.”

Their decision was unexpected: The three produced the announcement video that Sanders released last week, which has helped him raise $10 million, and they had been intimately involved in the planning of a second White House bid for the Vermont senator.

The rupture infuriated some of Sanders’ supporters, who feared it would detract from a stunning financial haul that they had hoped would quiet the doubters about a second Sanders candidacy. The shake-up was also the latest indication that Sanders is going to run a different kind of race this time around — or at least, that his advisers want him to do so.

In a brief interview, Longabaugh said he and his partners, who produced some of Sanders’ most memorable 2016 ads, had strategic differences with the senator and his wife, Jane, who is his closest adviser. “We came to realize this was just not going to work,” he said, noting that the disagreements “built over time.”

Longabaugh, who said he told Sanders on Tuesday morning of the decision, would not specify the nature of the disagreements.

But after running a highly improvisational campaign against Hillary Clinton, Sanders has been taking steps toward a more conventional race this time. He hired a new campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, the former ACLU political director, and the trio of consultants had little say in the decision to replace his 2016 manager, Jeff Weaver.

Shakir, who did not know the strategists were planning to quit, had not even yet met with them. Sanders’ new team said little about the surprise exit of the consultants’ firm, known as Devine, Mulvey and Longabaugh. “The campaign appreciates all the good work DML has done and wishes them well,” Shakir said in a statement.

Privately, Sanders’ supporters were irritated and suggested the consultants walked away because they were not going to have the same influence as they did four years ago.

Longabaugh dismissed that claim, noting that advertising firms are by their nature central to modern campaigns and that Sanders would inevitably have come to rely on their long experience in Democratic politics.

The senator clashed at times with his consulting team in 2016 — particularly Devine, and particularly at the end of the race when it was clear that Sanders could not win the nomination — but Mulvey and Longabaugh had been expected to play central roles in 2020. For months, they had made the case that Sanders should not be underestimated.

But Tuesday, Longabaugh would not rule out the firm working for another Democratic candidate. “We haven’t talked about that, so I’m not going to comment,” he said.

Sanders, who struggled to win African-Americans voters, has made clear that he wanted a more diverse array of campaign advisers after largely surrounding himself with white men in 2016. The three consultants departing are all white, while Shakir will be the first Muslim in American history to run a presidential campaign.

And Sanders will hold a series of rallies this weekend that nod to his biography — a marked contrast to his 2016 campaign, when he eschewed talking about himself and relentlessly focused on his progressive policy agenda. He is appearing in Brooklyn, where he was born, and in Chicago, where he went to college and joined civil rights protests. The weekend tour will include a stop in Selma, Alabama, for events marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday there.

And while he may have a different group of advisers for this campaign, Sanders clearly retains the same grassroots appeal: On his first day as a presidential candidate, he raised nearly $6 million, and Monday, six days after he joined the 2020 race, campaign officials said he had secured $10 million from 359,914 donors.

This article originally appeared in <a id="6133eeda-7a6f-4896-968b-597a690e1487" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-consultants.html">The New York Times</a>.

Architects of Bernie Sanders' 2016 Race Part Ways With 2020 Campaign

The consultants, Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh, said in a statement that they were “leaving because we believe that Sen.

Architects of Bernie Sanders' 2016 race part ways with 2020 campaign

Sanders may have been the runner-up in the last Democratic primary, but instead of expanding his nucleus of support, in the fashion of most repeat candidates, the Vermont senator is struggling to retain even what he garnered two years ago, when he was far less of a political star than he is today.

“It’s not a given that I’m going to support Bernie just because I did before,” said Lucy Flores, a former Nevada assemblywoman who previously endorsed Sanders. "There are going to be plenty of people to look at and to listen to. I’m currently open at this point, and I think the majority of people are.”

As Sanders considers a second bid for the White House, he and his advisers are grappling with the political reality that he would face a far different electoral landscape than in 2016. Rather than being the only progressive opponent to an establishment-backed front-runner, the Vermont independent would join what may be the most crowded, fractured and uncertain Democratic primary in the last quarter-century.

There would also be candidates who are newer to the national political scene than Sanders, offering fresh energy — something many in the party prefer — as well as those who echo his message about economic justice and the corrosive effects of money in politics.

“Ironically, Bernie’s agenda for working families will be the Democratic Party’s message in 2020, but he may not be the one leading the parade,” said Bill Press, a progressive talk show host who was an early backer of Sanders in 2016.

Press said he thinks a candidate like Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio could carry the same populist message. “What I hear from a lot of friends is that a younger Bernie is what we need,” he said.

There is no doubt that Sanders, 77, would be one of the most formidable contenders if he does run. No other potential candidate would start with the foundation of a 50-state organization, a small-dollar fundraising list that delivered $230 million and undying devotion from a core group of backers.

His advisers note that these advantages could prove crucial in a splintered field when only a plurality may be needed to prevail at the end of a long race.

Mark Longabaugh, one of Sanders’ top strategists, said he had no expectation of winning over the more cautious factions of the Democratic Party.

“Insurgent candidates never come back and become the establishment favorite,” said Longabaugh, noting that Gary Hart, after shocking the political world with his success in 1984, nevertheless had plenty of company when he ran again in 1988.

And some of Sanders’ most dedicated devotees are already moving to resurrect his organization.

“We have an opportunity to start organizing, and missing out on this moment is not an option,” Spencer Carnes, a leader of the volunteer “Organizing for Bernie” group, wrote in an email promoting the group’s first volunteer organizing call last week.

Melissa Byrne, who did digital and get-out-the-vote work for Sanders in 2016, said she’s eager to work for him again and noted, “We’re all more experienced and battle-tested.”

But unlike recent primaries when a second-place finisher ran again and won the nomination, such as with John McCain in 2008 or Hillary Clinton in 2016, there has been no rush of new support to Sanders ahead of his formal announcement. Instead, the early maneuvering is striking for the large numbers of officeholders, activists and voters who want to wait to see how the Democratic race develops. And that roster of progressives includes many who backed Sanders two years ago.

“I think one has to wait and see who’s got the best chance mathematically,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Sanders’ first congressional backer in 2016, because, as he put it, “the insurgency is broader.”

Grijalva was hinting at a phenomenon that many Sanders supporters have cited: He is something of a victim of his own success.

The senator’s views on issues like universal health care and his willingness to shun corporate contributions have increasingly become not only part of the Democratic mainstream but also litmus tests within the party.

Perhaps nowhere is his success more evident than in the lineup of other presidential candidates. Two other lawmakers who backed Sanders last time, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, are both moving toward long-shot, populist bids of their own.

And that is to say nothing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who watched as Sanders occupied the progressive lane that some on the left had hoped she would fill against Clinton in 2016; or, for that matter, Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, whose unvarnished appeals on the stump and refusal to take PAC money in his Senate campaign this year recalled Sanders’ approach.

The other potential candidates pose a more practical threat to Sanders: They may also absorb some of his former campaign aides.

While he would retain the same senior team, Sanders may suffer defections among some key staffers who worked for him in 2016.

For example, Symone Sanders, his former press secretary (who is not related to the senator), said she may work for one of Sanders’ opponents.

“There are a lot of good candidates this time,” she said. “I’m going to wait and see.”

Further, the political consulting firm led by three of Sanders’ top digital aides from the last campaign — Kenneth Pennington, Hector Sigala and Elizabeth Bennett — worked for O’Rourke’s Senate bid and are hoping to work on his presidential campaign should he run, according to a Democratic strategist familiar with the firm’s thinking.

Two veterans of Sanders’ 2016 campaign, Becky Bond and Zack Malitz, were instrumental this year in helping to organize O’Rourke’s race against Sen. Ted Cruz. Both said they are eager to be a part of any “Beto for President'’ effort.

“I don’t know if Beto is going to run, but if he does I’m all in,” said Bond.

Malitz added: “I want Beto to run and would want to work on that campaign.”

But it is not just lawmakers, strategists and potential staff members who are hanging back from Sanders: Some of his supporters in early nominating states are doing the same, in part because they do not want to litigate the divisive 2016 primary again.

Ron Abramson, an immigration lawyer in New Hampshire, was on Sanders’ steering committee there and hosted a 2015 house party for him before the campaign outgrew those types of small gatherings.

But Abramson — who still called himself “a huge fan of Bernie’s” — is not eager for another Sanders run. He said he was especially concerned about the senator’s age given how physically demanding the job of president seemed.

“It’s not 2016 anymore — the considerations may need to be more pragmatic than ideological,” Abramson said. He later added: "There are just too many Democrats who don’t forgive him for not being a Democrat. I don’t want to go through the same type of divisiveness again that we saw.”

Sanders does still enjoy some bedrock support in states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Unlike some of his lesser-known rivals, his unwavering base of progressives will guarantee him a floor of support should he enter the race.

But the first surveys of Iowa caucusgoers indicate he has lost some of his less-ardent backers. He is polling in the teens there even though he has universal name recognition and won nearly half the state’s vote in the Democratic caucuses in 2016. And while he is in second place at the moment, he is closer to O’Rourke, who was virtually unknown outside Texas until this year, than he is to the early front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Of course, Biden may not run, leaving even more votes up for grabs. But other likely candidates will work just as aggressively to step into that vacuum. And this surfeit of contenders may keep some institutional pillars of the left on the sidelines.

Organized labor, for example, is unlikely to rally around Sanders should another populist like Brown enter the race, according to multiple union officials.

“People are talking a lot about how it could change things for labor if Sherrod gets in,” said Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers.

The uncertainty has created some awkwardness for veteran progressives, who feel a measure of loyalty to Sanders but also recognize 2020 may prove very different from 2016.

“I don’t know, I honestly don’t know,” said Joseph Cirincione, a foreign policy adviser to Sanders in 2016, when asked if he’d support the senator again. “I would certainly continue to advise him. Would I support him? I think a lot of us want to see how this develops.

“I think he should do it, he’s an important voice. But does he prevail, would he be the strongest candidate? We don’t know yet.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/us/politics/bernie-sanders-president-2020.html" id="8e48743f-abeb-3a5b-a9b4-d5936b86986c">The New York Times</a>.

For Bernie Sanders, Holding Onto Support May Be Hard in a 2020 Bid

WASHINGTON — Some of his top congressional supporters won’t commit to backing him if he runs for president again — and two may join the 2020 race themselves. A handful of former aides might work for other candidates. And Bernie Sanders’ initial standing in Iowa polls is well below the 49.6 percent he captured in nearly defeating Hillary Clinton there in 2016.

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Jonathan Martin and Sydney Ember

Articles written by the author

Centrist Democrats squirm as 2020 rivals tilt left

Centrists Squirm as 2020 Democrats Swerve Left

Architects of Bernie Sanders' 2016 race part ways with 2020 campaign

For Bernie Sanders, Holding Onto Support May Be Hard in a 2020 Bid

For Bernie Sanders, Holding Onto Support May Be Hard in a 2020 Bid