The Strange Divide Between Warren and Sanders

Despite their similarities, the two candidates offer very different visions of the world.

Modified Image. Source: Gage Skidmore; image 1 and 2 via flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In the current race for the Democratic presidential nominee, senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both emerged as serious contenders.

More or less tied for second place, they are slowly closing the gap with frontrunner Joe Biden. At his peak, the former vice-president was enjoying a lead of 25 points. Now, it has dwindled to a less impressive 9-point lead, with many opining that his collapse is imminent.

And whatever happens next, Biden is sure to face fierce competition from the two senators.

Together, Warren and Sanders represent the progressive flank of the Democratic Party. And they are the most likely to appeal to voters hungry for change. With their ambitious proposals for healthcare, education and clean energy, the two senators offer the prospect of a kinder, fairer America.

Both have an honest, folksy demeanor that endears them to people. Both have proposed sweeping taxes on the rich and floated protectionist trade policies. And both have even promised to wean the country off of nuclear power.

And with so much in common, you might expect a big overlap between their prospective bases. But strangely enough, this isn’t the case at all.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found some striking differences between the profiles of Warren and Sanders supporters. Namely the following:

71% of Warren supporters are white in comparison to 49% of Bernie supporters.

Out of the five leading candidates, Warren boasts the highest share of voters with a post-graduate degree while Sanders has the lowest.

Sanders is the most popular candidate for voters under 30 but the least popular with voters over 65. Meanwhile, Warren’s support is spread much more evenly across age groups.

So Warren’s core supporters are whiter, older and more educated on the whole. And here we have the first suggestion that the two candidates appeal to very different voting blocs.

However, this is not to say that their bases are adversarial — as much as some corners of social media might give that impression.

In fact, a poll conducted by Ipsos and Reuters shows that Warren is the second choice for a good chunk of Bernie supporters and vice-versa.

But here’s where things get interesting. Biden was actually the second choice for most Bernie supporters in the sample size and the same goes for fans of Uncle Joe.

With Warren, most of her base prefers Kamala Harris as a fallback; while Harris diehards share this sentiment where Liz is concerned.

So what’s going on here, exactly? Why would so many Sanders supporters prefer someone with ties to big banks over a reformer like Warren? And why would Warren’s base pivot to the corporate-friendly Harris instead of the candidate who most resembles her — at least in terms of policy?

The reason has as much to do with style as it does substance. Throughout the campaign, Sanders and Warren have distinguished themselves through their markedly different rhetoric. Sanders launches into fiery polemics, chiding the establishment for their failures and calling for “political revolution”. Warren is hardly skittish about attacking corporate greed, but she presents herself as a problem-solver instead of an agitator. Through tinkering, she seeks to fix America’s current inequities.

Naturally, these different approaches appeal to very different sections of the electorate. But in order to discover why this is, we’ll need to look at the personalities of both candidates in a bit more detail.

Sanders the activist

Like Biden, Sanders is something of a public icon. Among the Democratic nominees, both men share the highest level of name recognition. Likely because both men represent a turning point in US politics.

For Biden, the election of the first African-American president. For Sanders, the revival of a left-wing politics and class-consciousness.

And though Biden is mostly remembered as the Barack Obama’s loveable sidekick, his actual record on race relations is… troubling to say the least. He opposed busing — a policy to desegregate schools in the mid-70s — and helped draft the 1994 crime bill which saw thousands of African-Americans incarcerated for non-violent crimes. Fortunately for him, the sins of his past barely endure in the public memory — except when they come up during a debate.

Sanders, on the other hand, is fondly regarded by the young and the disillusioned as the candidate who challenged the Democratic establishment back in 2016. And even though Hilary Clinton won the primary, the fact that she scored a below-average, 12-point victory against an elderly socialist speaks volumes.

The secret to Sanders’s popularity is undoubtedly his activist appeal. This is a candidate who prefers grassroots fundraising to corporate donations, who was the first big-name politician to express his solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the construction of a pipeline that threatened sacred land, and who has cultivated a mass movement to support him.

Nor has Sander’s anti-interventionist stance in foreign policy failed to attract notice. He is the only candidate who voted against all three of Trump’s military budgets. And in 2018 he led the effort to end America’s involvement in the Yemeni civil war.

His record, of course, isn’t perfect. Although Sanders voted against the Iraq War in 2002, he still voted for regime change back in 1998. And he also voted to authorize Bill Clinton’s war on Serbia. But in comparison to his Democratic rivals, Sanders is by far the best anti-war candidate.

Indeed, Sanders offers the same hope and change that Obama once promised— only with the voting record to support it. Not only that, but he has quickly become a visible presence in American politics. Much like Biden, he is a well-known, grandfatherly type, which might explain why Joe’s supporters consider him their second choice. But while Biden’s moderate politics send young people running (and senior citizens into his arms), Sanders remains their favorite.

Warren the technocrat

Warren’s overlap with Kamala Harris is actually a lot easier to explain than Sanders’s with Biden. For one, both women are professionals. Warren was a professor of law at several universities while Harris served as San Fransisco’s District Attorney and California’s Attorney General.

Unsurprisingly, Warren and Harris resonate most with the professional class. Skilled, white-collar workers see two people who have racked up impressive careers and represent the value of education and expertise.

But while Harris has collapsed in the polls, Warren has seen a steady upward surge. A trend that shows a clear migration to the Massachusetts senator.

In the end, Harris just didn’t share Warren’s credibility as a progressive. Her record on criminal justice has been criticized as unduly punitive. And her proposals for debt relief and climate action are much less ambitious than Warren’s.

Though Warren was once a registered Republican, she began her political career firmly in the progressive camp. Even before she became a senator in 2012, Warren played a vital role in financial reform and established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: an agency tasked with protecting consumers and holding financial institutions accountable.

In her campaign to win the 2020 nomination, Warren has embraced her image as a brainy technocrat. Her brand is very much defined by her abundance of plans that address social and economic issues. And while Sanders tends to favor broad, universal programs, Warren takes a more selective approach. Her higher education plan, for example, specifically targets low-income students.

Her proposals are bold but less costly than the ones Sanders has put forward. Her climate change plan proposes $3 trillion for climate-friendly industries and the transition to clean energy. This, in stark contrast to Sanders’s $16.3 trillion “Green New Deal”.

But while Warren’s plans are detailed and focused, they have been criticized for not going far enough. Her Medicare for All plan is frustratingly vague about the role envisioned for private insurers (in comparison with Sanders’s single-payer plan). And where Sanders stresses the need for public utilities and ownership as a part of climate action, Warren wants to steer the private sector towards green energy through incentives and regulation.

Granted, Warren will likely face fewer roadblocks from members of her own party. A regulatory approach is more amenable to moderates than Sanders’s homespun socialism. And his rabble-rousing has put him at odds with an establishment that demands party unity. While Warren’s ability to court Clintonites as well as progressives puts her in a good position to navigate the political machine.

Two candidates, two visions

Source: Senate Democrats; via flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Much can be said about the stylistic differences between Sanders and Warren. But ultimately, it is their ideological differences that reveal the most.

Bernie Sanders is a self-styled socialist. Elizabeth Warren wants markets and capitalism to work for regular people. Sanders proposes a radical departure from the status quo. Warren seeks to repair the flaws in a system she believes in. Both candidates have called out moneyed interests and the military-industrial complex. But Sanders views our current political paradigm as hopelessly broken, unable to address the problems it’s created. Which is why he wants to replace it with a new vision: what he calls “democratic socialism”. Warren, by contrast, signals a return to pre-Reagan America. She plans to rein in the untrammeled force of the free market, cut loose by Republicans and Democrats alike after the 1980s.

And it is these two visions which will come to define the future of progressives. Though Biden may very well win the Democratic primary, his staid, unambitious politics are on the way out. They have little purchase among the younger generations, who will inherit the world of tomorrow.

For them, Warren and Sanders have blazed two paths. One is defined by steady reform: a belief that the right people can overhaul a system that no longer works properly. The other stresses dramatic change. Those who take it believe that regulation is not enough. That any attempt to fix capitalism will quickly go undone. That a new way of doing things is America’s only chance.

This is the line in the sand that has always divided liberals, social democrats and left-wingers. And now, we are seeing it drawn in the arena of mainstream politics. Only a few decades ago, the ideas of Sanders and Warren would’ve laid too far outside the norm to warrant much discussion. Now, they have set the tone of the entire Democratic primary.

If nothing else, this is a sign that our political imaginations are finally starting to expand. That those things once thought self-evident— free trade, privatization and the virtues of capitalism — can actually be questioned. And, if found wanting, overturned.