Bernie’s Gonna Win

You heard it here, well, not first, maybe. But you’re definitely hearing it here loudest.

Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Bernie Sanders is gonna win. The whole thing. He’s gonna win the primaries, and then he’s gonna beat Trump in November. This is not me hedging. This is not me being like, “Well gee, maybe he CAN win.” No. He’s winning. I’m calling it with 0% of precincts reporting.

I realize I am the last blogger alive who has a right to tout unwavering election picks, but I don’t give a shit. I’m ready to try out hope again. Since 2016, I have not worn hope particularly well. I have been led by my own despair, with Trump’s election and its horrible aftermath leaving me hopeless that anything could ever possibly get better. But I think I’m tired of feeling that way, and perhaps you are as well. Laying down fatalist tweet after fatalist tweet is its own form of fiddling while the world burns. It’s self-fulfilling defeatism. And so while I have every reason to feel helpless to beat back the current forces that put Trump in office and have helped enable his grotesque agenda — the electoral college, a revitalized and open white supremacist movement, foreign election interference, voter suppression, Citizens United, a corporatized political media, and the Democratic party establishment — I simply don’t believe that Bernie is as vulnerable to many of those prevailing evils as a lot of other candidates are.

This isn’t just me reading some imaginary tea leaves. All of Bernie’s inherent electoral advantages are already out there in plain sight. The only reason NOT to have confidence in Bernie is because you’ve been instructed not to have any. American voters, particularly on the left flank, have been conditioned to be as meek as the average worker bee daring to ask the boss for a pay raise. Now now don’t go asking for too much, you might scare some folks! The reason Bernie Sanders is both appealing AND formidable is because he has no interest in that meekness. He has no interest in being too careful. That stands in diametric opposition to Hillary Clinton, who remained professionally cautious throughout the entirety of 2016 out of disposition, obliviousness, self-interest, and because she had 538 potential campaign booby traps — laid down by both the opposition and by herself over the course of her career — that she had to dutifully avoid.

Bernie is primed to defuse pretty much any line of attack because he’s been frighteningly consistent in his views since roughly 1806.

Bernie does not have any traps to avoid. What are you gonna do, call him a fucking socialist? Uh, okay. He’ll tell you that he is one, and he won’t be shy about that admission. He’s primed to defuse pretty much any line of attack because he’s been frighteningly consistent in his views since roughly 1806. And he’s already shown he can float above manufactured scandals, the kinds that are the lifeblood of Republican electoral strategy. He even threw a clip of Trump COMPLIMENTING him into one of his campaign ads, and it worked somehow. He also knows that the single most important message to get across to Americans is Donald Trump Is Ripping You Off, an obvious truth that even weirdo Obama-Trump voters can understand.

None of the other candidates in the Democratic field can beat Trump like this, and the bulk of them aren’t really interested in doing so. That’s why they’ll all fall by the wayside. That includes Joe Biden, who should have been able to coast to this nomination but can’t, because, after all these years, he’s still a painfully bad campaigner. Bernie will best them all, and then Democratic party leadership will put more effort into resisting his nomination than they’ve put into resisting anything Republicans have done. This is because they know that Bernie winning would finally bring down the massive, destructive barrier that corporate Democrats constructed to isolate themselves from their own voter base and to keep themselves from addressing the urgent needs of so many people within that base. Bernie will tear down that wall, and those same corporate Democrats will either find themselves out of work or they’ll have to fall in line.

Whatever they choose to do, it won’t matter. Tough shit for you, Concerned Anonymous Party Figure Leaking To Politico. Voters will follow Bernie and, on a macro level, the fate of the Democratic Party will have already been decided. He will rebuild the party in his image, the fruit of decades of political toil finally ready to be harvested. At last, a turtle of a different sort rising to power. From there, Bernie will head to the general election and beat Trump, whom he already trounces in head-to-head polls. After 2016, I want every poll burned, its ashes used to help mix cement. But I don’t need to check Nate Silver’s dipshit Twitter feed to know that the majority of Americans fucking HATE this president and will gladly replace him once the chance arrives.

Here’s a story you may not know. Before he was elected president, Donald Trump wrote a book. This was the kind of ghostwritten, stump-speech-in-print polemic that every candidate dumps into bookstores as an overpriced bit of campaign swag. The working title for Trump’s book was We Will Win. The publisher was all in for it. If you’ve ever published a book, as I have, you know that when a publisher decides on a title, that’s the title. There’s no going back from it.

But Donald Trump was no ordinary author (not even an author at all, technically), and he wanted the name of the book changed to Crippled America. Despite handing Trump a seven-figure advance, the publisher acceded to that demand and went with Trump’s preferred title. The book was a flop, so much so that they had to change the title once more to Great Again for the paperback edition. That book’s failure has been lost to history because Trump ended up winning the election anyway. Detailed inside stories about the 2016 election night noted that Trump’s inner circle didn’t really think he could win, and neither did he. So perhaps he backed away from We Will Win as a title in a rare moment of caution: His constant need to not look like a fool besting his equally constant need to display maximum false bravado at all times.

Bernie Sanders has no such insecurities. He’s already said he’s winning this time around, but not in the cursory way that every two-bit candidate screams it out at rallies. (“We’re going to WASHINGTON, kiddos!”) No, he truly believes that this is his time, not because he’s being a prick (though he has been known to act like one of those on occasion). He simply believes that he has both the temperament and the rebuilt campaign strategy to bulldoze his way to the presidency. And he’s right. He’s the only candidate right now who continually stresses that you deserve your inherent worth, and more and more voters are responding to that. They know he gets it.

I did not vote for Bernie in the 2016 primary. I voted for Hillary because I liked her better (particularly when it came to gun control matters), and because I fell for the now-debunked electability myth. I have, shall we say, evolved in my views since that time. I don’t give a fuck about electability anymore. I don’t give a fuck that the U.K. just voted to become a recurring Benny Hill sketch. I sure as hell don’t give a fuck what cable news pundits think of Bernie, when they deign to mention him at all. I don’t need Joe Scarborough’s advice on this shit. In a Good Witch dimension, Bernie’s campaign parallels Trump’s 2016 campaign in that it can thrive in its own specific media ecosystem (including, so help me God, Twitter and Facebook), and every attempt by the mainstream press to either derail or discredit him only makes voters more interested in what he has to say, and more compelled to seek out opinions about him from less compromised sources.

I’m an American, which means I don’t like being told what to fucking do. And I’m not gonna close my eyes in anxiousness when I pull the lever in the voting booth this winter or next fall. That’s what all the shitty people want from you and me. They want you to be afraid to vote your values. I’m not gonna give them that luxury.

All my life, Democrats have been too shy to lead. They treat confidence like it’s a Pandora’s box they dare not open. Well, fuck all that. Hillary Clinton was confident that a lifetime of political maneuvering had earned her the presidency. Bernie Sanders, in a nuanced but vital contrast, is confident that a lifetime of standing by his principles has earned him sufficient enough admiration from all Americans to help him win that presidency. And he’s right. He will win. He’s not afraid to believe it, and you shouldn’t be either. Get your hopes up.