I’ve touched on this point a couple of times, but in light of this positively bonkers editorial from the Washington Post I think it deserves a full hearing: Bernie Sanders isn’t extreme.

In the editorial, the Post argues that Sanders is so extreme that he comes full circle to the point at which he is actually kinda conservative. Calling his easily-verifiable claim that economic inequality is at historic levels “hyperbolic,” it then argues that Sanders’s broad-based social programs — debt-free college, paid family leave, etc. — aren’t actually progressive because they don’t exclude people who are reasonably well-off. How can Sanders be a progressive, they ask, if a single dollar of additional government spending is used to benefit someone who isn’t already destitute?

In their frame, Sanders cares so much about spending $18 TRILLION dollars (yes, they cited the Wall Street Journal’s widely-discredited accounting of the policies he’s endorsed) that he doesn’t care where the money goes. To them, Sanders is the worst kind of extreme — extreme for the sake of extremity.

This, along with the rest of the claims made both by journalists and politicians across the political spectrum that Sanders resides two standard deviations away from our ideological norm, is bunk. Sanders’s positions may place him in the left wing of the Democratic Party, but that left wing of the Democratic Party is less extreme than nearly the entire field of Republican presidential candidates while being squarely in line with public opinion. There are three big reasons why:

Voting record

Measuring ideology using someone’s voting record is difficult to pin down in one number, as a representative can be more liberal on domestic issues than they are on foreign policy issues than they are on social issues, and so forth. However, that doesn’t mean that ideology can’t be approximated. Using the DW-Nominate scoring system, political scientists approximate representatives’ ideologies by comparing members’ voting records to each other, rank-ordering them by their propensity to vote for liberal or conservative bills. A representative with a DW-Nominate score of 1.0 is then considered to be perfectly conservative; -1.0 would be perfectly liberal.

As measured by DW-Nominate, Bernie Sanders’s -.523 rating didn’t even make him the most liberal Senator during the last session. He was the third-most liberal, with Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin registering as more reliably to the left.

But Warren, Baldwin and Sanders pale in comparison to the level of extremism seen on the right. Six Republican Senators were farther to the right than Warren was to the left, and fourteen were more ideologically extreme than Sanders. Mike Lee, the most conservative Senator, had a nearly-perfect conservative DW-Nominate score of .986. Sanders’s closest analogs on the right were John Cornyn (.517) and David Vitter (.505).

As I’ve written before, no one feels obligated to describe David Vitter as “extreme” unless they finish the thought with “-ly into women who are not his wife.” He doesn’t make an especially big name for himself by being especially conservative because he has so many colleagues who are far, far to his right.

But DW-Nominate is, admittedly, an approximation. So if for election watchers who don’t like political science metrics and would instead favor something more familiar, one could take a look at the two years in which Sanders and Hillary Clinton overlapped in the Senate to see how often they voted the same way.

By that metric, there isn’t a lot of space between Sander and Hillary “I Plead Guilty to Being a Moderate” Clinton. They voted the same way 93 percent of the time — about the same rate at which Clinton voted with mainstream Democrats Ron Wyden and Barbara Mikulski. And in the 31 instances in which they disagreed, many were on repeat votes — six of the 31 divergent votes were on cloture for the same immigration bill. Among the other disagreements:

Sanders voted against the bank bailout; Clinton voted for it

Sanders voted against the 2008 Defense Budget bill; Clinton voted for it

Sanders voted to allow Guantanamo detainees to be moved to American prisons; Clinton voted against

Sanders voted against estate tax exemptions, Clinton voted for them

All this is to say that Sanders was to the left of Clinton during their two years together in the Senate, but not by much. Going off of voting record alone, it simply isn’t fair to say that Sanders is too far removed from the core positions of the Democratic Party.

Policies

Of course, the biggest problem with looking at voting records is that they only measure policies that come up for a vote, a factor over which Sanders has no control. This being the case, it’s also useful to look at what Sanders would do if Congress didn’t exist — what America looks like at his greatest aspiration — and see how they square with public opinion.

And wouldn’t you know it? America’s buying what Sanders is selling. As I wrote last week:

When you ask voters how they feel about socialism, they bristle, but when you ask them about the policies that social democrats like Sanders advocate, they love them. From polling conducted by the Progressive Change Institute: 77% of likely 2016 voters support universal Pre-K

71% support letting people buy into Medicare, and 51% support “Medicare-for-all” single payer health insurance

71% support a large-scale ($400 billion/year) infrastructure program

70% support a “Green New Deal,” entailing a massive investment in green energy jobs

59% support the establishment of a basic income

59% support raising the top marginal tax rate to 50% (the rate during Reagan’s presidency), and 54% support the creation of a new tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires.

55% support a financial transactions tax You can check out PCI’s full results and methodology here.

Those numbers aren’t from Democratic primary voters; they’re from likely voters in the 2016 election. Since we already know that likely voters are less economically liberal than unlikely voters and non-voting citizens, it’s safe to say that the public at large would register similar or higher levels of approval for these policies.

Even in the context of this right-shifted sample, planks on Sanders’s platform are supported by majorities of the likely electorate. Other ideas Sanders has endorsed, such as making Election Day a national holiday and banning for-profit prisons, have plurality support.

Specific policies aside, Americans also agree with Sanders’s core economic message that the distribution of American income is too unequal. Way too unequal. If the American people had their way, our income distribution would likely be flatter than even Sanders hopes to achieve (see the graphic on the right).

At the end of the day, it only makes sense to call Bernie Sanders “extreme” if your frame of reference is the consensus that formed in the ’80s and ’90s in Washington — a consensus that accepted low taxation, high inequality and privatized public services. But if your frame of reference is the American public more generally — which, in a democracy, is supposed to be the frame of reference of choice — Bernie Sanders is pretty mainstream.

Let’s start treating him that way, shall we?