The Democrats After Sanders
.. Elizabeth Warren, to pick one example, would have had fewer of these problems if she’d decided to run, and given how well Sanders has done it’s reasonable to suspect that Warren could have actually defeated Clinton. Now that it’s clear that the opening is there, a candidate of full-spectrum progressivism could plausibly enter the next contested Democratic primary as a favorite.
.. Bernie Sanders’s answer, was to promise the thing that every major Democratic politician since Walter Mondale has abjured:major tax increases, not only on the rich (who would be taxed at a rate upward of 70 percent under his plans), but on everybody, middle class and working class and upper middle class alike.
.. it would threaten the stability of the larger Democratic coalition, which depends heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class support and whose leaders have repeatedly backed away from middle-class tax increases lest they give Republicans an opening.