Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, noted that Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio might be the kind of politician who could appeal to voters on both the left and the right. Brown, Trende said, “holds a longstanding skepticism of trade and has more blue collar appeal than I could see Elizabeth Warren having.”
.. Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research, provided data reinforcing McInturff’s analysis that a left-right populist alliance faced insurmountable difficulties.
Moral Values and the Candidates Who Match Them
Their supporters’ attachment to four values, from a November survey representing all Americans.
.. If either Trump or Sanders loses the fight for the nomination, or if both go down to defeat, the question in November will be: Do their supporters fall in line? Do a substantial number stay home? Or will they vote for the opposition?
Why Left-of-Center Wonks Are Skeptical of Bernie Sanders
Most recently, Mr. Friedman projected a growth rate of 5.3 percent a year under a Sanders administration, compared with a Congressional Budget Office projection of 2.1 percent annual growth over the coming decade. Mr. Friedman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, also estimates that Mr. Sanders’s policies would bring an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent (the lowest since 1969) and 3.2 percent annual productivity growth (more than double the C.B.O. projection).
.. Now comes a man who has had to answer only to voters in the most liberal state in the nation, who has never had the responsibility to actually pull together the disparate center-left coalition that is the Democratic Party to enact concrete legislation.
.. But if Mr. Sanders wins the nomination, a fascinating test for how he will govern will be whether he mends fences with left-of-center policy wonks — or views them as part of the problem of establishment thinking he is trying to overcome.
The Roosevelt Approach
The brute fact is you can’t beat passion with pragmatism. The human heart is not built that way. You can’t beat angry passion with bloodless calculation. If you’re going to have any chance against these hotheads, you have to set a rival and stronger emotional tone. I’d ask you to think of the ancient ideal of comradeship.
.. Sanders and Trump try to put the blame for this disaster on discrete groups of people — Wall Street or immigrants. But in reality it’s a natural disaster caused by structural forces — globalization, technological change, the dissolution of the family, racism.
.. You may think of neighborliness as a sentimental, soft virtue. And I suppose in times of peace, prosperity and ease it is a sweet and tender thing.
But look at what happens to neighbors when one friend is threatened or when times are hard. Then neighborliness takes on a different hue. Friends become comrades in arms.
.. Let them assert that all our problems can be solved if other people sacrifice — the immigrants or the top 1 percent. You call for shared sacrifice. The rich can give more in taxes, but the rich, the middle class and the poor can all give more in civic engagement.
.. Sanders and Trump have adopted emotional tones that are going to offend and exhaust people over time. Watching the G.O.P. South Carolina debate I got the impression that Trump’s exhaustion moment is at hand.
Livin’ Bernie Sanders’s Danish Dream
It would create, as in Germany, a legion of eternal students who have little incentive to leave school because the costs are so low. It would give Washington officials greater control over state universities, determining what sort of faculty they could hire and what sort of programs they could run. It would threaten hundreds of private colleges, which could no longer compete against the completely subsidized state system. It would reduce the pressures universities now feel to reform themselves because it would cushion them with federal largess. Slowly, American universities would look more like their European counterparts. They’d be less good.
.. According to The Wall Street Journal, Sanders would add $18 trillion to the federal budget over the next 10 years. Currently, total government spending is about 36 percent of G.D.P. Under Sanders it would rise to about 47.5 percent of G.D.P., putting us comfortably in the European range.
.. Third, Sanders would change the incentive structure for the country’s most successful people. He proposes raising the top tax rate to 52 percent. As Josh Barro noted in The Times, when you add in state, local and other taxes, top earners would be paying a combined tax rate over 73 percent. In high-tax locales like New York City and California, it would be even more.