Partner Terry Sullivan in Wall Street Journal: Sanders Isn’t Trump’s Challenger So Much as His Sequel
February 24, 2020
Sanders Isn’t Trump’s Challenger So Much as His Sequel
He’s a brash outsider who’s leading the pack. Experts swear he can’t win. We’ve seen this movie before.
“We’ve seen this movie before, but for some reason the critics seem convinced it will have a different ending this time: A bombastic septuagenarian political outsider calls out a rigged system to the cheering masses. He finishes second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire and Nevada. He leads all the national polls while the establishment candidates wage all-out war on one another. Meanwhile, the media dismisses his chances and an increasingly worried political establishment convinces itself it’s only a fluke, that the worst case is a chaotic convention that ultimately nominates a mainstream candidate.
You’d think we political types would know better by now. The most important thing I learned managing Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential race was that the old political norms were dead. Experts and pundits’ predictions were often no more than guesses based on the way things used to be. Media groupthink only made these outdated and misguided notions more stubborn.
Am I the only one who was embarrassed enough at missing the 2016 political movement that elected Donald Trump that I rethought my approach to modern politics?”