Who can beat Donald Trump in this year's Presidential elections. After all, the Donald has seen a bit of a pick up in his fortunes, having been proven right that his impeachment was all a hoax, conducted by dirty cops against him, and by the US economy continuing to chug along with jobs growth still moving at a steady clip. That was a question that the journalists on the BBC's “Dateline” programme considered yesterday. Well obviously, the liberal pundits had no doubt that it could not be the US equivalent of Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, of course. He might rouse a few young people, but it was hard to see him gathering the required votes across the country as a whole. Unsurprisingly, they concluded that it would have to be someone from the centre ground, the centrists favourite candidate, Pete Buttigieg, getting a favourable mention.
But, yet again, this just shows that these highly paid journalists all live in their own little bubble of self-satisfaction, in which they can engage in confirmation bias. Corbyn's success in 2017 came as a complete shock to them, shaking all of their certainties. Corbyn's failure restored their certainty, and put the world back on its proper axis. It meant that they, and their US counterparts, could warn the Democrats not to make the same mistake that Labour had made in choosing a dangerous radical as their candidate, but instead to stick firmly in the centre-ground. Unfortunately, what it shows is that those very highly paid journalists can't even, it seems, do the simple thing of a little bit of research so as to check their biases against reality.
The actual answer to the question, who can beat Trump, is, apparently, pretty much anyone, other than some of those candidates from the centre. The polls show that it is a generic Democrat candidate who has the best chance of beating Trump. Every poll conducted gives such a generic Democrat a poll lead over Trump, in the most recent with a lead of around 46-43.
Biden leads Trump, but only by amounts within the margin of error, though, in the aggregate poll, he has a lead of around 5 points.
In the same aggregate poll, Bernie Sanders leads Trump across the country by 3.7 points. Indeed, the only Democrat not beating Trump in the aggregate poll is Buttigieg, who trails Trump by 0.3 points. The only other Democrat to lead Trump by a larger margin than Sanders is Michael Bloomberg. However, what is likely, as in 2016, when the Democrat establishment manoeuvred Clinton into the candidacy, is that, if they went for Biden or Bloomberg, large numbers of the Democrat core would sit on their hands. It would allow Trump to win in a similar manner to 2016. The only hope for the Democrats is to choose a candidate like Sanders who can mobilise the Democrat base, and mobilise all of those working-class voters who, for decades, have had no candidate or party to rally around.
Sanders is by no means a perfect candidate, but, at least, he provides the basis for US workers to step forward in a way they have not been able to do for a long time. The involvement of large numbers of young, radicalised US workers into political activity offers hope of a way forward. They will not get everything right, but they can quickly learn from mistakes. As Engels once wrote,
"….It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug tererden" [to learn by one's own mistakes]. And for a whole large class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical as the Americans. The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own.”
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