Even as some polls show Sen. Bernie Sanders besting top GOP presidential candidates, Republicans appear to be salivating over the prospect of taking on the democratic socialist in the November general election.
And they’re using Sanders’ success to embarrass Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer — as Clinton’s campaign noted this week — has even promoted Sanders on Twitter as the winner of Democratic debates and has taunted the Clinton campaign for “getting schooled by a nutty VT socialist.”
Meanwhile, American Crossroads, a super PAC aligned with Republican strategist Karl Rove, released a digital ad in Iowa targeting Clinton’s ties to Wall Street — a tactic also used by Sanders.
Sanders has highlighted polls that show him performing as well or better than Clinton in a general election matchup against GOP candidates, including front-runner Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
“If you want somebody who is going to beat Donald Trump, who is going to beat the other Republicans, I think Bernie Sanders is that candidate,” Sanders said while campaigning in Iowa on Tuesday.
‘A dream come true’
Sanders would beat Trump by more than 5 percentage points compared with Clinton’s 2.5-point edge over Trump, according to the most recent RealClearPolitics average of national polls.
But Republicans don’t seem to be taking Sanders’ argument seriously.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican presidential contender, predicted at the most recent GOP debate that Republicans will take “every state” if Sanders wins the Democratic nomination.
“That’s not even an issue,” he said to applause. “I know Bernie, and I can promise you he’s not going to be president of the United States.”
Trump has said a race against Sanders would be “a dream come true.”
Questioning Sanders’ electability
Clinton’s campaign has responded to Sanders more aggressively as polls show Sanders surging in Iowa ahead of the Feb. 1 caucuses and beating Clinton in New Hampshire, which holds the first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 9.
On Tuesday, Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri said Sanders’ arguments that he’s more electable are undermined by evidence Republicans would rather run against him than against Clinton. Palmieri also accused Sanders of taking cues from Republicans and “using a Karl Rove attack to go after” Clinton.
“While Sen. Sanders tries to make a case on electability based on meaningless polls, Republicans and their super PACs have made clear (which) candidate they’re actually afraid to face,” Palmieri said in a statement. “Both Sanders and the Republicans know that Hillary is the candidate who can take them on and ensure the White House isn’t in Donald Trump or Ted Cruz’s hands.”
RNC spokesman tweets ‘I #feelthebern’
Clinton campaign officials highlighted examples of Republicans defending Sanders, including a video by the GOP-aligned PAC America Rising that shows clips of commentators and journalists accusing Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, of misrepresenting Sanders’ health care plan. They also noted that RNC spokesman Spicer cheered on Sanders during Sunday’s Democratic debate via tweets such as “I #feelthebern #demdebate.”
Spicer said Wednesday that Sanders’ success is “highly embarrassing” to the Clinton campaign and that he is “having a lot of fun with piling on.”
“It’s literally like Duke worried about taking on Northern Virginia Community College’s basketball team. Give me one or the other,” he said of Sanders and Clinton. “We’ll beat either one.”
Tad Devine, Sanders’ senior media adviser, said Republicans are engaged in misguided “mischief” that shows their “disconnect with what’s going on with voters.”
Sanders mobilizing young voters
Sanders’ electability argument isn’t based solely on presidential preference polls, he said, but on responses to survey questions about which candidate is most trustworthy or which has a better economic plan. He said Sanders is the only candidate on the Democratic side who can turn out young people — at the level President Obama did in 2008 — along with non-voters and independents.
“I don’t think there is a single poll in America that would contradict the assertion that Bernie Sanders is doing much, much better with younger voters than Hillary Clinton,” Devine said. “The question is, Will that translate into turnout? If they do (turn out), then you’ve got a force on your hands like Obama had in 2008 that could change American politics.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial this week said Sanders’ performance in Iowa and New Hampshire polls is cause to take him seriously, and it’s “no longer impossible to imagine” him as the Democratic nominee.
‘Enormous confidence’ in Clinton
Democrats — other than Sanders’ supporters — still have “enormous confidence” that Clinton will be the nominee, said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, which rejects the far left’s economic populism as a political non-starter. But Democrats will begin “to panic” if the dynamic changes to favor Sanders, he said.
Sanders says his ability to rally supporters would help Democrats down the ballot, but Bennett said many Democratic House and Senate candidates would see their prospects “deeply imperiled” with Sanders leading the ticket.
“It would be a catastrophe,” Bennett said. “He’s a socialist. That doesn’t work in America outside very small precincts … like Vermont. The ads write themselves.”
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