When Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) decided to boo the mentioning of Hillary Clinton’s name at a Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) campaign rally in Iowa on Friday, she exposed two universal truths of the Democratic primary.
The first is that the fissures that erupted between Sanders and Clinton supporters in 2016 remain very much unresolved four years later, just days before voting begins in 2020. The second is that Sanders increasingly faces a difficult choice: stand beside his sharp-elbowed, oft-controversial, crew of surrogates and online supporters that helped fuel his rise or create some strategic distance in hopes of uniting the party behind his campaign.
It is a dilemma that has become far more pronounced as Sanders finds himself poised to lay claim to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. And it is one that will become only more difficult should he emerge as the general election candidate.
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For the most part, Sanders’ surrogates have been a great campaign asset.
Pop icons like rappers Cardi B and Killer Mike have given the senator a cross-cultural appeal that most septuagenarian Jews from Vermont tend to lack. Labor advocates have enhanced his blue collar persona at a time when he’s aiming to win back working class voters. And as Sanders has been holed up in D.C. during impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, his highest-profile defenders have hit the campaign trail on his behalf, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.
But, on occasion, the value add hasn’t always been there when it comes to dispatching outside individuals to bolster the campaign. While some Sanders’ surrogates have proven to be effective messengers, others have caused distractions. As Friday night underscored, they’ve even presented political complications.
Sanders’ campaign did not respond to questions about Tlaib’s comments. But the congresswoman went on to apologize Saturday for her comments, saying she let emotion get the better of her and also noting what had sparked her to speak out: less than two weeks ago, Clinton had been quoted saying Sanders was ornery and unliked by his peers and even left open the possibility that she wouldn’t support him in a general election.
Before the apology was issued, the congresswoman’s remarks drew rebukes from a slew of party-affiliated Democrats, who Sanders will likely need if he wants to secure the nomination.
And Democratic operatives warned that such off-the-cuff moments would prove even more dangerous and counterproductive if Sanders were to eventually square off against Trump.
“Everything can be used against you when you’re in a general election,” Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist and the political director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told The Daily Beast. “It’s why people are generally so convervative.”
Indeed, Trump has already turned his attention towards Sanders’ cast of campaign helpers; publicly using some of the senator’s most vocal allies against him.
“The ‘Squad’ is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart,” Trump tweeted in July. “They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left, and were against humanitarian aid at the Border...And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!”
For Sanders’ team, the idea that surrogates may be more baggage than benefit is anathema to the mission. Far from shunning radical ideas and non-establishment types, the senator has embraced them. To do otherwise is to adopt a type of defensive crouch that politicians should not have.
“The downside of having really high-profile surrogates is that any one of their errant tweets or utterances can become news cycles,” said Karthik Ganapathy, who previously served as battleground states communications director for Sanders in 2016. “But most candidates eat that risk because the benefit of prominent supporters hitting distinct audiences with the campaign’s message more than makes up for a day or two of hand-wringing by the Politico set.”
Nevertheless, in recent weeks, Sanders has had to deal with with flare ups involving a number of surrogates and supporters of his campaign. Last week, the Senator distanced himself from one supporter, Zephyr Teachout, after the law professor and public advocate penned a piece in The Guardian arguing that former Vice President Joe Biden had a “corruption” problem. Coming amid an impeachment trial in which Biden faces criticism from Republicans over allegations of improper conduct by his son Hunter Biden, there was sufficient public outcry by Democrats over the Teachout oped. Shortly after the story was published, Sanders offered an apology.
“It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way. And I'm sorry that that op-ed appeared,” he told CBS News.
Biden later thanked Sanders for distancing himself from his surrogate’s piece. But Rocketto argued that maybe he shouldn’t have. The Teachout oped, she said, was ultimately a net positive for Sanders—injecting a “conversation that they probably wanted to have but wouldn’t have invited otherwise” into the media bloodstream. And, indeed, other Sanders’ surrogates have since attacked Biden in ways far more aggressive than the campaign seems willing to go in an official capacity.
On Thursday morning, Shaun King, a top Sanders surrogate with over 1 million Twitter followers, tweeted an extensive rant about how Biden “NEVER PARTICIPATED IN A SINGLE SIT-IN.” The thread represented a highly aggressive attack on one of the former VP’s political strong suits—his relationship with black voters—and it seemed designed to hamper his voting coalition before the primaries began. Biden’s campaign did not comment when asked about the series of tweets. And Sanders’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether the campaign supported King’s lengthy thread.
But it wasn’t the first time King, who has stumped for Sanders in California, went against the national campaign messaging. As the proxy feud between Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) escalated after Warren claimed Sanders said during a private meeting that he didn’t believe a woman could beat Trump—which Sanders repeatedly denied—King added his own remarks to the equation. Shortly after the feud started, he tweeted that a source in Warren’s campaign had told him the Massachusetts Democrat “embellished” Sanders’ wording. Sanders never publicly echoed that sentiment.
Sean McElwee, co-founder of the liberal think tank Data for Progress, which has worked closely with Warren’s campaign, made the case that no campaign was immune from having a surrogate’s remarks blow up in its face. “Let the person whose movement has never cringe-posted cast the first stone,” he said. “The shitposting flows in many directions.”
But without referencing anyone by name, he acknowledged that “as Bernie becomes a front-runner, more surrogate discipline will be necessary to move him to the 50 percent he needs to win.”
For Sanders, that could be easier said than done. The senator has leaned on notorious free-talkers and dynamic personalities to help fuel his emergence in the Democratic primary. A newsletter produced by David Sirota, one of Sanders’ top aides, often pushes the campaign’s messaging to the limits (or beyond) of where the candidate seems publicly comfortable going. “Bern Notice” is billed as “a production of the Bernie 2020 campaign,” while adding the unique distinction that “the views expressed here are solely of the bylined author.”
Other prominent Sanders boosters have created their own political headaches that have, in turn, boomeranged back on to the campaign.
Late last year, Sanders previously endorsed The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, a congressional candidate in the race to replace former Rep. Katie Hill’s seat in California's 25th Congressional District. But after women’s groups blasted Uygur for past comments that were widely perceived as insensitive, Sanders’ withdrew his endorsement entirely, saying “our movement is bigger than any one person.” (Uygur later said he was rejecting all endorsements).
More recently, Sanders’ campaign produced a video clip amplifying controversial podcast star Joe Rogan’s endorsement, which received widespread traction and mixed responses on social media. Sandersworld and other progressives made a case for Rogan’s ability to pull unconventional supporters into the fold, and extended that logic to Sanders. Others viewed it more critically, with some activists calling out Rogan’s history of transphobic comments in particular. Democratic group MoveOn, which endorsed Sanders in 2016, explicitly called for the senator to renounce the support. The Human Rights Campaign also urged Sanders to drop the endorsement.
Sanders has not done that. And as the Iowa caucuses approach it doesn’t appear to have dimmed his prospects at all. And yet, not everyone thinks that the surrogates around the Senate will prove entirely beneficial.
“Rule number one in endorsements is they’re supposed to help you,” Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist, said. “You shouldn’t have trouble with your endorsers. The fact that he’s had so many problems with his endorsers is a problem for him.”
