“I think Senator [Bernie] Sanders has somewhat of a point.”
In defeat, Democrats, like longtime political strategist James Carville, are finally admitting that the independent senator from Vermont just might get it. “There are things Sanders favored that we could have put more front and center,” Carville acknowledged in a post-election interview.
The comment itself was not shocking, but the messenger was. After all, Carville had been a leading voice in the news media’s efforts to diminish Sanders’ influence on the Democratic Party during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. In 2020, after referring to the senator as a “communist,” Carville warned it would be the “end of days” if Sanders secured the 2020 Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. After 2024, Carville was not the only person in legacy media to move from critiquing to entertaining Sanders-style politics.
Indeed, the 2024 presidential election post-mortems saw many in the press cope with Donald Trump’s victory by tacitly admitting that Bernie Sanders was right. Since 2016, much of the legacy media has embraced the establishment’s disdain for Sanders’ style politics. During his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, Sanders advocated for a return to 1930s-style democratic socialist policies, including progressive taxation, robust regulations on corporations, increasing the minimum wage to a living wage, universal healthcare, and trust-busting. These ideas conflicted with the donor class, and the Democratic Party establishment, which abandoned such policies in the 1990s to curry favor with corporate America. Consequently, when Sanders, a political independent, joined the Democratic Party in 2015 so he could participate in their primary, he faced a coordinated effort by the Democratic Party and legacy media to marginalize his influence.
In 2016, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) actively suppressed Sanders’ campaign, something they have since admitted, by giving Hillary Clinton advance notice of debate question; fabricating stories about Sanders’ supporters throwing chairs; and counting delegates’ votes before they had been cast to make Hillary Clinton’s lead over Sanders appear larger than it was. The legacy media amplified these tactics by claiming Clinton was more “electable” than Sanders, despite evidence to the contrary; and incorrectly asserting that his supporters were all white men with the pejorative label “Bernie Bros,” Similarly, studies documented the “Bernie Blackout,” where Sanders received 23 times less coverage than Donald Trump and significantly less than Clinton during the 2015-2016 campaign.
In 2020, the media onslaught continued with Sanders receiving the most negative coverage of any candidate, accused of being unelectable despite evidence to the contrary, having his polling misrepresented or completely invisiblized in legacy media reporting, being smeared as a Russian stooge despite flimsy evidence, style of politics compared to communist executions by MSNBC’s Chris Mathews, and receiving attacks based on unsupported claims such as CNN siding with Democratic Primary rival Elizabeth Warren in a “he said/she said” debate with Sanders.
During both of those election cycles, the legacy media largely maintained that Sanders’ appeal to the working class would alienate key constituencies — particularly people of color, women, and the LGBTQIA community – for the Democratic Party because it was racist and sexist. This was summarized with Hillary Clinton’s retort to Sanders’ proposal to trust bust the big banks, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?… Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” In response, the crowd chanted “No!” The speech and the crowd’s reaction reflected the party’s belief in the ‘demographics are destiny’ theory of electoral politics. This theory suggests that Democrats do not need to introduce a working-class agenda because they will experience long-term electoral success due to historically marginalized communities becoming a larger proportion of the voting population. This approach to politics was embraced by Carville — the person who popularized the phrase “it’s the economy stupid” — in 2009, when he predicted that the nation was getting less white, and since his party attracted the growing population of people of color, the Democratic Party would rule for the next 40 years.
Sanders, his supporters, some scholars, leftist media commentators, and progressives in Congress (known as “The Squad”) disagreed with the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class. They argued that all working people, including those key constituencies, would abandon the Democratic Party and enable Trump to assume and maintain power, unless the Democratic Party engaged in a working-class “revolution.” Leaders of the Democratic Party fired back, with Sen. Chuck Schumer arguing in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Sanders’ referred to this approach as “political malpractice.”
The results of the 2024 election forced a reckoning in legacy media, where they had to confront the fact that they were wrong and Sanders was right when it came to electoral politics. After all, despite a decade of major media outlets such as New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN hammering home the narrative that Trump’s wealth, xenophobia, felony charges and convictions, sexual assault allegations and convictions, repeated racist and sexist remarks, and role in the January 6th insurrection would prevent his electoral victory, Trump is more popular in 2024 than he has ever been. Also in 2024, the Republican Party took control of the Presidency, House of Representatives, and U.S. Senate, while securing the popular vote (something no Republican has done since 2004), building a multi-racial working-class coalition, and making notable electoral gains among women and voters of color.
Given that it directly contradicted their political theory, the Democratic Party was shocked by the outcome of the 2024 election. A post-election HuffPost headline captured the mood of Democrats after Trump’s 2024 election victory: “Shell-Shocked Democrats Stumbling For Answers After Loss To Donald Trump.” Similar reactions reverberated across major legacy media outlets. CNN reported, “Still-stunned Democrats begin to squint toward their future,” while NBC noted Democrats were trying to figure out “What Went Wrong?” Telegraph’s Michael Lind explained that “Shocked Democrats thought they’d create a permanent majority. This election proved them wrong.” The Atlantic noted that Democrats lost because they were “delusional.”
Sanders and his supporters were not blindsided by the election, however, and used the election as an opportunity to remind audiences that his assessment over the last decade was correct. In a widely circulated post-election op-ed for Boston Globe titled “Democrats must choose: The elites or the working class,” Sanders reiterated this point that the Democratic Party had failed to attract or energize the working class, and lost the election as a result.
Given the overwhelming evidence that the Democratic Party not only lost, but was losing key parts of its base – young people, women, Muslims, and people of color – legacy media figures such as Carville had no choice, but to tacitly admit that their political theory was wrong. Columnist David Brooks, who once wrote a 2020 op-ed titled “No, Not Sanders, Not Ever: He Is Not a Liberal, He’s the End of Liberalism,” changed his tune after the 2024 election, writing that “maybe Bernie Sanders is right” about inequality, especially in education. Similarly, in December of 2024, MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid and Jason Johnson discussed the need for healthcare reform—a cornerstone of Sanders’ campaigns- referring to the health care system as “unfair.” In response, Reid chided voters for not supporting regulations on the health care industry. However, missing from their conversation was any self-reflection about how they helped stifle support for Sanders’ agenda, which included universal health care. Back in 2020, Reid had dismissed Sanders’ health plan as a “tough sell,” argued his messaging failed to attract “poor people,” and declared that his campaign should accept that the “war is lost.” Meanwhile, Johnson, who wrongly predicted Sanders would not finish in the top five in the 2020 Iowa Primary (he finished less than half a percent behind the recognized first place winner Pete Buttigieg), helped convince audiences that support for Sanders was racist. During the 2020 campaign, Johnson dismissed the African-American women working on Sanders’ campaign as an“island of misfit black girls.”. He was briefly suspended from MSNBC for this remark.
It is unlikely that legacy media will ever directly admit their assessment of the electorate over the previous decade was wrong. The shift in rhetoric from figures like Reid, Johnson, Brooks, and Carville represents the closest thing to “you were right” that progressives will receive from the establishment. After all, news media personalities believe that protecting their brand and outlet from the potential damage caused by admitting the truth is more important than objective reporting. This was made painfully clear in the Dominion-Fox News Channel lawsuit, which documented how Fox News Channel knowingly reported falsehoods about the 2020 election being stolen (which it was not) to retain their audience. Similarly, legacy media prioritizes audience capture and access to power over integrity. This dynamic explains why personalities like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski went from hosting a program where they justified comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler to seeking to build a relationship with him once it became clear he was re-elected to the presidency.
Fortunately, audiences are beginning to catch on. Both cable and newspaper legacy news media outlets have seen their audiences dramatically dwindle, with MSNBC losing 61% of its key demographic, since Election Day. This decline reflects a growing awareness that consuming legacy media only perpetuates its deceptive practices and leads audiences to vote against their interests. Hopefully, audiences will continue to gravitate toward those who understand the electorate and electoral politics rather than the James Carville’s of the world, who propagandize audiences until, long after the damage is done, they are forced to admit that they are wrong.
