Democrats Have Found Their Santorum in Sanders

W. James Antle III

Politics,

One senator's 2016 campaign for the White House echoes another's 2012 run.

The Democrats have found their Rick Santorum in Bernie Sanders. Neither the socially conservative former senator from Pennsylvania nor the socialist senator from Vermont would welcome this comparison.

But Sanders’s landslide win over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire sets him up to play a role in the Democratic primaries this year similar to the one Santorum played on the Republican side after a much narrower victory over Mitt Romney in Iowa. (The fact their respective party establishments tried to shortchange both men in the Iowa caucuses only adds to what they have in common.)

Sanders, like Santorum before him, is a purer alternative to everything that is wrong with his party’s anointed frontrunner. In both cases, the candidate is a purer ideological corrective—an unashamed social democrat versus the triangulating Clintons, an unabashed Christian conservative against a former moderate governor of Massachusetts—who better represents the grassroots. Both of them appealed more to blue-collar voters than their parties’ top candidates.

But each of them was also someone who lacked the presumptive nominee’s defining character flaws.

This last bit is even truer in Sanders’s case. Romney’s character problems were mostly confined to equivocating about public policy issues as he transitioned from Massachusetts to a national Republican primary electorate, although questions about his “vulture capitalism” were certainly serious. Clinton faces doubts about her basic trustworthiness.

How serious are those doubts? In New Hampshire, 34 percent of Democratic primary voters said it was most important that a candidate is honest and trustworthy. That’s eight points more than picked “has the right experience” or “cares about people like me,” an amazing 22 points than “can win in November.”