The timing of veteran Democratic consultant Tad Devine’s screed of a book—How the Democrats Screwed Bernie—railing against his own party’s establishment for blocking Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid perfectly reflects the mindless populism and rage against the mainstream that’s consuming the Democratic Party at record speed.
Of all the hangers-on in the Sanders political circle, Devine is among the least credible. He’s long been a member of an elite class of Democratic operatives who scored paydays as a top adviser on Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s unsuccessful presidential campaigns, all while making a name for himself as a ubiquitous talking head on cable news shows during the heyday of mainstream media.
As he tells in the book, Devine first took on Sanders as a client during a tough House reelection campaign in 1996 and reconnected for his inaugural Senate run in 2006, when he was bidding for an open seat, and there was still some skepticism whether a democratic socialist who didn’t consider himself part of the Democratic Party could prevail. But Democratic leaders rallied behind Sanders for the seat, he easily won election in a wave year for the party, and Devine landed a client who was, in the future, going to unexpectedly explode onto the national scene with his insurgent presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton.
Sanders’s national success, Devine notes, was premised on the same populist anger that Trump capitalized on in 2015. The word “rigged” appears regularly throughout the book to reflect Sanders’s railing against free markets, the power of special interests, capitalist greed, and the lack of generous government entitlements. “Bernie used that word before Trump,” Devine notes.
But the bulk of the narrative isn’t about Sanders’s actual (radical) views about the role of government, and what’s driving his followers, who are now rapidly taking over the Democratic Party. True to the cult of victimhood, at a time when Sanders and his acolytes are succeeding beyond their wildest dreams—with like-minded socialist and even communist allies coming out of the woodwork to win congressional seats—Sanders’s well-compensated chief campaign strategist is still embittered over losing to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign.
So the book focuses instead on how unfair the Democratic Party nomination process was to Sanders, relitigating tired debates over Clinton’s advantage with superdelegates, her financial edge in spending thanks to allied super PACs, and his campaign’s challenges in accessing the Democratic National Committee’s voter files.
¡Viva la revolución!
The timing couldn’t be worse, given what’s happened in Democratic politics over the past year. Party institutions have been hollowed out, holding little of their former influence. The current DNC chairman, Ken Martin, is such an irrelevant figure to the point that the committee barely has any money left to help his party’s candidates, and he can’t even show up on television to advocate what the party stands for.
And for all the Sanders screeds about the corrupting power of money, the ability for leftist candidates to raise big bucks from ideologically driven individual donors has long ago diminished the power of millions spent from outside groups. Many of the top congressional fundraisers this year are actually the Sanders-backed socialist candidates, who went on to win their nominations.
Before the rape allegation that finally did his campaign in, radical Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner raised a whopping $21 million for the race—outpacing Republican senator Susan Collins—despite having extremist views, a Nazi tattoo, and facing serious allegations of sexual misconduct.
The Sanders-backed Democratic Socialists of America House candidates that socialist New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani also championed raised nearly $1 million in the last fundraising quarter—near the top of the fundraising leaderboard.
Several senior Democratic strategists currently working on competitive campaigns told me that a Sanders endorsement alone—with backing from other members of the leftist movement—is now worth about one-third of the vote in a Democratic primary, a sea change from the toxicity of the socialist brand not long ago. Three-quarters of Democratic voters, according to a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll, are now open to supporting a democratic socialist for president. Other polls show Democrats view socialism more favorably than capitalism—by a healthy margin.
The Democratic Party is becoming a lot more like the party of Sanders, as he remains on the political stage a decade after his first presidential run, even with him approaching 85 years old.
The generous interpretation of why Devine’s book feels so disconnected from the political moment is a case of bad luck. He was putting together the book in the aftermath of the Democrats’ embarrassing 2024 presidential defeat to President Trump when party leaders were counseling moderation as the best way to win over disaffected voters. Devine offers his counsel in the book’s epilogue, where he blames Kamala Harris’s defeat on the party-driven effort to replace Biden on the ballot while calling for a “new generation of leadership.” Far from calling for the party to tack left, he’s speaking in generic party-approved talking points in operative-speak. There’s no ideological fervor to his guidance.
Indeed, the obvious reason Devine failed to anticipate the rise of Sanders’s socialist movement just as his book was coming out is that he’s part of the very party establishment of brand-name consultants and a representative of the moneyed class that Sanders constantly rails against. He isn’t part of Sanders’s movement. He’s a hired gun who was along for the ride.
If there was any profession deserving of populist anger, it’s this consultant class who are making bank off of candidates railing against the rich and powerful, while not even grappling with the extreme ideas being championed that threaten to lead the country off a cliff.
Make no mistake: The Sanders revolution is upon us, yet his own top strategist didn’t see it coming. It’s only fitting that a movement premised on victimhood, grievance, and populist anger can’t see the successes staring them right in the face.
How the Democrats Screwed Bernie
by Tad Devine
Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $28
Josh Kraushaar is the editor in chief of Jewish Insider and a Fox News Radio political analyst.
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