US election: Is Bernie Sanders the next Corbyn, or new Trump?

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during the party debate in Charleston. Picture: AFP

The vituperative, spiteful, shouty, disorderly, personal, abusive Dem­o­cratic TV primary debate on Wednesday (AEDT) tells us three important things: Bernie Sanders is the undisputed frontrunner; Joe Biden will probably win South Caro­lina at the weekend and stay viable; and Michael Bloomberg remain­s a terrible performer but has a shot, because of his limitless money, if Biden collapses.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg has the best lines, speaks in full sentences and doesn’t say anything downright weird, but he is struggling to turn his early surge — the latest figures now suggests he did win Iowa after all — into traction with African-Americans and Latinos.

The strangest line of the night, as so often, came from Biden, who claimed that since Sanders voted in 2007 against a gun-control measure­, 150 million people had died from gun violence. One hundre­d and fifty million? In a natio­n of 330 million?

Biden does these brain-snap crazy things often and never gets called out for them. In his vice-presidential debate with Sarah Palin in 2008 he claimed to have rid Lebanon of Hezbollah.

His sentences so often derail, have so many non-sequiturs, chopped clauses, dangling partic­iples, and strange changes of tense, that they are a unique living spec­ies, like a PG Wodehouse parody of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

For all that, Biden seemed wide awake and leads the polls in South Carolina, but two days later 15 states and territories vote simultaneously on Super Tuesday. Biden needs to win South Carolina by something like 10 points for the news value of his win to create momentum­ against Sanders.

Sanders remains the prohib­itive frontrunner, which is why he took more incoming fire this debate. Bloomberg, the remarkably wooden billionaire, did poorly, but better than last week. If he didn’t have $US60bn in his back pocket, his debate performance would probably rule him out of contention. But it was better than his epic disaster in the Nevada debate.

Still, Bloomberg is an astonishingly poor communicator. He is a candidate who should only ever interact with voters as a CGI hologram, in the hands of skilled animat­ors.

His jokes were cringe-making. One was that he didn’t understand why the other “contestants” bothered to show up after he beat them so convincingly in the last debate.

You can see that when the joke writer dreamed that line up it had some potential — funny enough, self-deprecating if done properly. But Bloomberg, visibly struggling to remember it, fluffed and jerked his lines so badly, it fell utterly flat.

Similarly, saying that what’s right for New York might not be right elsewhere, otherwise you’d have the Naked Cowboy all over America, confused millions of Americans who have never heard of the scantily clad busker who sometimes plays guitar in Times Square.

Bloomberg hopes Biden will collapse in South Carolina, and Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar disappear, leaving him to become the great alternative to Sanders. But if Biden wins South Carolina, that scenario doesn’t eventuate.

Having spent almost $US500m on his campaign so far, in most of the Super Tuesday states, Bloomberg is running third. Sanders is leading the biggest states and Biden many of the others.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Which brings us back to Sanders. The Vermont socialist took some hits in this debate but nothing I would think that really threatens his position as frontrunner.

Klobuchar claimed Sanders’s spending promises now total $US60 trillion, which is three times the size of the US economy. Buttigieg said it would be grim for America if the choice were Donald Trump pining for the social order of the 1950s and Sanders pining for the revolutionary radical politics of the 1960s.

The real question about ­Sanders is this: is he the Democrats’ left-wing populist version of Don­ald Trump of 2016? Or is he the Democrats’ version of Jeremy Corbyn of 2019?

Both Sanders and Trump would hate to be compared with each other, but as disruptive polit­ical irruptions they do bear some similarities. Trump was often declared­ unelectable on two grounds — personal crudity and being too far to the right, thereby alienating middle-ground voters.

But Trump won in two unexpected ways. He inspired the base to vote in bigger numbers than usual, and he reached out to working-class cultural conservatives who traditionally voted Democrat, or didn’t vote, and had them vote Republican for the first time ever or the first time in a long time.

Sanders, like Corbyn, appeals disproportionately to the young. The old left-middle-right spectrum of politics — with the idea that to win a candidate must come towards the middle — is still ­relevant but is overlaid by other spectra that contradict it.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders listens as Elizabeth Warren speaks.

Young versus old is a big predictor of votes. Old folks voted for Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. Young folks voted for Corbyn and Bill Shorten (apologies are due here to Shorten — this is perhaps the only way he resembled ­Corbyn). Looking like an outsider is crucial in the US.

Sanders says the key to beating Trump is increasing turnout. This is scoffed at by some analysts but he might have a point.

Voting is voluntary in the US and old folks vote at a much higher rate than the young. If Sanders changes those relativities, he could be on to something.

Also, while Sanders adopts the zeitgeist identity politics formulas, he’s not much interested in that stuff.

He’s an old-fashioned Marxoid fellow traveller so his analysis is much more class-based than ­gender/race/identity-based. Expressed as left-wing economic populism, that gives him some kind of shot at winning back white working-class voters who fled to Trump.

At this stage polls show Sanders beating Trump in the key battleground states, though polls at this stage are almost meaningless.

But it might be that Sanders’s supporters, like Trump’s in 2016, take him seriously but not literally, knowing that he will never really be allowed to spend $60 trillion in office.

For all that, I think Sanders is more like Corbyn than Trump in 2016. For a start, Trump was never a policy extremist. He was a popul­ist. His policies didn’t add up to a coherent whole but he was a mainstream moderate compared with Sanders.

Sanders wants to ban fracking, which will probably kill his ­chances in must-win Pennsyl­vania. And he has that grotesque left-wing love of long-dead Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, so reminiscent of Corbyn’s bizarre ideological hang-ups. That ­probably means he loses Florida.

Trump hopes he gets to run against Sanders. So far, that’s the most likely outcome.