Feeling the Bern of Cross-Cutting

In 2016 Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign was supported by the “Bernie Bro”. This group of enthusiastic young and predominantly white male supporters created some problems for Bernie’s platform, which relies heavily on the ideas of equality for all, resolving racial disparities, and alleviating the wealth gap within the United States. Bernie needed to gain the support of women, minorities, and people of color. Because of his association with the “Bernie Bro”, this goal quickly became more difficult and was a significant factor in Sanders losing the Democratic primary to Hillary Clinton. Sanders was well aware of this, going so far as to say, “we were criticized for being too white; that was a correct criticism.”

Since his defeat in 2016 Sanders has worked to correct this mistake.  He has seen his efforts come to fruition, with a 2019 Politico study showing that Sanders is now more popular among people of color than he is with white people. This same study also showed that women like Sanders at the same rate that men do. This attempt at becoming more relatable to the masses is clearly working.  

This change of campaign-style illustrates a principle that is explained in Mason and Wronski’s work “One Tribe to Bind Them All”, called cross-cutting cleavages. This idea is based on the fact that people have several different identities. They can identify based on their ethnicity, race, religion, economic level, age, gender, sex, etc. These different identities are called cleavages. Mason and Wronski explain the importance of these cleavages by citing Nicholas R. Miller, who states “All societies are divided to some degree. But some societies, especially larger and more complex ones, are divided by a pluralism of cleavages that are often related to one another in a cross-cutting rather than reinforcing pattern....Two random individuals, therefore, most likely belong to different preferences clusters and, if so, have conflicting preferences with respect to one or more issues but almost certainly agree on many issues as well.” This means that within political parties, and by extension political campaigns, several different cleavages exist and attempt to find the things that unify and divide them. Mason and Wronski go on to explain “However, once these cleavages begin to align along a single dimension, partisan conflict is expected to increase substantially.” The alternative to this is cross-cutting. Cross-cutting takes two or more clear cleavages and uses them to separate each other. Instead of a clear divide between cleavages (example, rich and poor), crosscutting divides them more, making issues more complex, but also unifying people (example: rich white, rich black, poor white, poor black). By cross-cutting these cleavages, it makes it easier for people to identify with more people than before, and to work in unity behind a common cause. This idea is illustrated in Figure 1 Below.

Figure 1

This is relevant when discussing the change from the 2016 Sanders campaign to his current campaign. In 2016, Bernie identified primarily with one cleavage, namely young, white, males. This resulted in a campaign that not everyone could relate to and distanced his platform from potential supporters, despite its merits. He has since changed his approach and the results are staggering. Sanders is ahead in the polls to win the Democratic Primary. A big part of this is his effort to gain support from groups other than the “Bernie Bro”. His new campaign strategy “talked about each constituency and what he would do with each demographic” according to Matt Grossman, a Political Science Professor at Michigan State University. Sanders has even gone so far as to say he “absolutely” has an agenda for black people. As a result, he now has a much more diverse support base, largely due to the crosscut that he has established by reaching out to these other groups. The majority of Sanders voters are still young people, but it now also includes people of color, minority groups, and women. A 2018 Harvard/Harris Poll found that Sanders also polled favorably with Latino and black voters, at 58% and 66% respectively. By uniting these different cleavages, he now has the potential to win the Democratic primary, and potentially the 2020 Presidential election.