Hillary Clinton Said “Nobody Likes” Bernie Sanders. Here’s What That Really Means.

The legacy politician who lost to Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016 has some thoughts about likability

Credit: Joe Raedle (Getty)

It’s not particularly surprising that Hillary Clinton dislikes Bernie Sanders. In 2016, she thought she was going to sail through the primaries without serious opposition. The press expected a coronation while her own campaign field-tested the impossibly entitled slogan, “It’s her turn.” Clearly, she saw the nomination process as a mere formality. Instead, she lost 22 states to a white-haired relic who looks like Doc Brown from and openly calls himself a “democratic socialist.” That must have stung.

Worse yet, we’re only one election removed from 2016 and even political junkies would today struggle to recall a single meaningful policy idea Clinton proposed in that campaign. Meanwhile, Sanders’ 2016 platform has reshaped the boundaries of American politics. The Democratic Socialists of America have gone from a glorified mailing list with a few thousand dues payers to a nationwide organization with 50,000 active members — two of whom were elected to Congress in 2018.

Oh, and that white-haired relic? It’s too soon to be sure, but as things stand today, he has pretty decent shot at winning the 2020 Democratic nomination and becoming the next president of the United States.

So if Clinton had said “ dislike Bernie Sanders,” no one would have blinked. There would be irritation, sure — after all, Sanders endorsed Clinton once she wrapped up the nomination, and he did so with time to spare, announcing it prior to the Democratic convention. Also, if Trump is the world-historical catastrophe Hillary resistance types make him out to be, how is it that in their calculus four more years of the incumbent comes out ahead of voting for Sanders? But these frustrations aside, people would understand a straightforward statement of personal preference from Clinton—something like, “I personally dislike him.”

That’s not what she said, though. Clinton made a much stronger claim: “ likes him.”

Bernie Sanders has the highest personal popularity numbers of any current candidate for president. According to YouGov, the only politicians Americans tell pollsters they like than Sanders have been out of office for years or decades — Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (That last figure might be primarily known and liked for something other than his stint as Governor of California.) Sanders has the home-state approval rating of any senator. People who know nothing about Vermont except that Bernie Sanders represents it and it’s where Ben & Jerry’s ice cream comes from often imagine it as an ultra-progressive paradise, but this is far from the case. Vermont’s current governor is a Republican, and when Bernie Sanders was first elected to Vermont’s only congressional seat in 1990, the office had been held by Republicans since 1960. According to Morning Consult, Sanders has the highest approval ratings of any U.S. senator—a remarkable achievement given that, as a presidential candidate, Sanders’ decisions receive higher scrutiny on account of running for the highest office in the land. Sanders has the most individual donors of any candidate — and, far from being an enormous collection of Brooklyn hipsters, the largest groups of those donors are Walmart associates and public school teachers.

All of this makes it seem like lots and lots of people like Bernie Sanders. The American people, his Vermont constituents, and loads of working-class and small-donation supporters. So what could Clinton possibly mean when she says “nobody” in this context?

To understand that, you have to understand what philosophers of language call quantifier domain restriction. A “quantifier” is a term like “all” or “some” or “none” (or a logical symbol that represents one of these concepts). When your housemate says, “There’s no milk left — it’s all gone,” he’s saying something true even though there’s plenty of milk left in the universe as a whole. You don’t interpret his statement this way, though, because you understand that the domain he’s quantifying over — i.e., what counts as “everything” for the purposes of his statement — is the refrigerator in your apartment.

Similarly, I suspect that when Clinton said that “nobody” likes an immensely popular politician she was being reasonably accurate, .

In fact, she was being refreshingly honest about the borders of the universe that matters to her. She was quantifying over the domain made up of centrist politicians, donors, and people she’s likely to run into at parties in the Hamptons. I’m sure that, in that sense, it is at least more or less true that “nobody” likes him.

And that’s exactly why so many of the rest of us do.

Arc Digital

On what matters

Ben Burgis

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Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor and the author of Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left. He has a regular weekly segment on the Michael Brooks Show.

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